Overpopulation makes me worry

Assalaamu alaikum,

It's curious, but in many wealthy countries, there are various efforts to get women to have more children through cash incentives of various kinds or subsidized childcare.

I read some years ago that a wealthy-country person consumed 20 times the amount of an impoverished person of a nation in Africa. (smile) And this made me think of Scimi's off-hand suggestion of 20 children. Because it suddenly seemed to me that if this statistic was correct, having a wealthy-country child was equivalent to having 20 non-wealthy children… (laugh) and I suddenly though: good God, if I have 6 children, does that mean I'm burdening the earth with the equivalent of 120 children?!

So I looked around the internet a bit. I didn't find the 20-for-1 reference, but I did come across some data compiled by the Global Footprint Network, which looks at various countires' use of resources, tracks them over time, and compares them. After reading the legal fineprint for how I could use this data, I was a bit concerned that I might have trouble using it directly. So I decided to draw on the 2007 data posted on Wikipedia. Each country's footprint is expressed in global hectares/person (gha/p) for the year (a hectare (10, 000 square meters) is about the size of a soccer field).

Fascinatingly, the world's top consumers are in the Gulf states. UAE, Qatar and Bahrain all clocked in at over 10 gha/p. Canada (my country) was 8th on the list of top consumers at 7,01 gha/p. The UK was listed further down with 4.89, Indonesia was 1.21, Pakistan was 0.77, and Puerto Rico was the least consuming country at 0.04 gha/p.

A quick calculation yielded that 1 Canadian used as much as over 5 Indonesians or 9 Pakistanis or… 175 Puerto Ricans! Yikes!

Birth rates are not the whole story, though. When I immigrated to Canada 30-some years ago, there were about 24 million Canadians. Since then, the population has soared to over 35 million. When people come here, they are very eager to get the wealthiest kind of lifestyle that they can get (irregardless of what their previous level was). (sigh) It's our greedy human nature. Looking at the most-consuming populations on this planet, then, I cannot but help come to the conclusion that the biggest problem right now is our human greed, and the fact that more and more people are accessing wasteful lifestyles.

Yes, local people can degrade their local environments. But it is a truth that a lot of resources are being seized by large corporations and local peoples are losing their means of subsistence (in all countries). From internal pressures like the desire for more, and external pressures like the inability to subsist off the local resources, people move, often to large cities, and wealthier nations. These migrants put pressure on the new locales' resources, as witnessed by Ardianto. They also lose their traditional networks of support, and families become more vulnerable (and this is true in wealthier countries, too), and children of migrants are more likely to have problems such as addictions, family violence, neglected children and mental health problems (and these have also been touched upon by Ardianto).

Just targeting poor women and telling them to have less children will not really help. This is why I believe we need to look at our own human desire for more, and how we can individually live lives less wasteful. As it says in the Qur'an 6:141

Yusuf Ali: It is He Who produceth gardens, with trellises and without, and dates, and tilth with produce of all kinds, and olives and pomegranates, similar (in kind) and different (in variety): eat of their fruit in their season, but render the dues that are proper on the day that the harvest is gathered. But waste not by excess: for Allah loveth not the wasters.

But just looking at an individual's actions is not enough. There are many individuals who would like to live differently, but find themselves constrained (and oppressed) by laws that favour large corporations (as touched upon by Scimi). And this is why I feel that we also need to look at the laws that regulate corporations, and those laws that have been designed to favour corporations over non-corporate commercial entities (like individuals trying to earn a small profit to live off).

(smile) And as always, I love the gentle posts by Sister Herb. I feel she has another piece of the puzzle. Her home-baking and gardening and crafts are a few of the ways that we can live less-wasteful, healthier, more Islamic… and happier lives.


May Allah, the Designer Who Knows something about us that the angels do not know, Guide us to ways that Please Him.