Dan Brown’s Inferno, a chillingly grim picture of a potential future, is a wonderful piece of satire. His views on overpopulation take a surgically-precise stand on what statistics predict to be true. In fact, his novel has no thematic connection to Dante’s classic work of the same name; although allusion is made to it, the real topic is overpopulation. The novel depicts a bleak world in the very near future of a human race on the brink of extinction. Furthermore, the dismal predictions he projects of our fragile world seem hell-bent on becoming true. With scintillating wit, he takes on the persona of his characters in intermittent battles between each other full of lies and distrust.
He provides startling arguments as Zobrist when stating: “... It took the earth's population thousands of years-from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s-to reach one billion people. Then astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we're well on track to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-million people to planet Earth. A quarter million. And this happens every day-rain or shine. Currently every year we're adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany” (Brown, 101). What happens to all of these people? All of them require food, water, consume natural resources, need shelter, living space, and even more space to grow said resources and food. Sadly, the world is running out of these things, and we are still expanding our population. One billion people go to bed hungry, another billion lack access to fre...
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McDonagh, Melanie. "Dan Brown's demography: The novelist is not the first to say that we're all doomed." Spectator 322.9639 (May 25, 2013) 24(2). Global Issues In Context. Gale. SD36 District Offices. 20 Nov. 2013
Zuckerman, Ben. "Nothing racist about it: Like it or not, over-immigration is destroying our environment, says Sierra Club board member BEN ZUCKERMAN." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] 28 Jan. 2004: A17. Global Issues In Context. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Longman, Phillip. "8 the world will be more crowded with old people." Foreign Policy 188 (2011): 87+. Global Issues In Context. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Ward, Gerry. "Genomics Blog." Genome Alberta. Genome Alberta, 20 June 2013. Web. 14 Dec. 2013.
Howmany.org. "Overpopulation:." Effects of Overpopulation on the Environment and Society. Institute for Population Studies, 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Parfit, Derek (2004). “Overpopulation and the Quality of Life.” In J. Ryberg & T. Tännsjö (eds.), The Repugnant Conclusion. Kluwer Academic Publishers. 7-22.
As civilization advances, most of the people in society are uplifted by the development made. In a thousand years, we went from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and we are rapidly entering the digital age. But inevitably, there are people whom civilization has abandoned and exploited in order to advance this far. In his poem, “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015”, Craig Santos Perez dispels the preconceptions we hold about our society and reveals the horrors that we have either suppressed or neglected. He uses the Halloween scene to reveal how we have taken the atrocities that mankind has afflicted and relinquished. Through figurative language, imagery, and repetition, Perez
Population control is destroying the world! Ann Aguirre in her dystopian book “Enclave” shows the community as an organism made of four parts which are running it. There are breeders which produce children; they have hunters who hunt for food and the builders who build houses and everything else. Also there is elders who judge and punish people. The people who are sick or disabled are killed as well as their parents. That is because the people are not as intelligent and can’t make the medical help better, the people are very afraid of the elders and can’t have their own thought, and the world is full of creeps witch kill and eat whatever they find. The book Enclave is an example of social commentary, because it talks about Population control, creates awareness, and makes people want to take actions.
In the novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the author creates a picture of a society that resembles our present-day society in a variety of ways. Although a society in which government has total control over its citizens seems to be a little extreme, there are definitely clues that can be seen today that suggest that we are headed in the same direction. Some of the resemblances between the society in Fahrenheit 451 and our society today are the governments’ hypocrisy, the gullibility of the citizens who fully support the government, and the fact that books are becoming rather extinct due to advances in modern technology.
An aging population is indeed a problem for the society and will possibly cause many social and economic difficulties in the future. According to David Foot (2003), professor of Economics at University of Toronto, an effective birth rate of 2.2% against current 1.75% will be necessary to replace the current work force in the near future and the government’s policy of bringing in more immigrants will eventually fail (Foot, 2003, 2). However some people predict that the increased size of an aging population will drive growth in the home, health care, and many other industries resulting in job creation and economic growth (Marketwire, 2013, 1). Majority of the people are of the opinion that the issue will be mainly in the health care and economic activity. As humans age, they start to develop health problems, leading to more visits to a medical clinic putting extra burden on health care system.
Overpopulation does not only affect humans and put a greater risk of getting in a vehicular wreck caused by a deer running out in the highways and interstates, but it has tremendous effect on environmental
In, The Population Bomb by, Paul R Ehrlich, he explains the problem of population increase, and how there are people everywhere! The feeling of feeling over populated. He talks about how if there are more people then there is more food that needs to be produced then ate. He explains on the rich people becoming wealthier and the poor are going to be even poorer and there is going to be a starvation. Population is doubling every year and how our energy is turning into
In Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly’s Tipping Point for Planet Earth, one of the many dangerous trends they bring up is the issue of overpopulation. At our current rate, we are expected to reach an estimated population size of over twenty-seven billion by 2100. Along with this massive increase in population size is an expected rise in food shortages, an increase in over populated cities like Delhi or New York, increase in life expenses, and overall loss of quality of life. In order to combat these potential dangers due to overpopulation, Barnosky and Hadly suggested that there are three ways to go about doing so. The first and worst of the three is a global catastrophe which would wipe out a majority of the population, whether that be
Bowerman, Mary. "Americans Shrug off Worries over Aging Population." USA Today. N.p., 30 Jan. 2014. Web.
Inferno follows the story of Dr. Langdon and Sienna Brooks as they travel through Florence trying to stop a mad man from setting loose a disease that could wipe out huge amounts of populations as a way to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. This disease being later shown to be a vector virus that make’s 1/3 of humans actually sterile instead. Langdon however has no memory of anything and has to retrace his steps in order to stop the possible outbreak. Many of the places told in the story all have to deal with significant areas within Florence herself. Florence is the breeding ground of the world’s most famous artists and have inspired books and even video games alike. From the Boboli Gardens to the Florence Baptistry.
Overpopulation has become a drastic issue, for no one knows how many people the earth
Hardin argues how the world only has so many resources and opportunities for agriculture to be expended. Therefore, with enough increase in population, these resources will become extinct. Thus, humans will run out of food and eventually starve to death. As Hardin declares, “a finite world can only support a finite population” (Hardin 98).
Americans are having too many kids that our Earth can’t sustain. For many years the over population of kids has limited our resources, as the population increases daily our resources are declining and leaving people with less to eat because prices go up, the more kids that parents have is making it more likely for the parents not being able to provide for them because the more the population goes up the more the prices will rise. Research says that, “There are more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in eight of us doesn't have enough to eat. The question of how many people the Earth can support is a long-standing one that becomes more intense as the world's population—and our use of natural resources and money is limited to adults and others” (p1)(Dennis Dimick, National Geographic) This paper will state that some parents aren’t
It is crucially important for the society to identify possible issues that arise because of the overpopulation and find the ways of dealing with these issues. In this essay I will seek to critically evaluate challenges in economic, social and environmental aspects that the world may face in upcoming years and suggest the ways of overcoming them.
The problem in our society is overpopulation. The amount of people on our planet are constantly rising. The births to deaths ratio is almost double. With 7.6 billion people on the planet, we need to cut it down and make our existence longer than a few million years. In an article by Morgan Winters that talks about how overpopulation may be a problem, but focuses more on how too many people are consuming food and resources, it states, “We are faced with a crisis not because there are too many of us for the planet