An Ironic Contrast

THE global population boom is expected to add nearly the equivalent of another China to our world during the 1990’s. The crunch hits hardest in the world’s cities. In fact, within the next 15 years, city dwellers on this planet are expected to outnumber their rural counterparts for the first time. The magazine International Wildlife notes that as the world’s cities swell into overstuffed megacities, they “foul the air and water, gobble arable land around their perimeters, deplete forest reserves to provide fuel and lumber, and breed crime, disease and despair.”

Meanwhile, more and more rural areas are being abandoned. For instance, in the United States, there are hundreds of rural towns that are dying from a lack of people. In the vast Great Plains region in the western United States, some counties now have more ghost towns than live ones. Ten counties in North Dakota have only four people or less per square mile [1.5 people or less per sq km]; 18 counties have lost at least 50 percent of their population since 1930. Some even feel, as The Wall Street Journal put it, that the entire Great Plains region is “inexorably slipping back into the grassland from whence it came.” Why? Experts blame mismanagement of the land, the abuse of a limited water supply, drought, and a depressed economy.

Teeming cities bursting at the seams. Sweeping prairies dotted with abandoned towns. In that ironic contrast lies further grim proof that man governs country no better than city, and this planet no better than its people. As the Bible so aptly puts it: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” (Jeremiah 10:23) But capable, fair government is not beyond the ability of man’s Creator. He has promised that soon now the entire earth will be productive, cultivated by peaceable inhabitants instead of destroyed by tenants out of control.​—Psalm 67:6; 72:16; Isaiah 65:21-23.