To the Editor:

Religious folk love to talk about Armageddon and the Apocalypse with almost all major religions predicting some sort of end times. Who knows, maybe there’s some sort of ESP subconsciously telling us that eventually life, as we know it, will cease to exist on this planet. It’s happened before, several times in fact. Scientists tell us that at one point there were no more than a few thousand humans left.

Caught up in our own daily personal survival, we go through our daily routines with no thought to the future, much less the distant future, living for today only.

Environmentalists fuss about CO2 emissions but ignore discussing over-population for fear of bringing the wrath of the religious down on them. But over-population is the most threatening single issue we have on this planet as it requires humans to use up more and more of our natural resources and eventually our resources will be gone entirely.

No one knows for certain when — perhaps in 50 years or so — that the Middle East will eventually give out of oil, which is their only source of riches. Once that happens, they are doomed unless they can come up with some alternative power source such as nuclear power instead of oil. Even then they will not be able to feed their rapidly expanding population.

Egypt’s population alone will almost double at the current birth rate to 140 million by 2050, but with jobs for less than 20 million. The result, along with much of the Middle East and Africa, is people are migrating to Europe and other countries. About 200,000 are expected to head for Italy this year alone.

Much of South America is over-populated with insufficient natural resources. The lack of jobs cause people to migrate to the United States where they can reside until our own resources disappear.

About 95 percent of Venezuela’s money comes from oil, and once that is gone, who knows what will happen?

Unfortunately, we don’t have finite resources either. Eventually, we will use up our underground water and when that happens farmers will be going broke by the thousands followed by national food shortages. Fresh water is our most valuable resource.

As our population grows and we can’t feed everyone, we may have to follow China in their forced abortions and allow only one child per American family. Worldwide, we may see abortions in the billions, perhaps even millions here in the U.S. Lack of fresh water to grow crops and the resulting starvation of millions will give us no other option.

Overpopulation is something that we need to begin discussions on.

Bob Wilson

Franklin