Ward Sutton, who was much funnier when he was drawing cartoons that lampooned rock-n-roll culture, makes an extremely dubious point about overpopulation and the “culture of life” in this week’s “Sutton Impact.”
In it, Sutton mourns the loss of greenspace and farmland in his hometown to “exurban” housing developments, blames overpopulation and then mocks the right-wingers who want to ban contraception. While the effort to ban contraception is ridiculously puritanical and begs for mockery and outrage, I find it extremely hard to blame American urban sprawl on “overpopulation.” The great big land mass under the stars and stripes is a whopping 5.9 million square miles, while our population is – as Sutton points out – soon to be 300 million. That means that, on average, we have to squeeze about 83 people to each square mile.
India, on the other hand, with its billion citizens, has to find enough living space for about 328 people per square mile. Taiwan gets comfy with about 636 people per square mile, the Gaza Strip makes room for about 3,823 in its relatively few square miles, and even prosperous countries like Britain and Germany accommodate 243 and 230 subjects and citizens to the square mile, respectively. The United States, in fact, ranks just 144th out of nearly 200 countries in terms of population density.
So, is the problem that there are too many people in the world, or that there are too many Americans in the world, demanding strip malls, office parks, sport utility vehicles and McMansions? Do we need fewer Americans, or do we Americans (who, with 5% of the Earth’s population, consume 20% of its resources) need to consume less?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of sex and contraception as the next single male hornball, but cries of “overpopulation!” often sound to me like cries of “There’s too many damn brown people!” And countries like India and China, while poorer than the U.S., somehow find a way to accommodate their masses without uprooting every forest in sight to build more goddamn Best Buys and 7-11s.
Perhaps I’d be less antagonistic to Sutton’s cheerleading for contraception if it was accompanied by a call for massive new immigration into this country. After all, there are places in this world where there is legitimate overpopulation (India, Palestine and China being good examples), and here we are in the U.S. of A. wasting perfectly good greenspace on giant styrofoam houses and honking huge parking lots. Brown people of the world, help fill our wide open spaces!