Seven billion people, give or take, now inhabit this world. That’s as of Monday. With the world’s population taking off, adding another billion people since we were in elementary or middle school in 1999, we —by which we mean everyone — should pay some attention to potential problems of allocating the resources needed to live. These resources include the basics of food, water and shelter, all of which must be shared among 7 billion people, billions of whom live in poverty.

Overpopulation has always been a concern held by intellectuals; some historians speculate that the Roman Empire’s inundation with Germanic tribes containing alien customs led to its demise. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Englishman Thomas Malthus theorized that population growth would need to be checked, perhaps even by active measures, as the means of subsistence increased.

Closer to our own time, some politicians believe that an influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, or from Islamic countries, could endanger our political system and the ability of quintessentially American middle-class families to retain their socioeconomic status.

Those concerns, while not entirely credible, have some truth to them. There is a limit to the resources our planet can produce and that we can cultivate. Weather is only so predictable, and with increased volatility it becomes even less so. Some crops are damaged on their way to markets; others are grown with only profits in mind. Until we can all find and regularly utilize agricultural methods in a sustainable as well as productive way, the specter of overpopulation will continue to haunt us.

Slash-and-burn agriculture only works when land is abundant. In a world where 7 billion people need space to live and die, land for cultivation decreases. We cannot afford to ignore the effects of our policies on the land’s ability to keep producing and meeting our needs.

Enter colleges like Iowa State. Originally a school for agriculture, ours is one that still has a strong agricultural focus. If we want to maintain our fame as a good school whose students go out and find solutions to real problems, we should continue our experiments and maybe even increase their rigor and the ingenuity with which they are approached.

Since our school has such a long tradition of finding new agricultural methods and our students are often a prime example of what this newspaper’s adviser regularly calls “Iowa nice,” we have an obligation to help those in need once our own needs have been fulfilled. In a time of budget cuts and funding worries, when departments’ existence are reconsidered and we have to compete with an increasing number of universities in this country and others, Iowa State should remember to continue its focus on what it was designed to do — agricultural solutions.