Tal And Walker

The population of the earth has already reached 7.3 billion, and there are around 353,000 babies born every day on average. The number of population is rapidly rising, so some people start to concern the problem of overpopulation. Tal and Walker claim that the planet is getting damage and the source on the planet will run out soon if the number of people does not have any control. Whereas, a contrast argument pops up from the people who believe in technology and social science: Ellis states that “It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technology systems that sustain us need improvement.” Besides, there is another view about overpopulation; in Pearce’s article, he believes that rising population is not

Tal uses a famine happened in China in 1958 to 1961 as an example against “technological optimists”. A lot of people passed away in that famine. This is a strong evidence to show us that it is matter to control the population and environmental sources at the balance level. Tal claims that setting up a law is a good way to slow down the population growing. He makes an example of Bangladesh, Iran, Singapore and Thailand; they all have significant success on controlling the birth rate. Moreover, he mentions about the extreme birth control policy in China—“one child policy”, and he thinks this policy is efficient, whereas it also bring a huge side effect to the citizen. According to Tal, there must be a conflict between scarcity and population growing; we can only choose one from

He thinks that people just enlarge the problem of the population growing, and miss the real main issue—over-consumption; he firmly declares that” the idea that growing human numbers will destroy the planet is nonsense. But over-consumption will.” Pearce clarifies by statistics that people are mistaking the overpopulation is a big issue, and in fact, human growth is not as fast as we thought. In his statistics, birth rate is actually going downward in many countries such as Canada, Japan, Australia, and so on, also the fertility rate of women is decreasing too. However, in Pearce’s article, birth rate decreasing does not mean that we do not have to worry about the environment and the sources in the earth because as Pearce says, the problem is not on the population but the lifestyle of the people. According to Pearce, “carbon dioxide emissions” is the most important issue that damaging the environment; and he points out that the people who have a lot of money would produce more greenhouse gases then the people who are in poverty. Base on Pearce’s article, population rising is not the most significant issue anymore; we should put our attention on over-consumption instead of still being stuck in the arguing of