Population Growth Is at Root of Environmental Problems

To the Editor:

Your article about consumerism and the resulting resource demand being a threat to the environment is all too true (“Learning to Make Do With Less,” September 7).

However, the writer does not acknowledge the single most important factor here, which is the sheer size of the earth’s population.

While the article discusses the need for better consideration of the effects of human activity on the ecosystem, it ignores the simple fact that there are already far more humans alive than the planet’s resources can possibly support in any decent lifestyle. And as it is, a fair part of this population — especially in less-developed countries — takes relatively little from the ecosystem at this time.

Even if it were possible to bring the entire population up to just an acceptable level of basic personal comforts (food, water, waste disposal, shelter, health, education), the resulting negative effects on the ecosystem would become that much more severe.

The assertion that people in more-developed countries should reduce their impact on the ecosystem goes only so far. It is inconceivable that enough of these people will ever voluntarily accept a reduction of their present comforts to the low levels that would be required to allow the finite ecosystem to sustain all of us indefinitely.

Thus, the least we can do is to continually remind people of the unbreakable relationship between population size and environmental degradation, and emphasize the importance of trying to at least reduce future population growth as much as possible.

If we do not do this ourselves, surely nature will do it for us. This is a controversial topic that comes with much baggage, but one which we ignore at our collective peril.

Richard Larkin
Certified public accountant
Bethesda, Md.