OSCAR | HISHO

Did you know that the global population today averages around 7.9 billion people (and counting)? Hisho and I were born in 2006, at which point there were about 6.6 billion people and in 1970 around when my parents were being born, there was only a population of 3.7 billion.

That means that the world population has just over DOUBLED in since the early 70s and in the 15 and a half years since I was born, the population has multiplied by approximately 1.19, which although may seem small, is HUGE for the amount of time over which this has occurred.

Hello listeners and welcome to Fighting Failure. I am Hisham, and I will be your host for this episode. My co-host is Oscar today. Sandhya will no longer be permanently co-hosting the podcast considering that she has been slammed with work recently, but will still be collaborating with both Oscar and I on the side and will be guesting in future episodes...so stay tuned!!

As you may have guessed (or may have seen if you’re a cheater and looked at the title), today’s episode is all about overpopulation, and marks the start of the urban expansion segment of Fighting Failure; Season Two; House of Cards.

This episode will serve as a starter to the rest of the urban expansion segment, as - quite obviously - urbanization (the movement of the rural population toward more urban areas) and the expansion of our bustling cities occurs concordantly to the increase in population, as there is a need for more accommodation for this ‘new’ population, and new jobs for the new population - often being sought after in more urban and industrial areas.

Just before we start, it’s important to understand the definition of overpopulation, a term that is commonly used loosely. Overpopulation is the point at which - according to Britannica - “the number of individuals of a given species exceeds the number that its environment can sustain,” meaning that overpopulation is a measure of the strain we put on the environment concordantly to our population growth.

Problems

• Firstly, the toll of having even ONE child adds an approximate 58.6 tonnes of CO2 to your carbon footprint EVERY YEAR. On average, a single person’s carbon footprint comes out to around 4 tonnes every year, while in the USA and other developed nations, it often comes out to around 16. This means that between 14.65 and 3.66 times your yearly (measurable) emissions added to your emissions comes out to your emissions after having just ONE child.
• So imagine that the typical American family has an average of 2.5 children under the age of 18... Even the majority of my friends - despite being between 15 and 17 - are already talking about wanting to have 3 children!...
• The strain of overpopulation comes with all the factors that have been discussed in previous episodes, making this episode a great recap...increase in need for factory/industrial farming...increase in the need for housing...the electric grid...transportation...complex and expansive supply chains.

Solutions

• The empowerment of women

• Education on the benefits of contraception

• Make education accessible and engaging

• Of course, government incentives!!

  • Place incentives to have fewer children - tax reductions?
    • In opposition to French policies
    • Fundamentally opposed to what the government ‘wants’
  • Two child / one child policies - yay or nay?

• If you want to have more than 1 or 2 kids, adoption can be a good option to limit an increase in ‘new’ population, while helping the adopted child by providing them with a presumably healthy environment to grow up in.

• 𝔏𝔢𝔱 𝔦𝔱 𝔟𝔢 𝔨𝔫𝔬𝔴𝔫 that massacring a percentage of the population - as people often joke - would not necessarily curb our emissions. For example, if only 1 billion people lived on the planet, but flew everywhere by spaceship, ate industrial, GMOy-soy-fed-beef and ran the grid on coal and oil, we’d be just as bad off as we are now. So in the end, as long as the world’s natural resources can sustainably support our population, it all comes down to how sustainable the lives that we lead are...

  • To what extent are we willing to sacrifice morally for benefit environmentally?

    • Lithium mining

    • Manure fertiliser / animals as slaves / animal testing

      ⚠️ So the main idea here - with having less children, or adopting etc. is to sort of stop population growth at the source, rather than cutting it off after the point

      <aside> 📌 Whilst forcibly decreasing the population massively would likely be environmentally beneficial, it almost defeats the point - as we are trying to save the planet for its inhabitants! Obviously it’s also a moral boundary that we, thankfully, are not willing to o’er-leap as a species.

      </aside>

• Finally, sustainable urban expansion (to a limited extent):

  • Remove single family zoning
  • Integrate trees and greenery within urbanized areas
  • Improve cities for cycling and walking
  • Remove cars from residential areas as far as possible to reduce particulate pollution
  • Increase metro and train availability (specifically in the USA)
  • Make public transport affordable

  https://www.sos-usa.org/our-impact/focus-areas/advocacy-movement-building/childrens-statistics