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Page added on October 17, 2011
Too Many People?
This week, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the world’s population, which is projected to reach seven billion on October 31st. The United Nations Population Fund, which once predicted that the earth’s population would level out at around nine billion in 2050, now foresees no end to growth, estimating that the number of people on earth in 2100 will be, as Kolbert writes, “a distinctly un-Malthusian” ten billion.
The United Nations has been analyzing and forecasting the world’s demographics for decades. 1966, Henry S. F. Cooper visited the Secretariat’s Population Division to speak with two officers, Milos Macura and Inderjit Singh. At that point, the U.N. estimated the global population at three billion three hundred and thirty million. Cooper asked them to look ahead, and Macura correctly forecast that the largest population growths would happen in China and India, and said, “The solution isn’t merely to cut the birthrate but to increase economic growth as well.” Cooper continued:
Mr. Macura didn’t think matters would be unbearable by the year 2000, when the population would be twice what it is now. “Statistically, it will mean people will be only half as far apart.”…
Mr. Macura said that he thought the major problems in 2000 would be housing and employment, not food … that with new sources of food such as ocean harvests, the world could safely double its population once again.
Of course, in 1966, concerns about the environment and the scarcity of resources were still mostly a thing of the future. The question of whether the earth can feed its ever-growing population was examined more recently in Bee Wilson’s 2008 review of Paul Roberts’s “The End of Food.” Wilson points out that the issue is about more than just the number of mouths to feed:
As the world becomes richer, people eat too much, and too much of the wrong things—above all, meat. Since it takes on average four pounds of grain to make a single pound of meat, Roberts writes, “meatier diets also geometrically increase overall food demands” even in those parts of Europe and North America where fertility rates are low. Malthus knew that some people were more “frugal” than others, but he hugely underestimated the capacity of ordinary human beings to keep eating… As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction.
6 Comments on "Too Many People?"
Kenz300 on Mon, 17th Oct 2011 1:36 pm
We have a food crisis, a water crisis, an oil crisis, a financial crisis, an immigration crisis and an over population crisis. Every problem is harder to solve with an ever rising world population. We could not solve the worlds problems of poverty, hunger and despair when the world had 5 billion people and adequate resources. It will be much harder in a world of 9 billion people and limited resources. The never ending population growth is not sustainable.
sunweb on Mon, 17th Oct 2011 1:59 pm
Overshoot is the main problem. It is caused by or causing all others if you throw in human arrogance and unintended consequences. All the problems will sort themselves out including overshoot. However, if we do not figure out the “making babies” conundrum no matter the result of the present dilemma unless we go extinct, it will be “same old, same old”. Violence for resources over and over again.
As an expression of life, as a representative animal and as ourselves, we are exactly how we would end up. We are not dysfunctional, as some would have it. We did not take a wrong turn in the past, ten thousand years ago at the agricultural revolution. We are not a cancer on the earth and we are not disconnected from our environment.
There are several natural factors that have aimed us at this particular moment in human history, where population pushes against resource availability, where as a social animal we stand against each other, where we are immersed in an environment of our own creative making and where our brilliance threatens us.
From: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-here.html
Anvil on Mon, 17th Oct 2011 9:02 pm
This article dosent fool me the more people the larger the gap between rich and poor.
Mr Bill on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 1:58 am
Each of the above comments make good points.
Fred Simpson on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 3:40 am
It really is very simple.
Contraception needs to be more widespread. Whether it is by withdrawl, pills, rubbers, or simply abstinence.
Until people actually take responsibility for the children they take into the world, instead of simply having them so that they will starve, or grow up and perpetrate acts of war on their neighbours.
antichrist on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 4:00 am
….u aint all finished,aint so?….