Our population is rising at an unsustainable rate....

Bigger, better, more! More people, more jobs, more money, more cities, more consumers. We live in a world that thinks all growth is good. But is it?
At the end of each day, the world has over 200,000 more mouths to feed than it had the day before; at the end of every week, 1.5 million more; at the close of each year, nearly 80 million more. Humans, who numbered 4.5 billion in the 1980’s, are now over 6 billion, and will probably exceed nine billion by 2050. Most of that increase will come in the poorer countries of the earth, exacerbating all of the consequent problems, among them shortages of food and water, depletion of energy supplies, deterioration of the environment, incitement to local and regional conflicts, and breakdown of the social order. Clearly, the continued increase in populations will produce a bleak future for all the earth’s inhabitants.

The need to reduce our rapid rate of growth, indeed to reduce the current and projected size of the human population, is urgent. Complicating the task of reducing populations are those who for various reasons advocate a continued increase and those who object to practical methods of population limitation, such as birth control and abortion, as well as those who simply turn their backs on the problem, refusing even to recognize the obvious. One legitimate function of education is the clearly enunciated recognition of social problems and the enlightened advocacy of social solutions. - By Philip Appleman