Just for Thought | Teen Ink

Just for Thought

December 19, 2007
By Anonymous

What if world population was decreasing? Would that make our lives better or worse? Would we live our lives differently? Well think about it for a moment; with less population we could live better. Here’s how. People could live in better places for less money. All those nice properties wouldn’t be so heavily sought after. Not as many people could afford them for that matter. Think of all the health problems. Is having too many people in one area good for your health?
Many people have studied this and have found that diseases have developed and spread more easily through large amounts of population. Look at Wisconsin’s deer population. Everyone has heard of Chronic Wasting Disease. The disease is spread through the transmission of saliva of deer. Conservationists have figured out that it wouldn’t have spread so fast or would have even gotten to the deer population if the herd was at manageable levels. Natural selection works much better with smaller populations. I’m not saying we should run around and kill each other but I am saying we need to manage ourselves as well as wildlife. How about we do what china did. They realized they had a problem and came up with a very good solution. They limited couples to only one child. I myself would not go this route. I would make it kind of like a lottery system.

Each couple or person (yes I said “person” some people want to be a single parent) would have to receive a permit or license to have a child. Only a certain number of permits would be issued per area per year. The couples who can not have children for health reasons would be able to adopt. People who had kids without a permit would have the child taken and put in an adoption agency. This would reduce the amount of unwanted pregnancies.
Everyone who is convicted of a sex crime (rape, molestation, child abduction) will have their genitals removed or be drugged in someway that would limit their sexual potential. You may think this is in humane, but would you want to have kids with this person? I think this would help keep our population more safe since most of the crimes are from repeat offenders.

I think less population would benefit the environment also. There would be less trash for land fills. Good cropland would not be disappearing as fast either. There would also be less pollutants going in the air from car exhaust and power plants. Waste facilities would not be overflowing with sewage and rubber by products. Have you ever thought of what will happen to all the concrete and cement from old buildings and roads? Most people burry it or recycle it, but either way you are still not getting rid of it. Concrete and black top all contain chemicals and petroleum based products. No matter what we do with it is still contaminated rock. Burying it is not the answer either. Chemicals soak into the ground water and spread even more pollution.

If we can control population why don’t we limit things that harm us or are bad for the environment? Things like rubber, plastics, concrete, and glass are recyclable, but how do we get rid of them? How do we get them back to the raw products that we started out with? Look at wood. It is very useful and if you leave it outside it will get rid of itself in a few years will no harm done to us or the environment. With all the technology we have why can’t we develop new materials that will behave like wood? Metals and some other things are still from the environment and with the right processing they are still virtually harmless.

What are we going to do with all of these things we can’t get rid of? Eventually we are going to be overrun with trash, concrete and glass. Oh well. I’ll probably be dead before most of these problems occur. But that’s the mentality of most of today’s population. Let’s worry about it tomorrow. We should fix these soon so we can start reversing the effects of waste on the environment. High population wouldn’t be bad if we could manage it better.

Most technology is a beautiful thing. But maybe technology isn’t all so great. Many people can’t live without their cell phones or computers. It’s making people more lazy and unhealthy. People have machines to work for them so they don’t have to. Computers are a great example of this. Programs on the computer can edit sentences and spell check for you. Is that not making us learn English or spelling? Why should we learn how to do something if we can have a machine do it or fix it for us? Technology has made our lives easier, but our knowledge has dropped off quite quickly. Its funny how many people can’t even send a letter home. What is this world coming to?


Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.