All human fears, from stuff as microscopic as germs to titanic event like the end of the world. Fear can paralyze us to cease functioning as a person, or it can drive us to overcome it, bringing out the best of our human struggle against our inner adversity. During the span of the decades, there has been fear mongering on global crisis such as the overpopulation and the threat of a nuclear attack. While world leaders like the United States and the United Kingdom have policed the stability of international politics suggested that a nuclear war is unlikely to happen soon, the staggering growth of the human population is multiplying at such alarming rate that it is happening even as we speak! So, is population explosion far more feared than a nuclear explosion?
The rationality of our fear is usually exacerbated by our mass media experiences. For instances, movies like ‘The Sum Of All Fears’ and ‘The Peacemaker’ presented a horrific threat of a nuclear warfare. Popular science fiction also soothsay the apocalypse following an atomic carnage in ‘Dr Strangelove’ and ‘Akira’. These imaginative portrayals of a nuclear attack fuel the fear of the audience with descriptive mental pictures of radiation burns and agonizing deaths. I was especially struck with the grotesque tale of Hiroshima bombing in the Japanese manga ‘Barefoot Gen’ where defenseless children were left in the wake of the aftermath to survive amidst death and destruction.
Our historic memories in World War Two where nuclear bombs were dispatched over the Japanese cities had shown us that the threat is indeed real. Images of real survivors relating the tale of the bombing had us reminded that had it been a different time, it could be us instead. And that possibility is not very difficult to materialize give the on going atomic arms’ race in our world now. The victory with superiority in nuclear warfare of the Second World War not only had propelled the United States to a superpower nation, but also encouraged the rest of the world to follow suit if they want to survive the next world war. Current world leaders are struggling to arm themselves more powerful and destructive nuclear war machines. We had witnessed in daily news of how Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, India and China fighting in place to match nuclear capability to that of the United States. The Cuban Missile Crisis has also presented that the threat of a nuclear war is indeed very imminent.
Overcrowding harms the environment by putting more pressure to accommodate our existence. The upsurge in population while not taking measures to ration our exploitation on Nature pollutes the Earth by altering the atmosphere composition, contaminated water supplies and even changes meteorological processes like El Nino, La Nina effects. Ex United States’ vice-president now turned environmental activist Al Gore has his fair share of criticism in the inspiring documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ explored how we had damage our planet beyond damage. And it is easy to amplify those damages with population explosion. Do we really want to leave a planet of filth and full of overcrowding to our own children, a bill that no one could ever repay?
Perhaps some might find it hard to relate to the environmental and resource issues mentioned above as they might seemed like problems that would happen in underdeveloped countries or far ahead in a distant future. But the ground zero of the population explosion is actually the cities. Overcrowding often occurs in the cities where people gathered to work the economy; it deprived them of privacy, stressed their well beings with noise and air pollutions, and suffocated them during rush hours and holidays. There were simply too much people to be around with! It can injure mental health and cause problems like anxiety, panic attacks, depression, thus impairing their social functions. Overcrowding also leads to high unemployment rates, inequality and illiteracy should the population becomes too much to organize. Poverty and crimes could also add on to the mounting social problems that a population explosion has.
However, optimistic economists had suggested that overpopulation should not have to be a menace as illustrated above if global cooperation and individual responsibilities are made to control population. Well distribution of resources across the world, the use of contraceptives and birth schemes are examples that can keep the troubles of overpopulation in check.
In conclusion, while population explosion could affect billions of livelihoods in the long run, a nuclear explosion is far more feared than it. Vivid images of a nuclear holocaust from both fiction dramatization and historic memories of a nuclear warfare struck a more imminent threat compared to theoretical catastrophes of a population implosion in the future.
