Deepak Salem Scholars Reaction Paper

The lecture I choose to attend was the lecture on population, poverty, and climate change by Dr. Monica Gupta in room 124B of Cole Student Activities Building from 12:00 to 1:00 P.M. This was actually a very interesting topic, and it took me back to when I took AP Human Geography (how humans affect the Earth) in high school. As broad as the topics were, it was very interesting on how Dr. Gupta tied them all together. Dr. Gupta primarily made four important points, the first of which being that climate change exists and real. She then went on to talk about how emissions affect climate change and how more emissions correlates with a worsened effect of climate change. It made me think back to a lot of theory in human geography, such as the Demographic transition model of growth and Malthus’ theory of population growth. She actually indirectly incorporated these into her argument. That is probably one of the first things I noticed: she assumed that if you were there, you had the necessary background information to understand the topic at hand. The Demographic transition model of growth states five stages of growth, with a theoretical sixth stage. It shows that birth rates increase drastically during the two stages then levels off to zero, with the theoretical stage being population decline (eventually). This actually brought her to her second point: managing these emissions is near impossible because of the sheer amount of people. Also, climate change is essentially affected by the number of people per capita. The interesting part here is that she said that most of the emissions are actually coming from the areas which are mostly developed countries, not necessarily developing countries as much. This brought in a slew of political and ethical concerns which were also really interesting, such as whether developed countries can tell developing countries to stop growing. That then brought her to another point, which is that climate change actually affects most those who contribute the least to it. In other words, it mostly affects the developing world, who need help. These emissions and climate change are actually drastically affecting the environment in these countries, causing conflict over the remaining arable land. For example, there is a lot of in-migration in the Indian state of Assam from Bangladesh which is causing a lot of ethnic conflict. In fact, the effect of this climate change on the environment is significantly severe: she claims that many areas in these impoverished developing countries will be underwater the way things are going. Unfortunately, this would just further the problem even more. The major solution she proposes is to lower the fertility in these developing countries. She states that lowering the fertility would mitigate climate change by the sheer education of women to use better contraceptive methods. She even said that this would ultimately help out these impoverished nations with much needed wealth. One of the topics of discussion after the presentation was actually about the contraceptive methods. They were discussing why Sub-Saharan Africa had such a high fertility rate and that the population growth was not actually leveling off. I chimed (undergrad me vs. PhD’s them haha) in with a different perspective and said that different religions in Africa have different opinions of contraception, with the vast majority being very strict on the intolerance of contraceptive methods (which is true). In the end, it was an eye opener to a different perspective on a solution to climate change. The one thing about this topic is that the solutions are very, very large scale. Overall, I loved the presentation and enjoyed the scholarly discussions in the end. Attending was well worth it.