What if we took every person in America and spread them out evenly throughout the country? How about if we did that throughout the entire planet?
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” – Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1789
“As our population grows, we have to recognize that our consumption of the planet’s resources is unsustainable. We need a global transformation of attitude and practice.” – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s “message for International Mother Earth Day,” April 2014
With these quotes in mind, consider the following:
The most densely populated state is California, which has approximately 100 million acres of land (or about 156,250 square miles). There are 640 acres in one square mile. There are 39,250,017 residents according to the 2016 census. That means, if spread out evenly throughout the state, each individual – in the most densely populated state in America – would have his or her very own 2.5 acres.
In July of 2015 New York City boasted 8,550,405 people. With approximately 205,000 acres (or about 320 square miles), each individual would have approximately .03 acres of land to him or herself if spread out equally – on the ground level. To put that in perspective, each person in New York City could have about 1306.8 square feet, not in a high rise apartment building, which obviously adds much more space. According to Naked Apartment, the average 1 bed apartment in New York City is about 750 square feet.
The least densely populated state is Wyoming, with 62,147,200 acres (or 97,105 square miles). According to the 2016 census, there are 585,501 people currently living in Wyoming. That means, if spread out evenly throughout the state, each individual living in Wyoming would have a whopping 106.1 acres to his or herself.
What if we took every person in America and spread them out equally?
If we take all of America – which has 2.3 billion acres of land (or 3.797 million square miles) – and divide that by the number of people – 326,625,791 – currently in America according to the Census, each man, woman and child would have approximately 7 acres. Cut all of the land in America in half for crop production and uninhabitable land, and the amount of land per person – if evenly spread – is still 3.5 acres.
Another interesting statistic: According to author and ecologist George Wuerthner, a paltry 3 percent of the land area in the U.S. houses 75 percent of the population – or approx 244,969,343 people – in America. If Wuerthner’s calculations are correct, each of those people would have 1.6 acres, if spread equally on the 66 million acres which account for 3 percent of America’s land mass.
Pretty roomy.
According to the World Population Clock, there are approximately 7.5 billion people on the planet. If we took those people and tried to squeeze them ALL into America and spread them out on equal parts of land, each individual on the planet could have .3 acres of land – or 13,068 square feet – in America alone.
Of course, this article is not taking into account areas that are not livable and/or desirable. So let’s be generous and say that a full half of America’s surface land is not livable. That would STILL allow every single person on the planet – every man, woman, and child – individually – to have a roomy 0.15 acres, or 6,534 square feet if spread out equally.
Finally, imagine if every single person on the entire planet was spread out equally.
That would be approximately 7.5 billion people spread out equally on the land surface of the entire earth, or 36.48 billion acres of land, allowing each and every individual on the planet to his or her very own 4.8 acres. Cutting it in half to allow for non-livable land and farmland, each and every person would still have well over 2 acres of land.
Since Thomas Malthus lamented that the “power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” in 1789, socialist eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw have schemed about what can be done to eliminate the undesirable masses. After the atrocities of the Nazis were laid bare, the once-popular eugenics movement morphed into “family planning.”
The population-obsessed fanatics have imposed their devastating social engineering programs all over the planet ever since, focusing particularly on the most vulnerable populations.
I lived in China for 4 years and there was no problem there! There is no pverpopulation problem here and probably won’t be for a couple more centurys. That is as long as we keep the muslims out of here! They hate everyone, including other muslims! They populate an area like rabits.
There is a problem with this type of article’s premise since we cannot spread out our U.S. population across the country for a number of reasons.
Our problems are over-population in some of our major cities which are causing serious and expensive infrastructure problems. I see this every day in DC and the surrounding states’ counties of Prince George, Md, Arlington, Va, Alexandria, Va (a city which has very limited land except in the poorer areas of Route 1 that goes into rich Fairfax County), etc.
In DC, land use planning has been terrible with poor areas left to rot for decades under the Democrat/crook rule of the late Marion Barry and his political machine while the rich white liberals live very nicely in largely unaffordable houses for the average working family in NW DC from Virginia Avenue ((the Watergate region) to the Maryland line out Wisconsin Avenue, Massachusetts Ave, Connecticut Ave, etc).
Thus there is a concentration of the poorer working classes in some neighborhoods where crime and drugs are more than rampant. They dominate life there so anyone who can afford to get out, usually does, while leaving the poor, infirm and often underemployed stuck in a black “hood” for which there is no escape.
There are some very nice old black neighborhoods that have been kept up, esp. in upper NE DC but other parts of DC including the lower NE section and SE are crime-ridden with older housing projects serving as prisons for the decent people who live there.
Most available land is now being used to create more highrise condos for the rich in the downtown DC area (I’m not talking about legitimate rebuilding of older structures). I’m talking about abandoned industrial sites.
DC’s water, sewer and streets/road systems are overwhelmed, outdated and often structurally unsound (i.e. not just potholes but also large sinkholes), many very aged water pipes breaking, and just poor repairs on main roads (DC incompetence).
Arlington County has never met an acre of wooded land it didn’t want to build on. Every year it issues land-buying bonds in the tens of millions of dollars but much of this land goes to immigrants projects, both legal and illegal and for other lower-incoming housing projects. There is nothing wrong with providing decent, affordable housing to legal, honest Arlington citizens, but this county is basically a “sanctuary city” location which has had a horrible affect on older Arlington citizens re the continual raising of real estate taxes that far outstrip their limited income (for both white and black longtime residents, as well as some older established Hispanics and Vietnamese). And this money does not go for these citizens, many of whom cannot afford to move, even if they have paid off their mortgage. Transportation and health limit their mobility.
The failure of many large cities to work with outlying counties in terms of road/street planning and maintenance, water infrastructure systems (drinking water and waste treatment plants), saving some land for parks and recreation, and linking up with other cities/counties in the region, has led to a hodgepodge of mini-cities and housing developments which have wiped out a tremendous amount of forests, meadows, streams, fields (I used to visit these areas on a regular basis and loved the open spaces, scenery and naturalists’ environment for science teaching).
This has had a major effect on the ecology and environment that has been largely detrimental. One way of cleaning the air, despite what liberals say, is to maintain healthy forests and grasslands where CO2 is absorbed and turned into oxygen. Rational environmentalists recognize this and ask for pragmatic land-use planning while radical environmental wackos are against all growth, planned or untamed.
Much of the world is not habitable for large populations (i.e. the deserts of northern Africa and the Middle East, the disease ridden jungles of So. America, Central America, Africa and Asia (I’ve been to some of them and can tell you about bad water and a lack of basic sanitation practices).
We need a much smarter approach to both land/water management and the populations that they support. There are ways of bringing water to the interior of many African countries that would enable them to stabilize their populations in mainly agricultural societies (something the Israelis did for them decades ago before Communist and Moslem extremists forced these countries to break their productive ties with that country. The same for similar work by the National Chinese in Africa before Red China put the screws on those countries too).
Also, bringing good water to the interiors of Africa would help save a lot of the wildlife that is being decimated by drought. This is good for tourism and jobs creation, things that are badly needed in many places).
Another problem is a lack of family planning in many areas of the world. It’s an old problem and story which encompasses religious practices, survival rate births due to health and poverty issues, and the continual wars that decimate targeted groups.
I won’t get into this because it is bound to detract from the key issue of land use and population, but you all know what I am talking about.
Just ask yourself: “How many more tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even a million more refugees can Western Europe handle before it economically, socially, culturally and religiously collapses into a new set of geographic “caliphates” and “No-Go Zones”?”
There are limits to many things in this world, and land for housing people is one of them unless you want to build cities in the deserts, the tundras of Asia Minor/Siberia, and above the Arctic Circle, or deep in the uninhabited jungles of South America (Central America is a mess right now).
Most people and governments have no idea how to pragmatically determine what are the limits of their countries’ lands/infrastructures/water supplies and food supplies, but some of them are coming close to having to chose new ways of thinking and resolving rapidly evolving problems. Many traditional ways of thinking may have to go out the window in the face of reality.
I didn’t make up reality but I sure know that we have to face it sometime, the sooner the better.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Max. I was completely uninterested in the nature of people / infrastructure for this discussion, focused solely on how many bodies could fit where. You go much deeper than I do here, but your points are all well taken.
Max Friedman, thank you for a well written article that most people should read.
You give a lot of food for thought.
A very good article about the left’s obsession with over-population can be found here: https://larevolucionfinal.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/eugenesia-conductismo-ingenieria-social-reduccion-de-poblacion-y-otros-experimentos-hacia-la-servidumbre-voluntaria/ (must be translated using Google translate.)