What is Overpopulation?
Overpopulation is the concept in which a certain population of an organism goes over their carrying capacity of its environment. A result of overpopulation is that environments cannot support all of its individuals with its limited resources. Therefore, the organisms may die from starvation or lack of shelter. The reason why I became interested in overpopulation came from visiting the website called www.worldometers.info to find the world’s overall population. As a result, my findings were astounding. The world’s population is over 7 billion people. That is a lot of people living on Earth which if the population continues to grow out of control, we will reach and eventually go over our carrying capacity. An example of this happening in the animal world can be seen in the reindeer of Saint Matthew’s Island: the reindeer population that was introduced on Saint Matthew’s Island (Klein, 1968). The reindeer experienced no predators, parasites, and no other factors that would reduce their population, so, what the reindeer have done was to reproduce more and more reindeer and using more resources. As a result, from having a reindeer population of 29 reindeer in 1944, it grew to about 6,000 in the summer of 1963, but in the following winter from 1963-1964, the reindeer population crashed from lack of food and only about 49 reindeer survived (Klein, 1968). Although people are not like reindeer, they are going to have a similar experience as them when they use up their resources for survival. In order to prevent a bleak future of starvation, lack of clean water, and such, we have to control the rate at which the human population grows at because around the world, there are already people dying from starvation and fighting over water sources in places like India and Africa (Parthasarathy, 2013) and (Famine As hunger and disease claim more lives, some ask if Africa can be saved, 2008). The world is overpopulated from the lack of family planning available to people, advances in medicine, and pro-life religious activists and if nothing is done to combat the exponential growth of the human population right now then there will be no future.