It’s come to my attention that as a species, we are approaching 7 billion people concurrently living and using the resources of the Earth. In this video however, we learn that this 7 billionth person is no longer a long way off. He or she is coming at the end of the month, just in time for Halloween. This is more frightening to me than any costume you’ll wear or any haunted house you may visit.

Overpopulation is a real concern that is the direct cause of every single global problem we’re facing as a species. The amount of available resources such as oil and food and oxygen are now being shared by 7 billion people (1 billion more people than this time 12 years ago). In case you need it spelled out for you, that’s 7,000,000,000 people. To put that in History Channel documentary terms, that’s enough to fill up the recently expanded University of Texas football stadium (capacity of 100,119 people) nearly 70,000 times. All of those people have to eat. All of those people have to shit.

Here’s a small, grossly incomplete list of problems caused by over population:

• Deforestation
• Nitrogen & phosphorus run off into water supplies
• Dead zones in estuaries
• Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
• Increased demand for fossil fuels (and the global militaristic build up associated with the protection and pillaging of these fuel reserves)
• Climate change (and global warming)
• Fammine
• Genocide

True, this isn’t entirely an American issue, but it’s one that Americans should be concerned with. The direct effects of overpopulation are beign felt in the 3rd world the hardest, so when your sister gave birth last week, she didn’t completely fuck the whole world over all by herself. But think about this: if there were less Americans living here, we’d have more land and more resources to share with the whole world. Do your part — stop having babies.

There’s a really great series of pictographs on PBS’s NOVA website that depict just how frighteningly the world’s population has grown over time. Children born today will live to see a world inhabited by 10 billion people.

Based on these facts, the only thing I can say is that having children is easily the most greedy, selfish, and irresponsible thing a person can ever do. I’m not advocating an all out halt on human creation (though some of you who know me personally might think I am), but I am saying that putting higher regulations on human reproduction on a global level is the only responsible way to ensure that we don’t use up this planet before its time.