Populating more important than Overpopulation

Authors Avatar

                James                 

James Rossi

Populating More Important than Overpopulation

The Middle Ages, by no means, made use of the world’s resources as the population inhabiting it today does.  Gies and Gies state that “energy sources were largely untapped.” (Gies 4) With approximately 6.8 Billion people on the earth and a new census count on the way it’s no secret that the 21st century population outnumbers Middle Age populations nearly 22:1 and we use way more that twenty two times the resources.  Today we cry out that the world is overpopulated; that in as little as fifty years, we could be on the verge of a population collapse, yet the same cry rang out in the Middle Ages.  With only 300 million people, in retrospect, it appears that this was a false alarm, but still the claim of overpopulation was made.  Does this mean that the claims of our generation will prove to be a fallacy as well?  I know it does not, but based on the premises of available resources and human ingenuity, there is a way to make overpopulation more a buzzword than an actual threat; the answer is not to have fewer babies, but to have more, so they can lead the next technological surge.

What I’m proposing is that if people fear overpopulation, then they need to populate; they need to put more people on the earth, so more people can use their brains to solve these problems.  While there will come a time when the earth simply can’t hold any more people that time is very far away.  It was Tertullian that, around 200 A.D, commented, “Everywhere there are people, communities—everywhere there is human life!”  (6)  This wasn’t a positive statement though as it first sounds.  Tertullian feared that Earth did not have the ability to support us.  He lamented, “The world is full.  The elements scarcely suffice us.”  (Gies 6).  But the world was only “overpopulated” in the Middle Ages because men like Tertullian said it was.  One must take an in depth look at the claims Tertullian made to realize why he felt that the population was too large, while by today’s standards 300 million people fit comfortably in the United States alone.  

Join now!

 The beginning of Tertullian’s remark shows that “Everywhere there are people.” The fact is settlements in the Middle Ages were teeming with citizens.  If you weren’t a farmer, you were crammed into an unsanitary urban area.  With nothing but untamed wilderness outside the livable realm it was easy to see why the people were confined to only the area they could master.  It was not wise to venture into the natural world, because the threat of the unknown, be it thief or beast, was as real as it was deadly.  It stands to reason that putting more people in less ...

This is a preview of the whole essay