ntemporary Canadian sociologist that deals with population problems from an aspect that can be more easily understood by people of our time. In one article “Confronting the Population Crisis the twenty one most commonly used arguments to confound the issue.” In this article, Weld is able to respond to those that don’t view population as a social problem. Although I would like to go into each of Weld’s responses, this is not a paper on her, so I will only choose a few. Her response to argument 2 is probably the most interesting. The argument is “Technology can make it possible to accommodate an indefinitely expanding population.” and Weld’s response is a valid one. Weld explains that when Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” about thirty years ago, there were about one billion people living at a level above poverty and that there were about 2.5 billion people living in poverty. But now, after some great technological advances there are only 1.2 billion people that are living above poverty and 4.1 billion people living in poverty. Weld opens her response to the argument with the following sentence that sums up this issue, “Those who have the greatest hopes for technology are those who understand it least.” I never really though about that aspect, but Weld really gave me a new perspective on the issue of technology. Argument 6 is another great response by Weld. The argument is, “Those who express concern about global population are racist” I think that many people feel this way about efforts to control the world’s population. Perhaps people are scared of this issue because that they fear a eugenics campaign. But Weld makes a great point in her response, she says that about 95% of global population growth occurs among non-white people. But Weld says that many people shy away from this issue because they fear being labeled as a racist. She says that those...
