Using Population Control to Achieve Environmental Sustainability

Sustainability relates to the ongoing capacity of Earth to maintain all life, which means developing ways to ensure that all resources on Earth are used and managed responsibly so they can be maintained for future generations.

Sustainability describes how well someone or something is able to thrive and survive. It also can apply to humans, in which there are three general ideas. First is environmental, which is how well humans can help the earth. Second, is economic, which states that everybody deserves the right to make money.

Geographically, Canada is the second largest country in the world (BBC, 2015). In spite of this, Canada has one of the lowest population densities at 3.8 people per square kilometer (Trading Economics, 2010). Due to the

The idea of population control is one that ignites people to talk about and explore. Some countries have implemented population control for quite some time now. There are many attributes that go against the argument, but there are also some potential positives that could come from it. No matter what religion or background people come from, each person has their own view on if population control is right or wrong. Many people choose to see certain positives over the negatives while others look at things the other way around. One of biggest and controversial topics within population control is issues of the environment.

Environmental sustainability is about making responsible decisions that will reduce the negative impact on the environment caused by business activities, not simply about reducing the amount of waste you produce or using less energy, but is concerned with developing state that will make businesses more reliably sustainable in future operations.

Population is defined as the number of inhabitants in a particular area. Currently on the face of the earth there are approximately 7.2 billion people alive at this very moment and as of 2013, 36 million of these people live in Canada. The top 10 countries by population are: China with 1.4 billion people, India with 1.3 billion people, the United Sates with 322 million, Indonesia with 253 million, Brazil with 200 million, Pakistan with 185 million, Nigeria with 178 million, Bangladesh with 158 million, Russia with 142.5 million and Japan with 127 million people. As can be seen a lot of people live in Asia. To be specific, 61% of the world’s population lives in Asia but why is this the case?

Since Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, the exponential growth of population and the arithmetic growth of necessities like food production have haunted the subconscious of social scientists and demographers. However, places like China and the Soviet Union rejected Malthus’s ideas, often for historical and political reasons. In the middle of the twentieth century China faced a huge increase in population. Their solution was to create the now infamous One Child Policy. The government's main concern in both instituting the policy and later changing it to the Two Child Policy was protecting the economy from the burden of a fluctuating population. Although China has claimed the policy prevented around 400

Let’s start with the economic portion of sustainability. Most societies have a desire to increase population and their standard of living. It is a natural human instinct to want to produce offspring, increase their level of wealth, comfort, income, quality and availability of employment and to vanquish class disparity and poverty while increasing their ability to purchase affordable housing and generally bring up their standard quality of living. However, if population growth is left unchecked our world’s population‘s growth would easily exceed our planet’s ability to feed this population.

“Population in the world is currently growing at a rate of around 1.11% per year and the current average population change is estimated at around 80 million per year” (World Populations). Think about that for a moment how many people are added every year.    The single greatest threat to the future of our planet, to the environment and to our resources, may be overpopulation. Overpopulation can be described as the inability of the world’s resources to sustain the population. There are many more significant environmental issues that face us also, but overpopulation is the main reason why all these arise. It comes from the simple need to fulfill the needs of the human society, such as food and shelter, at the expense of harm that it will do to our environment. They think more about the short-term gains instead of the long term detrimental effect it can do. As the population of the world increases more than the available essential materials for survival, such as transport, water, shelter, food or social amenities, will decrease with the finite resources we have no matter how bountiful. Due to this, it adds a lot of the stress to the environment just meet this demand. This regularly contributes to environmental deterioration, worsening in the quality of life, or even the disintegration of the population.

Sustainability is a model that has been developed to ensure that human life is not threatened by continuing depletion of the natural resources. This model has also been adopted in order to ensure that the ecosystem is protected. Sustainability is being promoted in order to ensure that human beings and the environment coexist within certain set restrictions so as to ensure that the ecosystem continues to support life. In addition, this model ensures that humans understand the relationship which manages the balance between their activities on the ecosystem. Through sustainability, human beings will be able to utilize the available natural resources sparingly with the view that future generations are depending on it too (Maria and Luciana 3). Some of the renewable sources of energy are solar, hydropower, biomass and wind. The use of these energy sources ensures that the ecosystem remain self serving and thus able to sustain human life (Diane and Shubhayu 12).

The environmental aspect of sustainability is all about preservation and reconstruction. It’s being careful how much we take and when we take it. After the effects of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized humans seemed to grasp that we are, in fact, not the masters of the natural world. We noticed things like global warming, habitat

    A nineteen year old pregnant Chinese girl is forced to abort because she is "too young" to have a child. Iran, an Islamic nation, instructs religious leaders to promote contraception as a social duty. A Norwegian international banker worries about "migratory tensions" that would engulf his nation with waves of third world immigrants. A Los Angles Times article decries the lack of an official United States population policy. What do these statements share in common?

Every living being are directly or indirectly depend on natural environment. Sustainability helps to balance financial, social, and environmental factors to facilitate responsible business decision making over the immediate and long term. . Sustainability refers to meeting the needs of present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Oxford University press 1987, p.43). Sustainability is also being protective and aware of use of natural resources and development that meets the need of present and everything that is need for our survival and well being depends, directly or indirectly on our natural environment. According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Sustainability is

The average human being, multiplied by the Earth’s population, would need to have about four Earths just to supply enough resources (Footprint Calculator). Thinking of people around the world, the people of the United States seem to take a lot of their life for granted. Many people when they hear of the polar ice caps melting wave it off and either don’t believe in it or believe it is not their problem. Well it is their problem and if we don’t jump on the issue soon we will not be giving our future generations much of a life. This brings me to the idea of sustainability. A simple description of the word means that what we have today we will also have tomorrow, next week, next year, or even the next lifetime. Although that is the modest version sustainability is much, much more than just that. Sustainability is derived from three main parts of the human life: environmental, social, and economic. Each being just as important as the other. Environmental is the most well-known aspect of sustainability in human life, but both social and economic take their place in keeping this Earth sustainable.

The notion that there are limits to growth is not new to science. The debate that exponential population growth and economic growth, coupled with natural resources depletion, cannot be sustained has started already a few centuries ago with a ground-breaking publication: “Essay on the principle of population” Thomas Malthus in 1798. With more scientific knowledge developed around this debate, a reverse strategy was formed on the international political agenda called Sustainable Development, and nowadays became a widely used terminology.