You may think that taking in refugees or migration groups will overflow your own country, but that’s not the real enemy. Overpopulation all over the world is a topic that I’m going to discuss today, as I educate you about our current global situation. In addition, I will be introducing the issue of bees- explaining how we’re also in danger of losing our pollinators. Which one does greater damage than the other, which one is the most important?
In the past, population growth came from families trying to survive the high death rate of infants. Specific countries like India, and many several others under Continent Africa, were victims of this so-called “short lifespan, high death rate”. These undeveloped countries did not have the technology either enough medical education or equipment to handle situations like this. After a time, life spans became longer, and the infant death rate lowered. The population growth had been slow until the 1800s. This shift in century opened a new era where people traveled more and had a better quality of both birth and life. It escalated to a situation where there are too many people on our planet. To the pint that we don’t have enough resources or enough economy to give everyone a luxurious life.
It’s said that there are so many heavy people on the planet that soon we’re going to fall from the sky. Of course, this isn’t the truth. But there’s still a lot of rumors going on that we’re in a big crisis of overpopulation and that we need to slow our birth rate- which China has done succeeding, by decreasing childbirth to 1-2 children. However, many people will all end up in flames and poverty if we don’t do anything drastic. I’m here to say that I’ve done my research and can tell you something different.
Today’s population might be changing slowly, but it’s changing surely. We’ve had a crisis where too many babies were born, but today we’re coming to a point where we are stabilizing our mankind and can control our population as well. At this rate, we’re currently at almost 8 billion people, and it’s estimated that we will rise to 11 billion soon in the near future, but stop growing from here and rather stay steady on that same number. Africa and India are now fighting to get out of poverty and have obtained good quality technology and medication, the same that we have here in Europe and America, and for that reason can help themselves out more.
To change the matters to something more green, let’s ask ourselves “what’s happening to the bees in all of this global crisis?”. While we have troubles with overpopulation and developing countries, the bees are the species that are struggling the most as more and more beehives die as production gets more expensive. They’re important to us because they’re responsible for spreading pollen dust to plants and flowers, and what do we do when we lose that? Eat mud?
The causes of the bee crisis are made up of many different factors of natural and human-caused reactions. One of the main reasons is the abundance of pesticide that is being sprayed and used on yields. These chemicals are used to keep the crops free from bugs such as mite but sadly work on bees as well. In addition, we have been removing huge chunks of nature and flora, creating a huge problem for the pollinating species when they’re going to find somewhere to spread pollen.
Almond prices are going up and it’s getting harder to build beehives and keep them alive. The crisis of bees is about the pollination crisis and how the system no longer goes as efficient as it used to before. flies, bees and other flower-visiting insects no longer suffice what our nature needs, and we’ve come to a point where mankind themselves need to hand pollinate our flowers and plants. What this does to our globalization means more work, more money, and higher prices in the market. In addition, we may also face consequences such as endangered species of the biome as well as extinct species in the biomes.
Dave Goulson, in the article “No Plan Bee”, gives an analogy of how a human walks for a whole day through a gas to get to a store. When the person gets his groceries, he walks home eating on rotten and bad nutritional food- thus creating a cycle of bad habits and health. This is equivalent to how our bees are treated.
To conclude which one is the most ravaged, we can’t say it’s population anymore. Our childbirth is no longer going through the roof, and we’re stabilizing mankind into a fair 9 - 11 billion people. However, bringing food to all of those 11 billion people is going to be difficult if the bees keep dying from acidic and bad quality nutrition. For that reason, I will summarize this text with the statement that the bee crisis is more important than the crisis of overpopulation.
Sources:
Dave Goulson, November 8, 2013, The financial times (article)
Hans Rosling, Don’t panic! The facts about population, Gapminder.org (video)
