I keep hearing people in message board constantly state that in the not so distant future we will face huge issues due to the lack of resource.

Yet from some of my research most of these resource problems are either political issues or those that can be solved with technology.

So can anybody fill me in on this?

Overpopulation has been something that people have been talking about since 1879 when George wrote Progress and Poverty -- and got a 20th Century make-over in the 60's with the popular book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It's balderdash so far as I am concerned.  Global lifestyle changes* would be preferable, if everyone on the planet lived as we do in the west it would not be a pleasant place to be, but ultimately people are like any life-form, they adapt to their environment.  The country I am in now has almost 10 million less people than California and it is the size of the continental United States.  Was even California over-populated with 38 million people?  Only on the freeways, only a small percentage of land in California is developed. The freeways are only clogged because So.Cal. apparently refuses to have any form of effective mass transit.

I am often astonished by how much these theories, and those like them are repeated centruy after century with little change.  You can read speeches from Nixon talking about how we need to "reduce our reliance on foreign oil" and how we need "universal healthcare".  I read in Theodore Roosevelt's biography about how he had to expend political capital in California dealing with their illegal immigration problems with the Japanese -- how Californians were concerned about the Japanese filling up their schools and being responsible fo ran increase in crime, and how TR would not tolerate their bigotry.  A hundred years later and we still have the same bigotry being demonstrated toward other immigrant groups.

*changes like the reduction of  automobile use, packaging, air flight and move to more energy  efficient foods/ energy.

Yodariquo said:

It's too complicated of a problem to summarize into a single concept of world over-population.  The problem isn't specifically the number of people, but the effect of consumption, the requirement of resources, and the distribution of people.


          The amount of garbage being pumped out by humanity is arguably more than is sustainable.  The same with pollution of many other kinds.


          Right now I think it's clear that there are too many people living in the manner that we are.  If we can become more efficient, that may change.  The more people there are, the more efficient everything has to be, and the harder it will be to be sustainable.


          It's not a "once we hit 10 billion, we're all gonna die," it's more along the lines of, "Things are quickly going downhill at 7 billion, we're doomed at 10 billion if we don't make some changes."

So in short it's a matter of changing politics and lifestyle, as well as adopting new technology?

Or in other words, the solution is the same it's always been since it was brought up in the 1700's?

Punk Rebel Ecks said:

So in short it's a matter of changing politics and lifestyle, as well as adopting new technology?

Or in other words, the solution is the same it's always been since it was brought up in the 1700's?

Key factors have changed since the 1700's like manufacturing processes that make it simple to change petrochemicals stored in the earth into packaging that does not degrade, and the internal combustion engine.  The word sustainability is thrown around quite easily these days, but this is the topic in which it is most relevant.  Living as we have in the west was sustainable only as long as we were the only ones wasting resources and polluting.  Now that population centers like India and China have moved from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial economies our old ways of consumerism and transportation are no longer sustainable.

I'm not an alarmist about it, or any of the other issues that are causing harm to the planet, though because ultimately humans will respond and adapt  -- but probably only when cause for change is in our economic interest.  So when it costs more to clean up the pollution then society will adapt.