Topical Guide 566
Mark Dorset
Population Pressure: Effects of
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 1:
The Purlieu Street School was supposed to get the schoolchildren of Babbington—my home town, the clam capital of America—off split session once and for all. Split session was a means of fitting more students into a crowded school system than it ordinarily would hold. Since the end of World War II, Babbington had been growing so quickly that people couldn’t adjust their thinking to it, growing “by leaps and bounds,” as people said then. In developments all over town, carpenters built houses furiously. The air resounded with their hammering. Families moved into the new houses as fast as they went up. During the sixth grade, a new boy or girl seemed to show up in class every week. The schools were chronically overcrowded, and about once a year the need to build yet another one took everyone by surprise.
[The following duplicates “Population Pressure: Effects of” in Topical Guide 162.]
The population of Babbington continued to grow rapidly during that time, and school building could not keep pace with the growth, so Mr. Simone continued to shuffle the students’ schedules to try to squeeze us into what space was available.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
I recognize the folly of looking too earnestly for a parallel between Babbington and Babylon, but I feel compelled to point out that—according to Population, a report prepared by Lee E. Koppelman and Alison R. Sawyer for the Suffolk County Department of Planning in May of 1963—the population of the town of Babylon grew from 24,297 to 45,556 from 1940 to 1950 (an increase of 87.5%) and from 45,556 to 112,125 by 1957 (an increase of 146% from 1950 and an increase of 361% from 1940).
Population pressure, a term summarizing the stress brought about by an excessive population density and its consequences, is used both in conjunction with human overpopulation and with other animal populations that suffer from too many individuals per area (or volume in the case of aquatic organisms). …
“Pressure” is to be understood metaphorically and hints at the analogy between a gas or fluid that under pressure will tend to escape a bounded container. Similarly, “population pressure” in animal populations in general usually leads to migration activity, and in humans, it may additionally cause land loss because of land conversion of previously-uninhabited areas and development [such as building a new elementary school in formerly untouched and picturesque Musgrave Swamp —MD].
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