Power of the People

The BBC adds this interesting take to the flurry of human population related news stories that have come out over the past week or so (anyone know what the impetus for these have been?).  Here is the question posed by the BBC story:

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

Unfortunately, ideas for how to manage human population growth do indeed have a history that is more than a little tinged with the inequities associated with race, class, and socio-economic power.  The eugenics and Social Darwin movements are cases in point.  More recently, the Sierra Club experienced a vigorous internal debate over its stance on population growth and immigration (mostly the illigal kind) into the US.  The beginning of this article gives a brief synopsis.  The potential inequities associated with managing human population have also been explored in a number of movies and books.  In Time just out in theatres has a Logan's Run-esque plot: people are only allowed to live until 25 as a way to sustainably manage resource use on the planet.  However, rich people can buy their way out the social contract....they get to live forever!

And of course managing population growth also always involves a whole other range of hot button issues such as the proper role of government in people's lives, abortion and other methods of contraception, and  religion.  Its perhaps because of these complexities that population growth is rarely talked about explicitly when we are thinking about sustainable resource management.