In high school health class they showed us a film featuring
lab rats. With just a few rats in a cage, they got along well. They shared
their space and their food, and were relatively clean. (Well, as clean as rats
ever are.) But when the rats were allowed to overpopulate their cage, they
fought over limited resources. They became sick and died. The film was proof
that we as humans should limit our families or maybe not have families at all. The
only problem with this premise is that rats aren’t humans. Rats can’t build a
bigger rat cage. They can’t plan a more efficient waste disposal system. They can’t
imagine better ways to produce and distribute food. Humans do that sort of thing
all the time. It’s why the dire predictions from the 60’s about overpopulation
never came true. Now if only we could think of a way to reverse our declining
fertility rate.
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