The Human Population Problem: Educating and Changing Behavior

During the summer of 1985 I had the opportunity to visit Yosemite National Park. The images of my visit that remain with me are not of El Capitan, waterfalls, or wildlife. The images are of humans, and many of them. I remember the traffic-clogged roads, congested hiking trails, low clouds of smoke hanging over crowded campgrounds, a river full of frolicking human bodies, and of course Mirror Lake. Instead of the placid waters and reflections that inspired the name, Mirror Lake had become a public pool. The lake was filled with people; the rock jutting from the middle of the lake that looked so majestic in photographs was veiled with human bodies. I visited Yosemite as a graduate student; although the population problem was known to me, I did not dwell on it. Ten years later, I have a much greater appreciation of the problem, and those images from Yosemite haunt me. As the years pass and the magnitude of the human population problem increases, I fear that Yosemite might be a microcosm of what Earth could become in the near future. Although human population growth is the ultimate challenge facing all conservationists, frank discussions concerning the problem are rare in the flagship publications of conservation-oriented professional societies. I do not know if Conservation Biology is the appropriate venue for human demographic studies (Meffe et al. 1993; Sieving et al. 1994), but certainly there should be more dialogue on the subject. If discussions of population growth are restricted to other outlets, we may be fostering the notion that the human population problem lies outside the domain of natural resource conservation. In the spirit of Meffe et al. (1993) and the relevance of human overpopulation to biodiversity, I wish to make two points that most discussions of human overpopulation neglect. First, the apathy or ignorance the general populace exhibits toward human overpopulation may