The concept and history of overpopulation

Overpopulation can be explained as the undesirable condition where the exiting number of human population exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth. Different types of factors result in occurrence of overpopulation. Researchers are of the opinion that reduction in the mortality rate, depletion of the precious resources of the earth as well as better medical facilities had become few of the causes that had resulted more people to survive on the earth (Friedman, 2018). Growing advancement in the technology with each of the progressive years had affected humanity in many different ways. One of the contributions of their advancement is the continuous development and advancement in the scientific and medical field that had helped in protecting and saving more lives in the present generation (Lu et al., 2016). One of the direct outcomes of this aspect was the increased lifespan of the people resulting in growth of the population. In the past few decades, the growth of the population had boomed and had created a situation of overpopulation that had created more pressure on the carrying capacity of the planet. This assignment would argue the concept of overpopulation by highlighting the causes as well as the history and different debates that rise from it.

It is important to shed light on the history of the generations that had paved the way for the occurrence of overpopulation in the present generation. Studies are of the opinion that the birth and death rate of the people had always been able to balance each other in the history of our species and thereby maintain a population growth rate, which is sustainable. However, since the time of the Bubonic plague in the 1400s, the population growth had been on the const rise. Between the time of the plague and the 21^st century, there had been hundreds of wars, man-made hazards as well as different natural calamities (Uniyal et al., 2017). However, none of the disasters had been able to dent the population. Researchers have opined that the developing countries are seen to face the issues more than the developed countries. However, it has become the global issues as it affects both developed and developing countries in different direct as well as indirect issues (Moak & Lee, 2016).

Some important events had been captured in history, which shows that this issue is not entirely a new one, and had its roots even in the previous centuries as well. By the year 1970, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich had been seen to publish “The Population Bomb” where he used lines stating that the battle to feed the entire of the humanity is over as in the years 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs introduced then (Garg, 2017). The Club of Rome had also published reports supporting that population growth would deplete resources and would result in the collapsing of the society. These jeremiads had often lead to different types of human rights abuses that included forced sterilizations in the nations of Bolivia, Peru, Bangladesh, Mexico, Indonesia, and India. However, it was interesting to see that in place of attending widespread starvation as well as resource shortages, humanity had managed to make resources more plentiful by utilizing them efficiently and increasing the supply and developing substitutes. This solution cannot be justified in the present generation as the population itself had crossed the carrying capacity of the planet with very few solutions left to handle and manage the situation efficiently.

Causes of overpopulation

 A number of causes can be found out that increases the chances of overpopulation in every nation. Poverty is one of the leading cause and lack of educational resources and lack of health promotion planning regarding necessities of family planning is one contributor. Poor knowledge and awareness of contraceptive use along with rigid religion beliefs is also another cause. More number of children per families and forcing them to work as child labor for meeting the family requirements of money is yet another cause. Reduction in mortality rate due to medical advancement, fertility treatment and immigration are other contributing factors for overpopulation (Singh et al., 2017).

Arguments and debates have always surrounded the topic of overpopulation. Present day initiatives of controlling the population mainly include birth control tactics like contraceptives as well as abortions. Utilization of these components can help in preventing unplanned childbirth and helps in effective family planning. However, religions have always opposed the concept of artificial contraception. The Roman Catholic Church beliefs oppose the use of all form of contraceptives (Peters, 2018). Their beliefs state that the purpose of coitus is to have children and therefore, interfering with the possible contraception of the child is believed to interfere with the plans of God. Their viewpoint states that intercourse is a part of normal lifecycle that was given by god as a purpose for reproduction (Stewart, 2018). Hence, they believe that anything that interferes with the possibility of a birth of a child resulting from the act of sexual intercourse would be against the command of god and hence sinful. Another belief is also harbored by many religions like that of Christianity, Islam and many others. It is considered that children are blessings from god. Therefore, working against the conception of a child is working against god and this prevents his blessings (Clark, 2016). They are of the opinion that every parent who are given the blessing of a child, either planned or unplanned, should love and care for the child without developing any feelings for preventing its birth in the world (Peters, 2018). This form of beliefs when preached by the church and when introduced into rules can govern the decision-making ideals of the couples of the nation. Therefore, this contributes to the high chance of increased number of children per families and hence overpopulation.

However, the church as well as the government also needs to understand the different negative impacts that overpopulation might result on the quality of the lives led by people in every nation. Studies have seen that overpopulation can create greater demands on the freshwater supplies of the world. Only 15 of the water of the world of fresh and accessible and therefore, overpopulation can create major issues. Some of the studies have estimated that demand of fresh water by the increased number of human would stand at approximately 75% of what is available on the planet by the year 2025 (Singh et al., 2016). This will put people living with limited access of water in the impoverished areas at a higher risk. Another negative outcome is lower life expectancy. Researchers are of the opinion that although in present generation, increased life expectancy is increasing in the population in developed countries. However, lower life expectancy may result from booms in the population especially that less developed or developing countries are facing. More number of people with limited resources will have reduced access to medical care, foods, jobs and fresh water leading to lower life expectancy.

Debates surrounding the issue

Faster climate change would also result from overpopulation that would have direct impact on the safety and quality of life of people on the planet. Larger nations like china and India would continue to develop their industrial capacities to meet the increased demand thereby contributing to degradation of the environment and increased pollution. Increased intensive farming is another negative outcome for increased population (Carter, 2018). Farming practices had been seen to evolve with the growth in the number of population to feed larger numbers of people. However, studies are of the opinion that intensive farming methods can cause extensive damage to the land as well as local ecosystems. This might pose problems in the future.

Extinction is another negative outcome resulting from effect of overpopulation. The latter will lead to destruction of huge stretch of natural habitats and forests to accommodate growing needs of human population. This would lead to extinction of wildlife species as per the data collected by researchers. Resource consumption is another negative outcome. In order to meet the demands of the increased number of the population, there would be implementation of pressure more on the food water and fossil fuel. This is already being consumed at record rates and this would thereby put greater demands on producers and planets itself (Stewart, 2018).

It is important to analyze the debate and conclude regarding the present growth rate of the number of population on the planet. The religions are of the opinion that bringing more lives on the planet is the wish of the god and all needs to support the planning of the almighty (Thomas et al., 2017). However, thinking and arguing logically, one can opine that bringing more lives but not allowing them to maintain the necessities of lives like water, food, shelter, hygiene, and medical access can result in death of the individuals. This aspect would ultimately create suffering for the lives of the human, which is against the idea of god to ensure safe and quality living on the planet for every individual. Bring more number of lives but not ensuring that they can fulfill the necessities can only increase in number of people but destroy the quality of lives and cause sufferings, pain and death (Uniyal et al., 2017). Therefore, it becomes extremely important for the nations to come together and develop interventions and strategies that would help in controlling the growth of population and ensuring people who are born on the planet can enjoy successful, better quality and healthy lives.

From the above discussion, it becomes clear that medical advancement as well as technological development and many other causes like poverty, poor contraceptive use and others have led to population burst in the present generation. Religions in many different parts of the earth are of the opinion that humans should never interfere with conception practices of childbirth and should not use contraceptives and abortion as it is against will of god. However, this might lead to uncontrolled population and can cause lack of fresh water, lower life expectancy, extinction of species, resource consumption and overconsumption of non-renewable resources, increased intensive farming, climate change and any others. This would make the earth a poorer place to love where humans might suffer from starvation, diseases and might not even get the minimum necessities like food, water and shelter required for better quality living. Hence, united nations and similar organizational should come together and develop strategies for overcoming global issue successfully.

Negative impacts of overpopulation

Response to the feedback:

The main feedback that was received by the professor was that the work was high on plagiarism and this resulted in the failure of the assignment. Plagiarism is the practice of utilizing other author’s work and then pretending the work to be own. In the universities, plagiarism is considered the act of trying to deceive the academic tutor deliberately by submitting the content that is not the real work of the student done by him or herself. Although, the work was seen to have high level of plagiarism, it was not a deliberate attempt of mine to cheat or submit the work without trying my best to excel with marks. I realized that I have poor paraphrasing skills and therefore, the statements that I had included in my assignment were similar to that of the research papers that I have used. Therefore, I was quite upset and disappointed on myself about getting such poor marks in my first assignment and thereby this affected my self-esteem and confidence.

It not only affected my reputation as a diligent student but also affected the expectation of my professor.  I could not rise up to his expectations and this affected my morale. Moreover, I scored very poor marks in the assignment and hence i needed to develop my writing skills ad researching skills efficiently. Therefore, I discussed with my seniors about how to avoid plagiarism in academic write-ups and they helped me immensely in developing my skills.

Six important areas were followed in order to avoid plagiarism in my second assignment. The first one was effective paraphrasing. I learnt that I should never paraphrase every lines form the author’s work. I need to read the paragraph written by the author and then abstract the concept. Then I need to develop my own content that would be entirely based on the concept. This would prevent the chances of plagiarism and this would prevent high degree of plagiarism output on the software as well. The second important way is to do proper citing. Citing is indeed one of the most effective ways for avoiding plagiarism. I have thereby followed proper document formatting guidelines according to the educational institution. If the students do not cite, it shows that the student is demanding the work of other authors as his own. I also used proper quotes as stated by the authors and cited them effectively thereby providing respect to the authors regarding their work. I had also provided proper referencing list at the end of the work along with proper in-text citations. All these had helped me to develop a paper that I believe would be free from plagiarism. I expect that this paper would be much more developed not only in quality buy would be also free from plagiarism.

References:

Carter, E. D. (2018). Overpopulation. In Companion to Environmental Studies (Vol. 76, No. 80, pp. 76-80). Routledge in association with GSE Research.

Clark, T. (2016). ‘But the real problem is….’: The Chameleonic Insidiousness of ‘Overpopulation’in the Environmental Humanities. Oxford Literary Review, 38(1), 7-26.

Friedman, P. (2018). Social Responses to the Environmental Impact of Reproduction in the Global West: A Critique of Christine Overall’s “Overpopulation and Extinction”. In Reproductive Ethics II (pp. 85-96). Springer, Cham.

Garg, S. (2017). Impact of Overpopulation on Land Use Pattern. In Environmental Issues Surrounding Human Overpopulation (pp. 137-154). IGI Global.

Lu, M. (2016). Overpopulation stresses resources, which in turn stresses people. Natural Resource Conflicts: From Blood Diamonds to Rainforest Destruction [2 volumes]: From Blood Diamonds to Rainforest Destruction, 10.

Moak, K., & Lee, M. W. (2016). China’s Economic Rise and Its Global Impact. Springer.

Peters, J. L. (2017). Mitigating the Impact of Climate Change on Human Health: The Role of the Medical Community. AMA Journal of Ethics, 19(12), 1153.

Peters, R. T. (2018). Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice. Beacon Press.

Singh, R. P., Singh, A., & Srivastava, V. (Eds.). (2016). Environmental issues surrounding human overpopulation. IGI Global.

Singh, S., Agrawal, S. B., & Agrawal, M. (2017). Harmful Effects of Ecosystem Impairment on Human Health. In Environmental Issues Surrounding Human Overpopulation(pp. 224-232). IGI Global.

Stewart, S. (2018). How the Sexual Revolution Led to Abortion and a Loss of Emphasis on the Doctrine of the Image of God.

Thomas, R. G., Norris, A. H., & Gallo, M. F. (2017). Anti-legal attitude toward abortion among abortion patients in the United States. Contraception, 96(5), 357-364.

Uniyal, S., Paliwal, R., Kaphaliya, B., & Sharma, R. K. (2017). Human Overpopulation: Impact on Environment. In Environmental Issues Surrounding Human Overpopulation(pp. 1-11). IGI Global.