Movie with a Message: Overpopulation!

why not? the amount of people on earth are soon to each 7 billions (estimated in autum this year) and african countries increase in population by around 24% ratio all the time. there is already overpopulation in africa, thus we see laods of starvation, wars and other things peopel do. obviuosly i dont support them. i mean you cant find food for yourself tne you make 9 children and cry you cant feed them? its your own fault you cant stop *beep*

On the topic, i think soylent green deicted overpopulation pretty well.

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"Common sense is not so common."
- Voltaire

"Overpopulation is a statistical myth."

Yeah, because sooner or later, you start to run out of resources and then a die-off occurs. Problem solved! So we shouldn't worry about overpopulation even a little bit. Except for the fact that the environment will be highly degraded by several billion people eating everything in sight. I recently read that the bluefin tuna will probably be extinct in ten years. Most commercial fish will be wiped out by 2050. Our farming methods are destroying the topsoil. Nope. No problems here!

Soylent Green had it wrong in that they thought the plankton would be the last thing surviving in the ocean, but plankton populations are way down. The fact is that we're very efficiently killing everything from the very large to the very small all at once. Killer shrews have nothing on humans.

The fact is, if our population did start to plummet, the world economy would crash, because it's based on the idea of unending exponential growth.

Very interesting points of view by all posters. As I said in my OP, overpopulation was a "hot Topic" in the late 1950's and focused on food shortages and starvation. You are correct that today, food shortages are caused by distribution problems, not supply. How do you get the folks that have food to turn over some of their larder to those that are starving? Now it becomes a political problem as well.

In a true communist world, food would be shared. We (thank god) do not live in such a world. Bottom line: people do starve. Why are they really starving? Could it be that they have exceeded the carrying capacity of their own land? I think so. I also think that eventually, the whole world would exceed its carrying capacity and a rebalancing of population would occur world wide. After all, there is a finite amount of food that can be produced.

However, in my opinion, the real problem is not food but scarcity of other resources such as oil. Nations have been willing to kill to protect their oil supplies long before food became a problem. All of these issues of food and commodities scarcity are excerbated by overpopulation: too many people chasing after finite supplies of "whatever". The environmental damage has yet to be fully assessed or apprerciated. Planet earth, as we know it, may not always be able to heal itself.

In summary, while it is true that populations will be rebalanced by famine and war, why not try to do something about the root cause (overpopulation) in a peaceful way? We could avoid a lot of misery to ourselves and damage to our planet and perhaps leave a better leagacy to our children and grandchildren.