Good afternoon everyone,
I’ve been running into quite a bit of information on human population over last week so my first post is going to be geared in that direction.
While we are generally living longer and healthier than ever in human history I’ve never given much thought of how many people can actually exist on earth at a given time. The first piece of information that brought me some insight was a graph I found depicting population over the last several hundred years. Give it a look (it’s the white rectangle on the page).
Surprised?
You should be. Population has been growing linearly until the last hundred
years or so we’ve seen an exponential increase. So what’s the cause of this?
The advances in medicine, cheap and abundant energy (coal, fossil fuel), and
transportation technology have allowed for communities to flourish unlike ever
before. Cities like Las Vegas, which is built in a desert, have been completely
constructed and sustained due to modern technology. This may seem for the
better on the surface but if you dig a bit deeper there is an impending
problem. How do we feed billions of more people in areas where we can’t even
feed them now?The problem with the graph isn’t necessarily that we are multiplying so rapidly but rather the steeper the slope the sooner it will peak. There will be a time where the death rate surpasses the birth rate. However, with the way we can control food production and where people live, it may be a good idea to organize where and how many people we can sustain.
The point is to start thinking about how to manage populations and find what a sustainable amount of children to have is in places where food supplies are low. This is going to happen sooner or later regardless of technological utilization. Until then starvation and nutrition related deaths will become even more prevalent. There is a finite amount of resources on the planet and to allow people to have as many children as they want is foolish and dangerous.
Leave some thoughts.
Cheers.
It's a bit uncomfortable to think that we'll have to regulate something so fundamental to our existence as child bearing, but it will be necessary.
ReplyDeleteThe discomfort comes from the actual process of regulating child birth. Do we punish people who accidentally have more than the allowed number of children? What do you do with accidental births? It's a big issue.
I think people need to be educated on how much food there is available to them. Basically, if they have more children than they should, there will not be enough food. I think this would change people's minds on how many children they have.
ReplyDeleteThis problem will stop as the world continues to develop, though. It's important to note that population growth in developed nations is generally negative - i.e. people are dying faster than they are being born. In the U.S., our population is still growing, but that is due to the additional contribution of immigration. On a global scale, the net effect of immigration is obviously zero.
ReplyDeletePopulations is still growth is still positive in most of the world. Check the image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_growth_rate_world_2011.svg
ReplyDeleteI agree, it is. But as 3rd world countries develop, active family planning is increasingly likely to be supported by governments. Take a country like Vietnam, for example. From the late 80s to today, their population growth rate went from ~2.5% to only ~1.1%, even as life expectancy increased dramatically (statistics from World dataBank). As developing nations mature, they'll show similar behavior. I don't think ridiculous population growth will continue for more than another few decades.
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