Uh-oh... OVERPOPULATION!

So the title's a bit melodramatic. Oh well.

Anyway. Overpopulation is a bigger issue in the world today than most people realize. For most of human history, our population has been at a fairly level and low number. However, it has been exploding for the past few decades and continues to do so today. The fact is, our planet can only support a certain amount of human life. We're approaching our carrying capacity, to drag a little biology into this. Unless we want to deal with famine, lack of adequate resources, etc., we've got to slow down our population growth.

The only non-violent population-control method that I've ever heard of is China's one-child policy. The name's pretty self-explanatory. However, making laws like that isn't a perfect solution: additional children just, well, happen sometimes. This law has also led to multitudes of baby girls that are abandoned by their parents because parents want their one child to be a son. They often don't survive.

Why has the human population grown so much in the past few decades? Well, let's start at the beginning. In the past, people had as many children as possible. It was like insurance: they could help provide for the family, and you had to have as many as possible because many of them died in infancy (or later on). When the quality of life in a society improves, people don't need as many children because they don't really need them, they're expensive, and hardly any of them die. However, when countries are in the in-between stages, the death rate has dropped but people continue to have as many children as possible, either because they need them around or because that's just the way it's always been done there. This leads to extreme population growth. As it happens, in the last few decades many countries have improved their quality of life to the point where not nearly as many people are dying. However, quite a few of those countries haven't reached the point where they are industrialized enough that the birthrate drops. Which is why the world's population is growning like crazy right now.

Of course, it's not just less-industrialized countries. If you assume that most people have children before they die, then in order to keep the population constant, each family should have an average of two children. Many families in the "more industrialized" countries do limit themselves to two children, but there are also many that don't. While having three children instead of two may not seem like that big of a deal, it adds up to a lot of people if everyone does it.

So how can we solve this? Basically, the countries in which families are having as many children as possible need to improve their quality of life to the point where they don't feel the need to have as many children. Obviously, they're probably going to need some help with that from other countries. But it can be done. In addition to that, people the world over need to be informed of our population growth problem. Many people are simply unaware of it. Families everywhere should be strongly encouraged to limit themselves to one or two children. I don't think there should be laws enforcing it (seeing as that's had some negative consequences in China), but maybe the government could provide incentives to have two or fewer children.

Apart from that, nothing short of mass executions will do anything about this problem. As I'm not a cold-hearted, bloodthirsty, inhuman savage, I don't support the latter "solution". Sounds a bit like Hitler, no?

Darfur

Mkay. So I believe what I'm supposed to be answering in this post is a) who is to blame for the crisis in Darfur? and b) what should the US policy be in regards to Darfur?

That being said, I don't have much to say about the first part. Lots of people are to blame. Some deserve more of the blame than others, but no-one has all of it. I don't think it really matters who's to blame: the fact is, the situation there has gotten to the point where lots of innocent people are dying. Therefore, we need to do something about it instead of sitting around pointing fingers at each other and playing the blame game. It's as simple as that.

What should the US policy be in regards to Darfur? Hmm, I don't know! D'you think maybe we should, I dunno, STEP IN SO THAT MORE INNOCENT PEOPLE DON'T DIE? Hmmmmm...

The US government MUST DO SOMETHING. We cannot allow large-scale killings to occur right under our noses YET AGAIN. Aren't we supposed to be the great and noble America? Defenders of human rights? Isn't the most basic human right the right to be alive? This is our chance to try to redeem ourselves for what happened in Rwanda more than ten years ago. Are we going to take it? If we don't, who will?

The issue certainly isn't that we're not capable of intervening. We certainly are. If we have the troops to invade Iraq, we have the troops to save people in Darfur. The problem is that people in positions of power in this country are lazy and greedy. They don't want to get involved in messy international affairs unless there's something in it for them. Of course, Darfur is a little more complicated than that because of Sudan's relationship with China that has led to China's support of the Sudanese government. Sudan supplies China with oil, so China doesn't want the UN to intervene. America doesn't want to offend China because they do so much of our manufacturing. Which of course is much more important than human lives. Oil and cheap plastic garbage. Yup.

This is ridiculous and disgusting. China needs to take a stand against Sudan. There are other places to get oil, and the world in general needs to get over it's dependence on the stuff anyway. It won't last forever, and it's destroying our planet. But that's a topic for another post. The US needs to stop worrying about the future of our manufacturing in China. Who else would buy that trash from them? Really. They need us as much as we need them.

That being said, we need to do something. It should be obvious to pretty much everyone. One of the reasons that I supported Barack Obama in the last presidential election was that I thought he cared about humanitarian crises like Darfur. However, the longer his administration goes without taking action, the more of my faith in him I lose. Something. Needs. To. Be. Done. And that's it. We can and we have no good reason not to. This is far from a political issue; it's purely a moral one. Has the human race truly come to this?