Many of the problems of our planet--depletion of fish in the
ocean, extinction of animal species, pollution, climate change, scarcity of
resources such as water--can be traced to a root cause: people. That is, too
many people, or overpopulation. How so?
- Fish are being depleted simply because there are too
many people who want to catch and eat those fish, in relation to the number of
fish there are. Supplies of fish are not unlimited, and many fish species are
close to exhaustion.
- Animal species are being lost from the ecosystem due to loss
of habitat (due to natural areas being turned into housing tracts and shopping
centers--so called "development") and also hunting, which often is
for food for people.
- Pollution, simply, is due to people and their activities:
their manufacturing, their burning fossil fuels, their producing all forms of
waste.
- Climate change, as many people understand, is due to the production
of greenhouse gases, which is due mainly to our burning of fossil fuels but
also to other causes such as raising of livestock (cattle emit methane, which is
a greenhouse gas).
- Scarcity of water is due to human activities: drinking bathing
and cooking, of course, but also manufacturing and agriculture. Of course more
people means more water consumed and this is already a critical problem in some
places.
In some parts of the world, such as Latin America,
where the birth rate is producing a growing population, a serious obstacle to
controlling population has been the Catholic Church.
In America,
we have many single mothers who have four, five, or six children. (I hope it
will not sound racist if I say that these are often "minority"
women.) When there is no father in the home, this is a recipe for poverty. Some
of these women work two or even three jobs to try to support their children,
and their jobs are often low-paying. Also, their children are apt to receive a
less-than-ideal amount of supervision and thus they get into trouble.
I don't know why these women don't use birth control more. I
can only guess. Some of them may be Catholic (but what percentage?). Many
presumably don't know enough about the available means of artificial birth
control or are the victims of misconceptions and misinformation.
If they work at jobs that provide health insurance (and,
surely, many of them do not), they should have access to birth control through
their employer-provided health insurance. However, the Trump administration is
doing what it can to worsen the population problem. Under former President
Obama's health care plan (often nicknamed "Obamacare"), employers,
through their employee health insurance plans, made access to birth control easier.
But Trump and his cabinet want to make it easier for employers to opt out of
providing this coverage on "conscience" grounds, i.e., they can claim
it violates their religious beliefs. (In the interest of the greatest accuracy
possible and to avoid over-simplification: there was provision for such
objections, which involved submitting a form, but some employers--for example,
Catholic hospitals--object even to doing
that, and Trump is trying to make greater accommodation for these employers.)
And, perhaps even worse, Trump has undermined, curtailed,
and even eliminated US
aid to family planning programs in other countries.
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