The Last Taboo... Population.

MotherJones - What unites the Vatican, lefties, conservatives, environmentalists, and scientists in a conspiracy of silence? Population.

"Overpopulation, combined with overconsumption, is the elephant in the room," says Paul Ehrlich, 42 years after he wrote his controversial book, The Population Bomb. "We don't talk about overpopulation because of real fears from the past—of racism, eugenics, colonialism, forced sterilization, forced family planning, plus the fears from some of contraception, abortion, and sex. We don't really talk about overconsumption because of ignorance about the economics of overpopulation and the true ecological limits of Earth."

"... India, the dynamics of overpopulation and overconsumption are most acute, where the lifelines between water, food, fuel, and 1.17 billion people—17 percent of humanity subsisting on less than 2.5 percent of the globe's land—are already stretched dangerously thin. India's population is projected to surpass China's by 2030 in a country only a third China's size—adding 400 million citizens between now and 2050. But that's the mid-level projection. A slight uptick in global fertility, and it may be home to a staggering 2 billion people by 2050. Here, before anywhere else on Earth, the challenges of 20th-century family planning will become a 21st-century fight for survival."

Core differences about how the population issue is viewed have reinforced the paralysis. Conservationists tended to frame the issue as people vs. nature, while human rights activists found this analysis simplistic and even racist, failing to address what they saw as the core problems of poverty and environmental injustice. Yet they in turn have tended to deny the limits of growth. Add the tension between rich and poor nations, and the issue quickly becomes radioactive. "In the developing world," says Kavita Ramdas, the president and CEO of the San Francisco-based Global Fund for Women, "the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of Western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fueling the overconsumption of the West."

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Haase Comment:

I do not believe "Population" is a problem that can not be fixed, yet it can not be ignored. 

If every life was treated with the care, compassion and consideration it deserves our current population would be 4 Billion. Nearly 2 billion of worlds population are born into neglect, poverty and unwanted homes in arid lands that offer no hope or future. Education, compassion and incentives for self preservation are key.