As of July, the estimated world population is 6,790,062,216 ... a little under seven billion. For comparison purposes, the following: It was estimated to be three million at the end of AD-0; one billion in 1820; two billion by 1930; three billion in 1962; four billion in 1974; 5 billion by 1988, and six billion in 2000.

The global population growth rate peaked in 1962-1963 at 2.20 percent per annum. In 2007, that rate fell to 1.19 percent. The current rate is thought to be 1.18 percent, which represents an increase of approximately 80 million people annually. For the mathematically challenged, just because the percentage of growth has gone down does not mean fewer bodies as the percentage is applied to a larger number of bodies. The growth curve continues to move upward.

So, who cares? There are more people to pay taxes and re-secure our Medicare benefits and Social Security retirement. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot for a moment about the pending lack of resources to sustain our lives. That might be important.

And I also blanked on the current job losses causing financial disaster even though more than 90 percent of willing workers are still employed in some capacity in the United States. Ten percent of our population is down and, in some cases out ... of luck.

 

About those resources. What do we need? Certainly food, water and shelter. Continued free public education would be nice so we could communicate with each other and understand what our government is doing. Perhaps medical care, although the medical profession is one of the identifiable reasons we are living much longer, and therefore, exacerbating the resources problem. Oh, yeah, we also need energy, you know, electricity, natural gas, gasoline, all that stuff we use to procure our food, refrigerate or freeze and cook it. However, good healthful food is another reason we may be living beyond our future resources.

Is one option a bad plague or a good war to reduce the population and to save us from the effects of our current wasteful lifestyles? Not likely. The only recorded downturn in world population was during the “black death,” the bubonic plague pandemic during the 14th century that killed 30 to 60 percent of the European population. No recorded war deaths have ever made a dent in the overall world population.

Closer to home, the population of the United States was thought to be two million in 1770, 76 million in 1900, 152 million in 1950, 282 million in 2000, 301 million in 2007 and projected to be 317 million by next year.

Are the illegal aliens sneaking across the border into California causing a problem with our limited state resources? Look, I don’t blame people who are trying to improve their lives from seeking employment in the United States. But I do hate to get publications mailed to me written in both English and Spanish. That insults my Dutch forbearers who had to learn English as the “official language of the United States,” if they were to be allowed to stay here.

 

Why is it that many illegal, Spanish-speaking aliens are illiterate in their own language, you might ask? Well, gee, could it be that if they could afford to go to school in their own country they wouldn’t need to sneak, at great peril and expense to themselves, into the U.S. to feed themselves?

Or, should we follow some other foreign countries in mandating the number of children we may produce, even though that created some biased results in the past: Allowed only one child to reduce the population by half, baby boys were thought to guarantee extended family financial benefits to the parents and, so, first-born baby girls were killed.

Only thought to be a tad worse than binding their feet to make them more “attractive” or performing genital mutilation to keep them from wandering, the murder female newborns was an option apparently sanctioned by their parents and the state.

 

Somewhat more acceptable, today’s technology allowing for birth control or to determine the sex of the fetus in the womb allows for early abortion of females or children of any sex thought to be defective.

What next? The “Soylent Green” solution? Starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, the 1973 science fiction movie was set in the year 2022. It depicts a future in which overpopulation leads to depleted resources, which in turn leads to widespread unemployment and poverty. Real fruit, vegetables and meat are rare, commodities are expensive, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, causing riots when the supply wanes.

In the movie, a “greenhouse effect” (global warming) culminating in 2014-15 resulted in the absence of sufficient water to produce fruits, vegetables and meat to sustain the already bloated population. The blue planet no longer had green. Voluntary suicide was encouraged and abetted by the state. The secret solution was to feed the living people ... well ... rationed wafers containing dead people mixed with high energy plankton.

You’d think someone would have come up with the notion that acceptance of homosexuality may be coming into its own at this time as a possible partial prevention to overpopulation. But, wait ... what about God’s (King James version) mandate to “be fruitful, and multiply”? Could it be that we may have already created too much of a good thing?

 

You may respond directly to Diane Willee at dianewillee@yahoo.com.