About the Contributor
Mary Ford, Arts Editor
Mary Ford has a dog and his name is Buddy. He is significantly more important than her. Antidisestablishmentarianism-opposing the church of England.
My Message: Control the Growing Population Size
October 12, 2016
Dear future president,
Do you know how many people live on this planet? As I write this, the current population is 7,449,791,931 humans. And every day, this number climbs by 220,000.
With every person born into the world, there comes another mouth to feed, another river of water to use up, another car wasting fossil fuels that don’t come back. We build another house with limited resources, pay for more student debt, stretch our medical resources even thinner. Population is the cornerstone of may of the world problems.
I live in a quintessential beach town, where verdant lawns grow and the temperature is 75 degrees most days of the year. In reality, these things don’t mix. It’s a man-made oasis that should be dry desert. We pump water in and drain California’s resources like we are going to wake up one day and see them all returned. As the population grows, the water supply dwindles. This exploitation of resources now means grave danger for our posterity.
So future president, please take mandatory restrictive action now in regards to the population and overuse of resources so we don’t pay the pied piper in the future.
Sincerely,
Mary Ford
Mary Ford’s opinion piece can also be found at HS Insider, the online high school publication run by the LA Times.
Disappointed Alumni • Oct 13, 2016 at 8:28 am
I really don’t like how you suggest “mandatory restrictive action.” Are you suggesting birth control methods be forced on the world or our country? How is that ethical? Your whole tone suggests that new people in the world aren’t worth anything but wasted resources. You have nothing in this article that supports that claim. Would it not be more effective to find ways to stop being wasteful or build new ways of generating resources? This article has a super privileged tone to it. How do you suggest the president stops people from having babies? That might be easy in a wealthy area like Encinitas, where the majority of people attend secondary education. But good luck advocating for that in other areas with no supportive evidence besides “you’re wasting resources.” You should look more into this issue before writing pieces like this.
Igor Winogradow • Oct 13, 2016 at 1:45 am
but this is not the main issue. As you marked at the very end a re-distribution of the resources and a more efficient and resource-saving lifestyle would benefit this world way more. A control of births leads to an society with a very small number of young workers you have to pay for the older generation, which are in rent. The resources on this planet are sufficient for a bigger population, if you correctly and maybe scaling down your own life style.