But the world cannot keep on increasing in population. Look at the way we humans are consuming resources and despoiling the water and air.

This is something far too few people are willing to acknowledge--or address the impact of declining population.

Sue, you are ignorant, misled, or both...Do you never get out of the city? Industrialized societies tend to stop growing when they achieve a certain comfort level and the children needed to support parents in their old age are no longer deemed necessary...but this is implosion, suicide, loss of collective will to survive brought on by...what? Loss of religious belief, societal loss of confidence in the rightness of your culture and its validity? Selfishness (why spend on kids what I could spend on myself?)...this is national hara-kiri.

Economically, population is a scarce resource at all times...the child that was not born could have been the one to cure cancer, the one to develop the new food grain, the one to discover faster-than-light propulsion. We are not a burden on the world...we are the crown of creation, sentience, understanding, the chance to strive for something beyond the next meal.

I don't live in a city. I live in a semi-rural parish (county) in Louisiana. I work in New Orleans.

I have been in 42 of the 48 contiguous states (as an adult). I have lived in seven in my adult life. And I have visited eleven countries outside of North America on three different continents.

I can see the negative results of filling in marshes and wetlands and building large, elevated houses on them. Without those marshes, high tides (and we won't even mention storms like Katrina) travel further before they peak, and houses built decades earlier get flooding more and more often.

As more and more land is cleared of most of its trees (trees are great water storage units--plus they keep a house cooler) the flooding potential increases. Houses are becoming larger and larger, and the more square footage of a lot that they occupy, that much less soil to absorb water.

This is only part of it. How do the majority of people get to work? By auto. We are using gasoline at an obscene rate. Dinosaurs are an endangered species.

I suggest you read The Rise and Fall of the Great States by Paul Kennedy--and see if you the 20th century world leader following the path of Portugal, Spain, France, and Great Britain.

I'm also 72 years old and have quite a few background memories.

The solution to Japan's declining population is simple, why haven't they developed an immigration program?

In contrast to the Japanese story, we in America don't realize the growth of our population, now at about 330 million, more than twice as large as when Dwight Eisenhower was President. Japanese culture is not comfortable with the notion of assimilating large numbers of foreign residents and much in the culture: language, tradition, religion, education is so internally directed that it is unlikely that foreigners would be assimilated. By contrast, the U.S. has experienced a doubling time of less than 50 years. By 2055 our population may well be more than 600 million.The pressures on resources, living space, open space, need for more public services will seriously impact the basis of this nation and require major adjustments and governmental regulation seen intolerable to us today.