World Population in Texas

Years ago I remember hearing that "over population" was a myth and that the entire world's population could fit in Texas.

Well, I did a little math today and realized that, not only could the entire world's population fit into Texas, but they could do so with quite a bit of space to share. I guess when they say "everything’s big in Texas," they're right.

Texas is approximately 7,438,152,268,800 square feet. The current world's population is estimated at 6.6 billion. If you divide the square feet by the total population, you find out that every human being on this great planet could fit into Texas with 1127 square feet of space each. That's almost the size of my house.

Think of that... all humans in Texas and the rest of the world empty. All of the great cities, empty. All of the beaches, mountains, continents... empty.

That's pretty hard to fathom.

So, why the argument about over population? It's obviously not about square footage. So, it must be about something else. Food? Water? Resources? If you watch TV you'll see the starving people of Ethiopia or the thousands eating garbage in India and it seems we have a serious ecological problem. Well, those are all valid concerns, but the lack of those resources in the world is more governmental than ecological.

In the 1990's I was in a play called Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad, about a reporter in Africa. The cast got to talk with a veteran international reporter from the St. Pete Times who spent a lot of time in Africa. We spent hours and hours researching Africa's history and the political environment. For thousands of years, Africa's people were separated into tribes. Some got along with each other, others did not. Our research uncovered that, when Britain settled in Africa, they ended up making arbitrary country delineations, often times putting two historically warring tribes in one country and calling them citizens. In Ethiopia, for example, those people are starving not because of a lack of food, but because one tribe is in power and is trying to exterminate the other tribe that is not. If the power shifts, the famine shifts to the other tribe.

If you look in India, they believe in a caste system and that you are born into your class. Upward mobility is only now, with outsourcing jobs going there, becoming an option. And their governmental processes are so inefficient that any improvements to help those less fortunate will take years to get approved and implemented. They are commonly considered the most bureaucratic democracy in the world. For example, when KFC tried to get approval to open restaurants in India, the discussion in the halls of Indian government lasted over five years, debating the quality of KFC's products. A representative from KFC argued that he found it hard to understand that their chicken quality could come into question when so many of India's population was eating out of garbage.

So, when you hear about over population, remember it's about resources, not people. And, when discussing resources, it's the misuse of power that squashes opportunity, not the world's ability to feed it's people. Even if they all resided in Texas.