The Chicken or the Egg?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? - Although this has been a widely debated and pondered question, we seem to be no closer to the answer than we were in the beginning.

Thomas Malthus

Similar to this question, then, which came first: population growth or poverty? In Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that population growth will go unchecked until the growth runs up against environmental limits which, eventually, lead to poverty, resource scarcity, and hunger. Later critics of Malthus’s work have come to argue that poverty and hunger cause environmental decline and population growth as impoverished families struggle to maintain a living. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen is one of the individuals in this camp.

Amartya Sen

Whether or not you buy into the argument of the chicken or the egg, or the argument of population growth or poverty, it is important to take the facts at face value. Or population is growing, and it is growing quickly. A constant rate of growth in the population leads to the acceleration of the use of natural resources. Our world is only so big; there are only so many resources to go around.

If you need to put into perspective the real, tangible problems that we are facing, take a look at this video: 

Also, keep in mind that today, in 2013, (as mentioned in the video) our world population is over 7 billion and growing. According to Michael Mayerfeld Bell in An Invitation to Environmental Sociology, more than 90% of the world’s population growth is currently taking place in poor countries - countries with high poverty rates and low levels of human development.

Check out this interactive map if you would like to see how the population is growing across countries and continents worldwide, provided by the Population Reference Bureau.

While thinking about an exploding population it is important to keep social issues in mind, as well. It is imperative to consider some of the reasons why birth rates are consistently higher in many impoverished countries. Although there are a multitude of social, economic, and political issues to take into consideration, this link may help put things into perspective, at least to some degree, in regards to women and the difficulties that they face in controlling their reproduction in many countries: Dollars and Sense: The Case for Contraception.

Although determining whether population growth causes poverty or the opposite, whether the chicken or the egg came first, it is equally important (if not more so) to own up to the issues related to population and poverty that we are facing today - before it is too late.

~Carly