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?