How Many People Is Too Many?

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted August 10, 2006.

Everyone from anti-contraception Christians to zero-population-growth advocates is using the U.S's looming 300-million mark to advance their agenda.

By mid-October of this year, the world's third most populous nation will hit 300 million inhabitants. And thanks to America's burgeoning fertility rate, we will keep moving briskly onward, hitting 400 million in less than 40 years, by Census Bureau projections.

Is 300 million people too many -- or not enough? Wade into a discussion of population size, and you're soon up to your neck in a host of knotty issues: sex, contraception, immigration, economic justice and ecological crises. To find out who'll be celebrating the big milepost, who'll be deploring it, and why, I got in touch with seven individuals who have especially strong views on the various forces that will decide the eventual size and composition of our nation's population.