Dear Father:
I just stumbled upon your website and could not believe what I read about overpopulation!! How can you have your head in the sand about the truth just because the doctrine of your religion doesn't fit in with it? True, we are not being packed in like sardines yet, but I think it is a fact that due to the huge physical demands humans put on environment we are in a big cause of climatic change, mass extinction of other species, desertification, deforestation...
Every living creature's population on this planet is kept in check through the beautiful balance of nature created by God. Do to human resourcefulness, we have been able to skew that balance. I think human's selfish need to multiply at this unsustainable rate is the ultimate sin that we can commit!!!
Sincerely,
G
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Dear G,
Appreciate you writing. Do you really consider procreation to be the ultimate sin? I just finished a couple of books on Hitler's Germany. Do you judge having a large family a greater crime than the Holocaust?
And does increased population density necessarily have the harmful effects you fear? For example, here in Western Washington the population has increased enormously in the past forty years. Yet we have cleaned up streams and lakes, improved air quality, lowered overall pollution. I've tried to find out if any species in this area have gone extinct since the population increase. Some animals, like the Columbia White Tail Deer, were actually taken off the endangered list.
I agree with you that we human beings do create problems, but my point was that we also are able to solve them. You can buy land relatively cheap in South Dakota, but few people are moving there because less people means less opportunities.
Sincerely,
Fr. Phil Bloom
P.S. As I stated in the opening sentence of the article on overpopulation, the Catholic Church has no doctrine regarding "overpopulation."
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