Tonkel+People's+Paradox

1. World in the Balance: People’s Paradox by NOVA. 2. The main argument of this film is that soon our world’s population will be up to an absolute maximum carrying capacity for the earth. Second to that the film discusses the complexities with both quickly shrinking and growing populations in different countries. 3. The arguments of the film bring out a few very difficult sustainability issues. The first of which is of course our world population. How do we address such an issue when many people would see that it is a complete violation of personal rights to be told how many offspring they are allowed to have? It’s also difficult because population control is largely an educational issue, meaning that many women don’t fully understand family planning. This is of course an educational sustainability issue. Aside from that there is still the issues of economic sustainability, where our economy has been build on exponential growth and now that a limit is being realized we may see many economies collapse as more people enter retirement than those who enter the workforce. This then touches on the sustainability issue of our public policy and public works systems. The structure of many of our Medicare and social security programs also depend on this growth to be helpful and effective. Lastly, there are all the sustainability problems tied with the rise of many developing countries. Many believe that the developing countries should be allowed to become developed in the same way previous countries have, by exploiting fossil fuels. If countries like India, whose population is so large are allowed to burn fossil fuels the earth will probably not be able to handle such massive consumption. 4. For me, the most compelling parts of the film were about the economical and social downfalls of steep population decline and population aging. In so many environmental movies the problem of overpopulation is stressed, it was really interesting to hear that we just can’t stop having kids to fix all of our problems. The problems with population are very intricate and can have devastating effects in both directions. Also, the ideas surrounding population pyramids were very compelling. The idea that the population is really well supported only when it has a very pyramid like shape with a wide base makes sense, but this also relies on continuous growth as population ages. The problems facing distortions of the pyramid shape are very complex. For example the African population pyramid is almost hour-glass shaped due to HIV AIDS. This is very problematic because there are almost no middle aged citizens alive to take care of the new born children or those elderly that survive. There is essentially no workforce. On a last note, I found the treatment towards Indian women and the attitudes of the Indian culture towards sons and daughters very compelling. There is always talk of wanting a son in history books but it very shocking to see that it is still such a huge problem among cultures across the world. 5. I think the film could have spent less time on the ideas of the women in Japan and their attitudes towards having children. Although I do believe it was important to mention and go into some detail about, I was not completely compelled by this portion of the film and lost some interest. I do believe there are women in the workforce that put off having children for social-economic regions I was not 100% convinced that this was going to be a new trend. 6. After watching this film I think it would be really interesting to research into what our government plans are for when social security runs out. We know it is going to happen eventually, do we even have any one looking into new programs and trying to fix the problem or is our government just ignoring it until it becomes a larger problem? Another example would be to find out if the United States has any plans to try and fix the problem of population. On top of that I want to find out more about the HIV epidemic in Africa. It’s crazy some of the numbers that are thrown around about how many people have AIDs and what kinds of intervention people are trying to implement. 7. I think this film was particularly directed at students, possibly from young high school kids on up. This is because the film was not exactly showing the current consequences of the world’s population but was more focused on what will happen in the near future. The population problem is going to be something that the current teenage generation is going to have to deal with. There isn’t much that current adults can do to help fix the problem. I do think the film will foster imagination and creative ideas in viewers because it clearly states the problems that we will encounter and offers almost no solutions. This problem is so complex that it will probably take many “crazy” ideas in order to solve it. I don’t think that this film would really change the way people act because there isn’t much that someone can do in their everyday lives to help change the population. 8. As I expressed earlier, there was not a lot of ideas given by the film that stood out very well. The main argument that was made was that we need to start teaching people family planning, and continue to use effective birth control techniques. 9. I thought this film had a decent environmental educational value in that it did a very good job clearly stating the different problems we will run into involving population growth. It was fairly optimistic and I think allowed for viewers to think about the problem critically because they were not being preached to or told exactly how the problem needed to be fix. On the other hand the film did not go into very deep scientific evidence or examples that challenge a viewers understanding of the problem.