The Negative and Positive Effects of Human Behavior on the Environment: Population Growth

Many things threaten our world: war, climate change, and poverty are among them. While many people are concerned with our economy, our oil dependency, and dwindling food and water supplies, others acknowledge the simple reason as to why we are faced with these issues – the Earth is overpopulated. Exponential growth has been seen in our world population over the past two centuries, with a grand total of 7 billion people roaming the Earth today (Tomkin, 2011). These numbers will continue to grow due to the increasing number of births and humans are having longer life expectancies. Humans, in addition to animals, consume vast quantities of food and water; humans also use a tremendous amount of energy and raw materials, and produce much waste which is harmful to our environment. Population growth contributes to almost 7.9% of the world’s environmental problems (Wenner, 2005).

Educating the young men and women on their behavior and the environment, will help them realize what effects that having children at an early age will cause not only in the country that they are living in but could potentially have an impact globally as well. Giving them access to contraceptives at either a low-cost or give them away free through a government funded education plan. Give young women some sort of incentive to achieve a higher education and encourage them to start their families at a later stage in their life. The best solution out there is to get the governmental officials and environmental groups to find potential solutions and determine what would be best for the future of the planet and its human inhabitants. In order for us to solve this problem, many of the options such as birth control, education, and economic development may seem fairly reasonable, it just may take the government to get more involved.

The huge increase in population growth means that there is huge pressure on the world’s resources, causing the resources to diminish, as every person that is born will need...