The World at 7 Billion: Can We Stop Growing Now?
The following was originally published in Yale Environment 360. See: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing_now/2426/
The World at 7 Billion: Can We Stop Growing Now?
With global population expected to surpass 7 billion people this year, the staggering impact on an overtaxed planet is becoming more and more evident. A two-pronged response is imperative: empower women to make their own decisions on childbearing and rein in our excessive consumption of resources.
By Bob Engelman
Demographers aren’t known for their sense of humor, but the ones who work for the United Nations recently announced that the world’s human population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year. Since censuses and other surveys can scarcely justify such a precise calculation, it’s tempting to imagine that the UN Population Division, the data shop that pinpointed the Day of 7 Billion, is hinting that we should all be afraid, be very afraid.
We have reason to be. The 21st century is not yet a dozen years old, and there are already 1 billion more people than in October 1999 – with the outlook for future energy and food supplies looking bleaker than it has for decades. It took humanity until the early 19th century to gain its first billion people; then another 1.5 billion followed over the next century and a half. In just the last 60 years the world’s population has gained yet another 4.5 billion. Never before have so many animals of one species anything like our size inhabited the planet.
And this species interacts with its surroundings far more intensely than any other ever has. Planet Earth has become Planet Humanity, as we co-opt its carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles so completely that no other force can compare. For the first time in life’s 3-billion-plus-year history, one form of life – ours – condemns to extinction significant proportions of the plants and animals that are our only known companions in the universe.
Did someone just remark that these impacts don’t stem from our population, but from our consumption? Probably, as this assertion emerges often from journals, books, and the blogosphere. It’s as though a geometry text were to propound the axiom that it is not length that determines the area of a rectangle, but width. Would we worry about our individual consumption of energy and natural resources if humanity still had the stable population of roughly 300 million people – less than today’s U.S. number – that the species maintained throughout the first millennium of the current era?
It is precisely because our population is so large and growing so fast that we must care, ever more with each generation, how much we as individuals are out of sync with environmental sustainability. Our diets, our modes of moving, and our urge to keep interior temperatures close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit no matter what is happening outside – none of these make us awful people. It’s just that collectively, these behaviors are moving basic planetary systems into danger zones.
Yet another argument often advanced to wave off population is the assertion that all of us could fit into Los Angeles with room to wiggle our shoulders. The image may comfort some. But space, of course, has never been the issue. The impacts of our needs, greeds, and wants are.
To read the full article, please click here: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing_now/2426/
July 29th, 2011 at 10:55 am
The family of humanity as well as much of life as we know it are now here inhabitants of a finite planet with a frangible environment that is failing fast. What really matters is being inadvertently ruined on our watch by the human population, but is not being openly discussed. My ‘blood boils’ in the truth that we have possessed knowledge of so much about ourselves as human beings with feet of clay and acknowledged so little about what has been known for so long about our distinctly human creatureliness, based upon extensive empirical research and unchallenged scientific evidence. Elective mutism and silent consent in the face of the reckless degradation, relentless dissipation and willful sell-off of what everyone knows to be sacred looks to me like the worst of all precipitants of the colossal ecological wreckage that appears in the offing.
Inside and outside the community of top rank scientists, as well as among first class professionals in demography and economics who claim appropriate expertise of issues concerning human overpopulation issues, one issue is not being discussed by anyone. A worldwide conspiracy of silence continues to prevail about the population dynamics of the human species. The last of the last taboos is the open discussion of extant scientific research of human population dynamics. The implications of this astounding denial of what could somehow be real are potentially profound for the future of life on Earth, I suppose.
Within the human community a tiny minority of self-proclaimed masters of the universe hold the ‘destiny’ of all in their hands. This elite group is operating behind the scenes these days and “growing” the global economy to such a colossal scale that it could soon become patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth because our planetary home is not, definitely not “too big to fail.”
August 2nd, 2011 at 2:54 am
In 1948 Aldo Leopold wrote: “our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has… lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings. Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.”
In our time greed is extolled as a virtue. Many too many are invited by the few to do ‘good’ things. Seven billion are told the global political economy was saved today, but not told at what expense: mortgaging the children’s future. Nor were they told at what price: the Earth as a fit place for human habitation? To say that greedmongering is “unhealthy” seems tame to me. There must be stronger words deployed to describe such obscene per capita hyper-consumption and patently unsustainable individual hoarding; such conscious dissipation of Earth’s finite resources and willful degradation of its frangible ecology. Perhaps we can find other words that more adequately describe how the planet we inhabit is being ravaged on our watch. And if we can find the words, who will speak out loudly, clearly and often? A worldwide conspiracy of silence is in effect. Self-proclaimed masters of the universe have already bought and paid off ‘the brightest and best’. The greediest among us are selling off the Earth to the “lowest bidders.” Greed rules the world, I suppose.