Nature Controls the World Population

I believe that environmental disasters and diseases are nature’s way of preserving resources by controlling the world’s population.

In our technologically modern world, we have created countless ways to avoid death and destruction in the midst of natural disasters. These include systems for anticipating future tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. Developments of medicine have extended life expectancy to over 70 years in most developed countries. Though we are extremely fortunate to have technology and medicines that allow us to better control how our environment treats us, these advancements have come with a price.  

There are far more people being born than dying everyday, a balance that is supposed to be relatively even.  This massive growth in human population is a problem because our world is running out of natural resources. In the chapter called Disease and the Growing World Population in our textbook, it describes how the Black Death and other plagues lead to horrific numbers of victims in the European and Asian populations. Even though a mass amount of death is never something we hope for, the drop in world population also had its benefits. After the Black Plague ran its course, there were less people alive and therefore more food and water for the living. The Black Plague may have been nature’s way of saying, hey humans, stop growing so fast; you need to conserve resources! I do not mean to make a joke of on something that was catastrophic to the human race.  However, the point that I am trying to prove is that the Black Death had benefits for the preservation of resources.

Another example of a disaster that inadvertently helped the environment was in ancient Rome.  In ancient Rome, the government was thinking too much about supplying its people with food in the short-term, and not enough about running out of resources for the future.  In order for the government to produce that much grain, “they had to cut down thousands of trees to create farms.” Fewer trees led to soil erosion, which then led to flooding of the Tiber River. When the floods receded, they left a malaria-carrying mosquito infestation. This wiped out around 10 percent of the Roman population, later causing the resource-scarce empire to collapse.  Could this spread of this disease have been nature's way of stopping the Romans from further ruining their environment?

The constant growth in our population will eventually lead to more and more scarce resources, regardless of whether we effectively conserve right now.  I hope I do not sound unsympathetic to the millions that die in horrible natural disasters. However, I do see that when people die, there are less resources being used.  This is just how our world works. My only hope is that in the future, the human race can find away to survive while preserving our natural resources. Their needs to be an equilibrium between what humans take from the world, and how fast resources can be replenished.  If we cannot find a way to coexist with our environment, we may face new environmental disasters that could kill millions just like the Black Plague.