Population: Arguments for and against growth abound

SALT LAKE CITY — "Jon & Kate Plus 8" and "19 Kids and Counting," two reality television shows on the TLC network, played a part in catalyzing James Lee's descent into the darkest abyss of mental illness.

Promised voyeuristic entry into the hustle-and-bustle routines of inordinately large families desperately seeking to mobilize handfuls of often-uncooperative young children, millions of viewers faithfully flocked to "John & Kate" and "19 Kids." The phenomenal popularity tortured Lee's psyche because from his mindset he perceived the shows as glorifying large families in an already overpopulated world.

After years of his haranguing TLC and its parent network Discovery Channel — including a 2008 protest outside Discovery Channel's Maryland headquarters that ended with his arrest after he initiated a public disturbance by throwing large amounts of cash into the air — Lee recently reached his breaking point and returned to the Discovery Channel offices one last time. With a loaded gun in hand and explosives strapped across his body, he stormed the building and took three hostages. Following four hours of tense negotiations with law enforcement, a police sniper shot and killed Lee without injuring his captives.

If innocuous television programming drove Lee to terroristic behavior, then he clearly suffered from some form of mental illness. However, Lee's professed belief that the world is overpopulated and as a result on the brink of ecological disaster is a familiar refrain among academics dating back at least as far as 1798 and Thomas Malthus's seminal "An Essay on the Principle of Population."

And therein lies an issue for debate — with 6.9 billion humans already calling earth home, are there too many people or can the third rock from the sun still sustain more population growth?

Two camps of thinkers generally exist on the topic, neither of which will ever agree with the other. Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban development and author of "The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050," is representative of the optimists who view population growth as a potential springboard to greater societal achievement. Contrary to Kotkin, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich believes that humanity long ago blew past an appropriate threshold of global population — a decidedly Malthusian viewpoint that's especially popular within academia and among scientists.