The Day of
Seven Billion
It sounds like the title
of a B-grade horror movie. The day the world's population will
hit seven billion will occur this year, on or around Halloween.
I was born in the late
60s, and at that point there were three billion on the planet and around
12.2 million in my home country, Australia. The population of the USA
was around 202 million.
According to the US
government's population clock, at the time of writing, the global
population is now an estimated 6,953,519,479 and the USA's is
311,920,155. Australia's is somewhere around the 22.6 million mark:
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
Australia is vast, as is
the USA and the world, of course – but so much of the earth's land isn't
suitable for supporting human life beyond a subsistence level. For
example, in my own country, only somewhere between five and nine percent
of our land mass is suitable for growing crops – and must we take all of
that land?
Seven billion is a
number that is hard to visualize. Will it double again in another few
decades?
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/337/1/Visualizing-population.html
Some say it will; others
say factors will come into play that will see it slow, one of those
being a trend whereby some developed nations have lower birth rates as a
result of better education and "better" lifestyle. Unfortunately, we
already know that not everyone can have our lifestyles, as the planet
simply won't support it:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/blogs/546/Earth-Overshoot-Day-2010.html
Even if population
growth does slow, will it be enough? The earth is having enough problems
with "just" 6.9 billion of us.
With all the
environmental issues we currently face that we are still grappling with,
will the impact of (potentially) 14 billion people just overwhelm
whatever action we take now to try and rectify those problems? If we
have so much trouble providing for all the people on our planet right
now and a history of never being able to do so, how will things be with
a global population of 14 billion?
We're already in the
midst of the sixth great extinction, an event with one major cause – us.
However, we were by no means an endangered species, even back in late
60s, and the number of humans has doubled since then:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/blogs/94/Sixth-great-extinction.html
"Can We Stop Growing
Now?"
That is the title of an
essay by Robert Engelman, executive director of the Worldwatch
Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington,
D.C. It's well worth a read:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing_now/2426/
As much as I hate to say
it, these days when I hear news of friends having a child, it's
incredibly difficult for me to share their joy. I wonder what type of
life these children will have as adults, and I fear the world they'll be
living in will be something like the one depicted in the 1980s movie
Blade Runner.
It's a case of hoping
for the best (and taking actions to try and make the best happen), while
preparing for the worst, I guess.
Overpopulation is the
biggest environmental issue we face – it's at the root of most of our
problems – and we really need to start talking about it more.
