China - The Epicenter of Overpopulation Essay -- Exploratory Essays Re

China - The Epicenter of Overpopulation In 1999 the world population reached six billion. Roughly 200,000 lives have been added each day since then, about one small city a week. This population boom however, is not evenly distributed throughout the globe. In fact, many countries in Europe have experienced negative population growth in the last ten years. It is the developing nations of our world that are most responsible for the exponential increase the world has begun to experience. The busy-bodied human mind has rushed and hurried to find "tech-fix's" to sustain our ever growing population. The population should have hit a glass ceiling a few billion people ago, many argue that it has explaining the 1-2 billion people dying of hunger at this very moment. We have reached a point where we are uncontrollably increasing in size, exploiting our resources in an effort for survival before we can begin to map out ways to protect them, increasing the total output they could give. As Edward O. Wilson says, "The epicenter of enviro nmental change, the paradigm of population stress, is the People's Republic of China". China is home to one fifth of the world's population, about 1.3 billion people. This population is expected to reach 1.6 billion by the year 2030. The majority of this population is crammed into the Yangzi River Basin, the most southern region of China. The wave of population was brought on in the late 1950's when the world experienced a baby boom after the world wars. This time period is referred to as the "golden age" in Chinese history. The country had suffered nearly 40 years of warring states and corruption from many differing political parties, so when the communist party finally came into power, a united nation o... ... of water distribution, mass public work projects have been developed and started to combat this issue. The success of these projects could quench the looming water shortages of over 300 major cities. China is under serious pressure to find all the "tech fix's" possible to support its large scale hatchery. Meanwhile, the eyes of the world will be on China to see how it manages its mass population. Hopefully, they will be successful, hopefully they will find answer and the genius of humanity will be able to continue to stretch the glass ceiling that the bacteria, that human population has become, is up against. Bibliography: Aird, John S. "China's family planning terror" The Human Life Review, Summer 1994 Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life (excerpt, the bottle neck theory) U.K, Random House Inc. 2002 www.gdrc.org/icm/grameen-info.html www.worldbank.org