Is
Canada Overpopulated?Is
Canada Overpopulated?
The textbook defines overpopulation as related to the people-land connection. It is a value judgment of an environment unable to support it's population or it is a " continuing imbalance between numbers of people and carrying capacity of the land."(1)
To look at this geographically I quote from Paul Erhlich in the Population Bomb: "... they share with the UDCs a serious problem of population distribution. Their urban centers are getting more and more crowded relative to the country side."(2) The UDCs are meant to refer to undeveloped countries and the "they" in this quote is the DCs or developed countries. So we may in Canada have overpopulation in our cities according to popular writer and scientist Dr. Paul R. Erhlich.
Crowding is not the same as overpopulation but lets look at a crowding situation in North America. In particular here is a quote about New York city from the Crowding Syndrome by Caroline Bird:
"There are reasons why things always look worse in New York, even when they are not. The breakdown of network systems - air travel, phone, mail, electrical power - starts at the hub spreads from there until the whole system is down. Other systems, such as crime prevention, schooling, health care, refuse disposal and traffic control are simply more visible when they break down in New York."(3)
Canada has no cities as large but certainly there are these support systems in our large cities such as Toronto and Montreal.
Do we realise a problem of overpopulation? A few people I asked said Canada is not overpopulated, so I agree that overpopulation is not overcrowding.
The text mentioned insufficient dietary needs of the worlds people. Canada grows wheat, and has sold it to the Russians. Some scenarios in the population bomb see us running short of wheat. Can we really plan our farming? Here again from the Population Bomb is a idea of what happens with planned farming of wheat:
"In 1954 large sections of the dry plains of Kazakhstan were put into grain production. Khrushchev had hopes for this highly touted "virgin" lands program, but unfortunately the virgin turned into a harlot in disguise. Bad climate and other factors turned the program into a major disaster."(4)
If they still need wheat can we still sell it to them? Definitely we have enough food for our middle class but we are interdependent with the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is overpopulated. So economically we may be well off but our cities still have problems and we can't ignore the rest of the world.
References.
3
Bird C., The Crowding Syndrome, 1972, David Mckay Company, Inc., New York, Chapter 1, pg. 14.
2
Ehrlich Dr. P. R., The Population Bomb, 1968, Ballantine Books, New York, Chapter 1, pg. 24.
4
Ehrlich Dr. P.R., abid., chapter 3, pg. 97.
1
Getis A., Getis J., Fellmann J., Introduction to Geography. 4th edition, 1994 Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Iowa, Chapter 6, pg. 199.
Copyright Peter Timusk
