Overpopulation is the world's biggest problem, write biologists Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in Thursday's Op-Ed pages. They contend that the world's growing population is creating an unsustainable strain on Earth's resources and forcing the future of humanity to hang in the balance.
Our editorial board recently took a similar position in "Diffusing the population bomb." "Nations cannot indefinitely produce larger and larger generations to support older ones," they wrote. "Humans may have the reproductive ability to keep raising their numbers, but the planet on which they do it is finite."
RealClearScience's Alex B. Berezow, however, debates whether overpopulation is actually a crisis. He writes that we don't need to worry about overpopulation because, in fact, in some places the population is actually decreasing. He offers birthrates in Russia as one example:
The problem is so bad in Russia, which may shrink by 25 million people in the next 40 years, that demographers are referring to a population crisis. This will put an enormous strain on Russia's economy as the government struggles to care for its aging population.
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