Steve Dunn is a retired journalist who has self-published two books, about former State Senator Pat Deluhery’s political career and the history of professional baseball in Des Moines.
Retired anesthesiologist Dr. Dick Wheeler of Des Moines put people to sleep for a living. Now he wants to wake people up to what he believes is the No. 1 threat to humanity: overpopulation. At 103 years old, Wheeler is more concerned about the future of his four children, eleven grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren than his own.
He has been concerned about overpopulation for a couple of decades. “I read one article about it, which had a bunch of statistics that really alarmed me,” he explained. “Someone had asked a group of experts of various persuasions how many people could Earth support. After due consideration and research, they decided all the way from 11 billion to 17 billion.”
In 1935, the Earth’s population surpassed 2 billion. In 2000, the count was 6 billion, or 2 billion less than three years ago. If the population triples again, the Earth’s population will hit 18 billion in 2065, Wheeler points out. The United Nations predicts the world’s population will peak at approximately 10.3 billion by mid-2080 and then decline to about 10.2 billion by the end of the century.
“Civilization will begin to break down if that happens,” he said, referring to a tripling in population. “The planet is running out of trees. Only about 15 percent of the Amazon forest, which is the Earth’s primary source of oxygen, is left. For the past several years, satellite photos at night show at least 1,000 forest fires [in the Amazon forest]. That’s their method of clearing land for agriculture,” he said. “And it isn’t all that great of agricultural land. It is used up in a hurry, so they abandon it and burn off some more. In order to stop that, the government has to decrease its gross national product. So, they’re pretty reluctant to put any brakes on that practice.”
Brazil lost almost 170 million acres—almost five Iowas—of forest between 2001 and 2023 to make room for 34 million more people, according to Alon Tal, a member of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Public Policy and a visiting professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “As population swells, communities destroy their forests simply to survive,” Tal says in Overpopulation: A New Survey Confirms the Cause of the Planet’s Environmental Crisis.
Tal believes overpopulation drives today’s key environmental concerns: deforestation, climate change, biodiversity, overfishing, water scarcity, and desertification. “Unless the world confronts overpopulation, genuine environmental progress will remain elusive,” Tal says.
People who can live off the land might be the only survivors in the worst case scenario, Wheeler said. “We’d be back in the caves within a few generations,” he added.
The United Nations had a birth control program for a while, according to Wheeler. “But the UN found that it was pointless talking to men, who ran most of the world’s governments. So, the UN abandoned that and went straight to the women. In a lot of the world, a man who spawns sixteen kids is more of a man than a guy who spawns only twelve. If you try to explain to them that neither one of them could support more than two or three kids, they’d looked at you blankly and say, ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ So the UN went to the women, and the women were receptive.”
Clinics were set up, and the program started to be successful in several areas, including parts of Africa. “Then word got out that abortion was part of the program, and the United States withdrew its $10 million support for the program about 40 years ago. It collapsed right at a time we desperately needed it,” he said. “So, everything seems to be working against reducing the population.”
A 2017 study from the University of British Columbia concluded that having one less child was nearly 50 times more effective at reducing carbon emissions than lifestyle changes such as going vegan or giving up flying. On the other hand, Haiti has lost many native species as forest cover has dropped from 50 to 1 percent and population has jumped from 3.2 million in 1950 to more than 11 million currently. In 2024 the World Wildlife Fund reported the Earth’s monitored vertebrate population had dropped 73 percent between 1970 and 2020.
Wheeler was raised on a farm near Alden, along the Iowa River about 80 miles north of Des Moines. “Dad didn’t make me do them [chores], so of course I didn’t,” he chuckled. “Yeah, I did some, but not as many as other kids had to do.”
Wheeler’s graduating class at Alden High School was the largest up to that point—30 students. “They’d come up to 25 and 29 [in a class] up to that point, but we were the first one that had 30,” he said. “We were kind of proud about it.”
Wheeler attended Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls for two years. Then he went to Iowa State University in Ames for one year. After he was drafted into the Army, he was put in pre-engineering for nine months at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Once that dissolved, he studied pre-med at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi, for nine months. Six months later, he started medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, Tennessee.
After World War II ended, he interned at Broadlawns in Des Moines for two years. Then he got drafted again for the war in Korea, served eleven months and received a hardship discharge. “I liked the group of anesthesiologists from Mercy Hospital while I was interning, so I called them and asked them if they had room for another anesthesiologist, which they did,” he said. “So, I worked for them for two years and became a member of the group. I was a member for 31 years and gave more than 33,000 anesthetics.”
Wheeler believes big financial institutions and industry in general, which depend on quarterly market growth, are a big part of the problem. “They depend on increasing markets. Well, that’s going to be a real desperate fight,” he said. “An economist will have to come up with a way for a society to have enough for everybody in the face of an increasing number of people. If they can’t do that, all is lost. It may well be anyway.”
Besides famine and wars, overpopulation can lead to the spread of disease such as Ebola and COVID-19. Wheeler called those diseases “a couple of strikes by nature trying to solve the problem on her own.” International flight only increases the likelihood of the spread of disease. In fact, “I don’t see how we’ll avoid it,” he said, referring to the chances of another pandemic.
In 2024 the UN reported that the percentage of stocks fished at unsustainable levels almost quadrupled during the past 30 years. “The drop is largely due because more people want more seafood,” Tal says. And domestic water demand globally has increased sixfold since 1970, much on account of an expanding population.
To control population, the United Nations must be allowed to restart the program it had for several years, according to Wheeler. “It was successful in several areas. I don’t know how we get around the abortion issue,” Wheeler said. “The program might still be successful if we didn’t have abortion.”
Photo of Dr. Dick Wheeler, courtesy of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Des Moines
Resources:
In-person interview with Dr. Dick Wheeler on October 10, 2025.
Ten things that you may not know about population – The Overpopulation Project
Will There Be a Massive Population Correction Before the End of the Century? | Watch
Top photo of a densely populated part of Jakarta, Indonesia is by Tom Fisk, available via Pexels.