Inferno and Overpopulation

Such a good plot twist. 

Lately, it's been very hard for me to find books to read outside of school. Maybe I just don't have the time or patience to stick with it until it becomes interesting. But every once in a while, I find a book that is so gripping I can't put it down and if I do, I can't stop thinking about it. One such book was Inferno by Dan Brown, who is one of my favorite authors. Centered around Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, the book finds Robert Langdon in Florence as he wakes up in a hospital with a cylinder bearing a biohazard sign and no memory of what happened to him. As he tries to figure out what the heck is going on, he gets wrapped up in a plan woven by an ingenious geneticist, Bertrand Zobrist, who warns obsessively that if the global population isn't checked fast, humanity will find itself in a cesspool of suffering, poverty, and misery in a world that will look just like Dante's inferno.



Inferno got me thinking deeply about the issue of overpopulation, a very pressing one, and since it has to do with the health of our planet and the balance of life, I'm going to explore it some more right here.  

From The Scientific American, by Hana Ševčíková and Jen Christiansen from September of 2014

Throughout the last century and decade, humans have accomplished mind-blowing advancements in science and technology. When applied to the medical field, novel drugs and machines have made it possible for more people to survive illnesses, and therefore to add even more people to the planet. As a result, the global population reached 6 billion around 2000 and 7 billion in 2011. In contrast, we only reached 1 billion in  1804 after fifty thousand years of existence as a species.  

Worldometers shows a live count of the current population, which as I write is about 7,286,739,000 with nearly 3 million people born this year already. The world's population is growing by about 80 million or 1.14% per year, which seems like a small number, and it's actually projected to decrease to under .5% by 2050. Even at that low growth rate, the UN predicts that global population will reach 8 billion in just ten years, 9 billion by 2042, and will stabilize at about 10 billion by the end of the century. 

These numbers frankly scare me, and it certainly seems like Bertrand Zobrist had a point. Just because the population will stabilize at 10 billion doesn't mean it will happen in a positive way or that 10 billion humans will live comfortably on Earth. In nature, overpopulation in ecosystems is usually reversed either through lack of resources, predator-prey relationships, or disease. And though humans seem to cheat nature every once in a while, there will come a point where there simply won't be enough water available for every person, let alone food and shelter and money for a decent salary. Conflicts for resources will escalate and disease will spread quickly through increasingly crowded areas.

Hong Kong | Urban Barcode by Manuel Irriter. The artist made a series of 
photographs showing overcrowded apartment buildings in Hong Kong

Is it humane, then, to withhold food, medicines, or aid to people plagued with disease and starvation because that actually decreases global population a little? Is it humane to let conflicts run their course, even if thousands may die? After all, it's for the good of the planet, and therefore for the majority of humanity. 

Of course, very few people want to even discuss overpopulation let alone suggest killing people. It's the elephant in the room more so than climate change, (there actually exist strong arguments saying that overpopulation is a primary cause of climate change). So if overpopulation is closely tied to the slew of environmental problems threatening the planet, something must be done to reduce the growth rate even more, or even to turn it slightly negative. 

I think this is why Inferno is such a provocative book: it takes a highly controversial, seldom-discussed topic by the horns. Brown doesn't suggest a real answer, but uses Bertrand Zobrist to create a hypothetical solution. But more importantly, he draws attention to the issue to make readers really think about the implications of overpopulation and to point out that it's a really hard question to answer. For me, the book started a discussion both in my head and with my mom, and any book that achieves that is, to me, genius. I'm not going to tell you what Zobrist does by the end, because it's extraordinary and a part of a super exciting plot-twist. And so, I'm going to leave this post open-ended, because I want to know what you all are thinking. Is there anything to be done?

If you have some time and wish to learn more about overpopulation, I recommend watching this video  from SciShow by Hank Green.