This post has material from our ENVS textbook Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction by Paul Robbins, John Hintz, and Sarah A. Moore.
You trace a spiral and think you have found the center, a fixed point to refer back to. The axis mundi, and the solution to the problem. Does the center of a spiral really stop? Does it just travel farther than the eye can see? This is what I think about when I try to focus on a single problem affecting our environment today. Right now, my focus is Population growth.
The beginning of Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction has similarly outlined some of the problems and ideal solutions brought to me first by my AP Environmental Science class my senior year of High School. It reminded me that the fact of the matter is; you can connect everything back to population growth. Whether population is increasing exponentially (as suggested by Thomas Malthus) or declining because of a gap between the young and old (like Japan) there seems to be a trend. That is; oh my goodness there are so many people on this planet! So what do we do about it? How do we deal with population growth and ensure that we can always provide for the given population?
According to Thomas Malthus, there are supposed to be natural ways to limit population growth. Some of those reasons are, “war, famine, destitution, and disease”(15). These are supposed to be the natural events that keep our populations from reaching a carrying capacity. The carrying capacity is the limit in which resources are available to sustain a given population. The methods Malthus determined to keep population levels low have however been altered because of medicinal and technological advancements.
Some say that these advancements have allowed us to exceed our population’s and this planet’s carrying capacity. This is because there is an evolution of technology that makes up for lack of resources. Although this keeps some populations alive, it spurs false hope that we have all of the resources we need to sustain our population. This increases supply and demand, which pushes us to use new technology more and more. What a vicious cycle, although will we always be able to rely on technology?
The supply and demand of consumers also poses another problem. The products that they are using may also have long-term effects on the environment, which is why it is important to look at a product form its point of manufacture to its disposal. A documentary called Waste Land opened my eyes to the excess waste of consumers on the earth, and where that waste ends up. The documentary is about the lives of people in Brazil who live and work in the largest landfill in the world, and shows a transformation through trash as art. By looking into their lives it was overwhelming to think about how our population size, and increased amount of waste from consumer goods has been affecting these less developed countries that waste is shipped to. Some consumers actually try to think about this and chose better products that are more “sustainable”. The problem with that is that there is a lot of “greenwashing” within market based solutions. This means that there are many products that are falsely marketed as good for the environment. This is extremely unsettling because the individuals who may think they are doing something good for the environment, are actually contributing to the piles and piles of trashed material goods.
I have changed my mind. It isn’t a spiral with a focused point, but a spiral that is never ending. It is so hard to pinpoint a specific problem and the source of that problem because there is so many overlapping perspectives. There is always going to be some contradiction, some continuing issue. My resolution is this; the issue of population growth is a very tangled problem with few pleasant answers.