Population and Urbanization - The Malthusian Point of View - Research Paper Example

Population overgrowth has been viewed as a threat even before the time of Robert Malthus who expressed an assumption on population in his work "Why Humanity Faces Ultimate Catastrophe." Assumptions made by Malthus can now be felt that the continuously outraging human numbers surpassed the rate of sustainability and thus can come to a point when all there is can all be gone if this persists. The question of when and how is yet a struggle (Malthus, 1978). Imagine the world as a pail, and humans as the flow of water from a faucet.

Eventually the pail will be full and inevitably the spillage will be unstoppable. Population has been an issue since time immemorial. A lot of thinkers even since the early part of history have forecasted and feared the current situation the world is faced today. Population per se is not the problem rather the exploitation and the bearing it gave the world out of its rapids. According to Thomas Robert Malthus “human beings will overwhelm the earth’s capacity to provide for us.” Truly one can conceive how Malthusian theory came into being.

We only have one world and the fear reaching its physical limit is at a verge of realization. According to Malthus (1978), population has the tendency to increase beyond the nourishment that can be used to support it and beyond the nature of its subsistence. It is concluded to double itself every 25 years or even increase in geometrical ratio. Currently the population is large and rapidly growing at an annual rate of 1.7% and it varies from region to region depending on its level of development.

The average annual increase in more developed nation is at a lesser value of 0.5% with an associated doubling time of 137 years compared to the 2.4% of the combined population of less developed countries (excluding china) expected to double in 30 years if no changes can be made (Daily and Ehrlich 1992). The current estimate for the 2025 population is 8.5 billion (UNFPA 140) based on optimistic assumptions on continued decline in population growth rate but as of today we are 7 billion and counting.

It was Oct 31, 2011 when the official 7th billionth person was born according to United Nations Demographers (Biello, 2011). But the 7 billion is irrelevant alone not unless versed on whether mother earth can handle the bulk of her children. How many can the earth house really? Or till when is a question far been sought and feared to happen. Population explosion has been a plague among all regions and is reflected in many researches globally. It is not merely a question of territorialism but rather a question of survival in terms of the basic commodities like food, shelter, and resources.

A single person cannot go with living without having to spend a resource from the totality of the resources that the world offers. How much is too much? And imagine 7 billion people altogether exploiting a single resource at this very moment. That would equal 7 billion exploits just this very minute. But what is 7 billion exploits versus the trillions more that the world can give? The bottom line is not how much is there but rather what if when all resources are depleted. The world’s carrying capacity is defined by ecologists as the maximal population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future. All