World Population

This week in class we have been talking a lot about patterns in world population. Many people believe that the worlds' resources are rapidly decreasing and that they are almost completely out. There is no evidence to support this. In the 1970's there were only 3 billion people on earth and now there is over 7. There was a widespread belief that people would start starving to death if there wasn't population control.

It all started with the baby bomb post World War II. Over 77 million babies were born in the United States shortly after men came home from the war. The largest increase in births the nation had ever seen. This partly had to do with the current economy years prior. Not only was the nation going through and recovering from a depression, but then we entered into the war and most of the men left the country. So naturally when they all returned and the economy was better, families formed and babies were born. After this baby boom, a lot of buzz was created about the myth of "overpopulation".

Just to give a real world example, you could give every person in the entire world an acre of land, and every last one of them would fit inside the state of Texas alone. Majority of the world is completely empty and undeveloped. This doesn't sound like overpopulation at all, does it? Many people are under the impression that they must have small families in order to support them. This is detrimental to the worlds population. There are simply not enough children being born in todays society all over the world.  The problem this creates is there is an excess of elderly people needing financial support from the youth of the world. Social security is running out and this presents a major economic problem for all future generations.

Life expectancy in this world has also dramatically increased. It has been said that "it's not that people started matting like rabbits, but we stopped dropping like flies". This gives an explanation of why there are more people on this earth than we have seen before yet there is no balance or consistency.

Having five children has been compared to robbing a bank. Ethically wrong. That it is using up resources that could be used for another family by having more than one. That having multiple children is selfish. This is obscured. We know that the purpose of this life is to create families have those connections with people. I present you this. If we have parents only having one child, in four short generations these people would find themselves related to no one. No aunts and uncles, which means no cousins, and no brothers and sisters. Never having nieces and nephews. Once their parents die, they would literally have no family. How tragic would that be if we had people walking this earth without a support group. With no one to gather with on holidays and look after. No fun family vacations with all your cousins, or family reunions in Utah every summer with your crazy great aunts.

We need to educate people in the importance of repopulating the earth not only from an economic and survival point of view but more importantly from a point of view of family. Families are our Heavenly Father's greatest masterpiece and we owe it to him to bring his children onto this earth. We have been commanded to and agreed to do so long before we gained temporal bodies.