The Most Pressing Problem of All

The number of ways in which man and the environment are intertwined are numerous, possibly too numerous to count. The history of man, the development of civilization itself, has in many ways been fashioned and shaped by the physical environment: the presence (or absence) of mountains, deserts, rivers, and oceans determined who settled where, and how easily. The flow of Europeans westward on the American continents was determined by what mountains were easiest to cross, what soils were most fertile, or where water was to be found. Power struggles and wars were fought, and will continue to be fought, over natural resources like gold, oil, and water.

But man from the beginning tried to tame the environment, to control, rather than be controlled by, our physical environment. We dug, and later drilled, wells so we could survive in the desert. We plowed the land so we could farm it. We began to build dams and straighten rivers to control flooding and provide a more secure source of water. We cover the land with asphalt and concrete. We build earthquake-proof buildings and stabilize slopes.

And with control come challenges. As the population grows, and as technology advances, natural resources are threatened. Water supplies become scarce, and water quality is degraded. Homesites are more and more frequently located in areas that are incompatible with the environment, resulting in greater efforts to control the land by engineering it.

Ever-increasing use of fossil fuels results in fears of climate change. New roads must be built, and new airports to accommodate increased travel. Heavy metals from abandoned computers poison landfills.

It's a complicated world, with complicated problems. But the underlying root of the problems is actually pretty simple. It's overpopulation - an environmental issue that isn't talked about nearly as much as it should be. It took all of human history up to about 1860 for the world population to reach one billion. Then it took about 150 years. Then it took 30. The sixth billion of human population arrived in only ten years, and the seventh will come even faster.

When animal populations increase beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, natural controls take over, primarily in the form of disease and starvation. Natural population controls like disease, flooding, famine, earthquakes and wars worked for a time with people, too, but tend to be harsh and frightening, and we devote tremendous energy to conquering them. But we aren't successful at replacing traditional population controls with gentler techniques like birth control.

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