More People, More Ideas

Many have seen population growth as the bane of environmental stability as people continue to over consume resources and expand into new environments. However as I have eluded to previously I believe that technological advancement is the solution to this problem not a decrease in population growth.

Population growth is directly correlated with technological and intellectual advancement. The link is very simple as populations grow they have more people that think and communicate with each other so they can collectively advance ideas more quickly. But two factors must exist for this to occur: people must be educated and people must be able to communicate. That is why I see the distribution of growth throughout the world as problematic. Not only are the areas with large population growth those that can not support many more people e.g. Africa, but also those areas are the places where those two conditions do not exist. In contrast the areas with the least population growth, western countries, not only have the economic conditions necessary to sustain growth but also have the intellectual conditions to have that growth translate into the advancement of humanity.

Thus we need to not look at the solution to our environmental problem as ending population growth but first of all making it distributed over areas which can support that growth, places with decent economies and also a low ratio of persons to acre of arable farmland. And second of all creating practices to increase the carrying capacity of all regions, that is to increase the amount of people the world can support, essentially through increasing the output of agriculture and decreasing its global foot print, like with my favorite hydroponics. We must also expand the eduction and communication systems throughout the world, but this task first requires the economic development of the third world. I do not suggest that we force certain people to have children or not have children as in China, but that we must make modern society more conducive to families and also that people must become aware of why population growth is important, I believe that our future is rooted in a continued exponential increase in population and advancement.