It is hard to blame doomsday predictor Harold Camping for believing the world was coming to an end on October 21, 2011.
Zucotti Park was occupied with a capital "O," strains of the Arab Spring remained as virulent as ever, and unemployment figures remain dismally discouraging. And all this before a snowstorm hit New England and parts of the Mid-Atlantic just before Halloween.
But in terms of the world ending, all of this pales in comparison to the birth of the symbolic seven-billionth human being, a little girl named Nargis, on October 31, in Lucknow, India.
(I'm kidding about the apocalypse, but only a little bit.)
The BBC's website has a nifty little tool to determine the trajectory of human population growth; your own number, so to speak, is revealed when you enter your date of birth. When I was born, I was the earth's 5,209,888,885th person. Like I said, nifty—if it weren't so ominous.
Scientists are not entirely certain about the mechanics and specifics of carrying capacity, which is roughly defined as the maximum supportable size of a given population with reference to available resources.
There can be little question, however, that the current human population stresses the carrying capacity of planet Earth. Because of our ever-evolving abilities to manipulate resources, we continue to live longer and healthier. Put very simply, birth rates stabilize or increase; death rates drop off.
As the number of human inhabitants increases, wildlife has a funny tendency of disappearing. Forests vanish to make room for those methane-producing Big Mac cows.
Industrialization—which arose in large part as a response to increased population density and facilitated the continuing growth of the global population—certainly isn't good for the environment, polluting the water resources of the poor and increasing our dependence on oil.
In a Washington Times op-ed piece, Laura Huggins argues that the immediate problem of overpopulation is a myth, propagated largely because of human tendency to sensationalize and our primal love of terror. As a balm to our increasing collective hysteria, Huggins cites Aristotle's fears of overpopulation and its resulting poverty. If the world hasn't ended in the last 2,400 years, why would it end now?
Huggins writes that population alarmists fail to acknowledge the fact that "the world's birthrates have slowed dramatically."
What Huggins ignores, however, is that birth rates in many nations—such as India—have not yet reached stabilizing levels of procreation, which means that until such equilibrium is achieved, more women will give birth to more babies. This indicates, naturally, that until replacement-level fertility is the norm, more people means increasing levels of stress on limited resources.
In Huggins's article, she references the U.N.'s prediction that the global population will peak around 2050, so we have 39 years to wait.
The question, then, is not so much whether populations are growing, stabilizing or declining. Regardless of whether or not nations are experiencing population stagnation, if there are too many people on the planet as a whole, we have a problem.
All of this raises questions of globalization and industrialization. The concern for now is any environmental measures that can be taken to insure against a crisis when the apocryphal four horsemen do come.
Huggins seems to encourage a laissez-faire approach to resource management and the notion of overpopulation.
Maybe we do love to be scared. And maybe that's a good thing.