There are documentaries about global issues. I dare not say about every global issue because there has yet to be a documentary about over population. I just watched a great documentary about the industrialization of water. Honestly one of the most basic things is being commodified and sold to people at a higher price than it was originally (free). The amount of control this puts into corporations hands is catastrophic and the movie makes and excellent point of bringing this to the public’s attention.

It doesn’t take much work to find out what companies are in control of what and what this collection of power is capable of doing. Monsanto, Nestle, Coke, and many other corporations will likely be curse words in the comming century for the crimes they have committed in the name of collecting resources. The accumulation of power is no secret to being a source of a problem for the masses. Whatever the solution is to the proper distribution of this power, it won’t be solved if we keep civilization going. I agree fully that these corporations need to be stopped and power given back to the people of the world, not in the form of monetary wealth but in the original form of the resources but at what point will we take into account what the human population is doing?

We live not only in a time of corporate take over of resources but in a time a human exponential growth. We can blame corporations for destroying our environment for now, but we cannot overlook the populations impact just on the environment. At what point will we take into account that population itself is a problem. Once all people have equal access to water and we still have pollution then will we realize that humans not simply corporations impact their environment in negative ways, not because humans are harmful but because there are too many of us that use resources. Right now distribution is being corrupted by corporations and the means of distribution are more pollutant than local community based distribution, which will hopefully be what happens when we take back the world from corporations.

At this point, when the evil of corporations is neutralized. We will all have to come to the realization of the relation of population size and the inverse relationship of quality and quantity of life with in the human population. However Malthusian this sounds there is a direct relationship between the quantity of a population and the quality of individuals within that population. We know this when we talk about jobs being taken from us, given to others, closing our borders, outsourcing. Importation and exportation are going to be very important things when we defeat the evil of the world, because with or without Monsanto we have to deal with the needs of other populations versus the needs of our population, and hopefully we will realize this on a global scale before it is too late.

William Catton Jr. describes this next century as the Bottle neck century. He smiles when he gives interviews but he understands the devastation that will be occurring because in our current times, no one is stopping the population growth. Robert Putnam writes about the dissolution of community and the statistical relationship to the American trend of lower connections and high mistrust of others as a result.There may or may not be a relationship to the growing population but even when Putnam’s statistics are only a century old because that’s all that is available to him, he has no interest in relating the statistics of over population with the decline in community. These statistical relationships are the most important of our time. What happens to community and the distribution of power, with the increase of a population?

The movie I just watched, “Flow: For the Love of Water” describes community activity as a cure for the power accumulated by corporations. Community activity and petitions, grass roots activism will drawl the worlds attention to the important issues. However much power The Spectacle may have if we attempt to point it in the right direction may be too late but at what point will any of the serious discussion turn to over population? When we equally distribute the resources, erase the debt, destroy the corporations, then we will still have to face issues that have not been brought into the homes, into the wombs of every household. This is not an issue of being happy and having each and every persons needs met, because when these needs are met, we will still be faced with the inhumane decision of having less children. If we can start today, to better this understanding of what is really at risk then we might better understand why there are corporations that can accumulate wealth and distribute resources unequally. With an understanding of population and its affect we can better respond to human rights, equality, distribution of resources and we can do all of this in the most humane ways possible before there are more and more fights over water. 

I hold no one person responsible. We need another generation, so there should never be an end to having children, but our understanding of every problem for the next several decades must take into account our global presence. No single problem is without a connection to our numbers. I envision a great task of accepting the responsibility and relationship of ourselves and of our environment to the problems we face within human interaction and with the dying world around us. If we can bring together our desire for equality and our responsibility to understand our population size affect, then we can hope that the deaths occurring in human life and within the other-than-human community of life are not without our concern.