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Essay on Overpopulation

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Overpopulation

It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die but that they die like sheep.
VACHEL LINDSAY

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main...
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind:
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
JOHN DONNE

Despite the extreme effort, they surged on through the darkness. Their streamlined bodies, built for speed rather than endurance, were tiring fast, and many of …show more content…

In a 1974 report submitted to the White House, the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Agriculture, and the heads of the CIA and the Agency for International Development, stated that rapid population growth presents "a major risk to world economic, political, and ecological systems, and as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values" (Doerr, 1995).

Causes of Rapid Population Growth

The past 300 years have been characterized by an unprecedented exponential increase in worldwide human population. Humanity took millions of years to reach a 1700 population of around 700 million, which had nearly doubled by 1850. Only one hundred years later, world population stood at 2.5 billion and doubled again in less than forty years (Weiskel, 1995). The impressive improvements in diet, shelter, clothing, sanitation, and medicine brought about by the Industrial Revolution, beginning in eighteenth-century Europe and still expanding throughout the world, have dramatically lowered mortality and increased life expectancy in industrializing countries (Davis, 1991).

Demographers have identified an overall pattern of demographic transition which appears to repeat itself with remarkable regularity in industrializing societies throughout the world. In each case, mortality begins to decline rapidly as the effects of

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