Botkin Human Population

For many years it has been thought that the maximum human population would be determined by the amount of drinkable fresh water. Earth can only hold, manage, and support so many people. This is called carrying capacity. If we go over this carrying capacity it could cause worldwide issues with the environment along with many other issues. For example if the human population goes over the carrying capacity of the earth then problems like lack of clean drinkable water, lack of land that humans could live on or occupy, and lack of available jobs could become much more serious and have terrible effects on the system which everything works.

Ecosystem: a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment

As the human race continues to grow older the population starts to grow. Population growth is a change in the size of a population over time, depending on the balance of births and deaths over a period of time. For the world, population grows when the amount of births exceeds the amount of deaths. As shown in figure 1, the world’s population grew very slowly until about 1750 that is when the population growth started to increase rapidly. Figure 2 shows the growth of the global population from 1950 onwards, it also shows the projected population growth up to 2050. The global population is estimated to rise to approximately 9 billion people by 2050.

Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the interactions of organisms with each other, and with their physical and chemical environments. Another main topic discussed in this chapter is ecosystems. Ecosystems are habitats or areas that consists of two basic components. Ecosystems include such things as biotic and abiotic components. Biotic components are living organisms within an ecosystem and abiotic components are things like sunlight, temperature, and rainfall. Within an ecosystem are producer and autotrophs. Producers and autotrophs consist of plants, algae, and bacteria. These two organisms obtain food from inorganic materials and light energy. As to where consumer and heterotrophs obtain energy by eating plants or the animals that eat the plants. An ecosystem is made up of several different parts. Each part of an ecosystem is different from the other. None of these parts within the ecosystem rely on the other. They are all interdependent being either predators or

When it comes to nature, trees, rivers, the sky, air pollution also affect the environment. Air pollution can harm the ecosystem. “Nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide cause eutrophication and acidification of lakes and streams, damaging ecosystems” (Melamed et al, 2016). This can harm the environment and contribute to the human health problems. We drink water, and water plants with water. Even more particulate matter interact with cloud formation processes and may impact the amount and location of precipitation (Melamed et al, 2016). This is the reason of flooding and water problems.

Throughout the last few hundred years, humans have built a foundation. Compared to all of the other animal species on Earth, humans are the most intelligent. We have built houses everywhere, developed a system to sustain ourselves, and now inhabit almost every piece of land on earth. Humans are smart, strong, and know how to fend for themselves. But, humans have a tendency to take it too far, and we have already done so. There have been numerous advancements over the past few hundred years which could ultimately lead to the downfall of the human race. The main issue is overpopulation due to the advancements in technology and general knowledge. The statistics from an article by Kenneth Smail show that “In the year 1900, there were almost 2 billion humans living on Earth. Throughout the 1960’s, the baby boom, there were 3 billion humans on Earth. Today in 2016, there are just over 7 billion humans living on Earth.” Currently, we have taken up just over half of all available land on this planet, and with increased amounts of people having kids, our population will only increase. Overpopulation is becoming a serious problem all around the world, especially in countries such as China and India. There are many global problems associated with overpopulation that are becoming more and more prevalent, which will all have dangerous effects on the foundation that humans have

The Global human population increases growth amounts to around 75 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion in 2012. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.4 billion by mid-2030, and 9.6 billion by mid-2050. Many nations with rapid population growth have low standards of living, whereas many nations with low rates of population growth have high standards of living.

Every habitat has something called a Carrying Capacity, this is the maximum population of any given species that the surrounding environment can sustain indefinitely. The factors that define the carrying capacity are water, food, shelter, and other necessities required by the species. Nobody is a hundred percent sure what the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is, but many scientist believe the global population is nearing that limit. From the Stone age to about the 18th century the population had a slow steady growth rate. Then due to the sudden increase in food production and advances in modern medicine, the human population exploded from one billion at the beginning of the 19th century to the seven and a half billion we have today.

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms coinciding with the nonliving components of a specific environment. One example includes the freshwater ecosystem contributing to Earth’s aquatic ecosystems. They include lakes and ponds, rivers, streams, springs and wetlands consisting of low salt concentrations (University of California

An ecosystem “is a community of plants and animals interacting with each other in a given area.” (Rinkesh, ND). There are three different categories: freshwater, terrestrial and ocean ecosystems. Each can be broken into subsections, for example terrestrial ecosystems include: rainforests, savannas, deserts, tundra, grasslands and forests. Each subsection supports a different range of plants and animals interacting in different ways while supporting and providing a range of different ecosystem services. Key ecosystem services include supporting, provisioning, regulating and cultural services. The services help the ecosystem to stay sustainable and provide exploitable commodities for humanity. Provisioning services allow humans to grow crops and food in the ecosystem to sell or consume. Ecosystems regularly experience both physical and human environmental problems, like pollution or over fishing.

One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will

(n.d.). So many things go into human population growth such as deaths, births, and migration; for, all three play a factor when calculating the growth. The more people that live in the area, can affect more on the environment then anything. “For the last 50 years, world population multiplied more rapidly than ever before, and more rapidly than it is projected to grow in the future.” Jordan, J. (n.d.). Human population growth affects things that go un noticed such as in the workforce, environment, and our

The Earth 's inadequate supply of natural resources will only be able to tolerate 2 billion humans by 2100, the bad thing about that is, is that the world already feeds and supports 5.9 billion. The ideal human population, or carrying capacity, for the U.S. is projected to be 200 million, which is way fewer than the current population of the United States. This is a growing problem in not only the United States but also around our world today. The growing of population can lead to the diminishing of more than one or two of our natural resources. For more than a couple years the population has been growing faster than our renewable and non-renewable resources. Not only will we have

When I was in my Biological Evolution class, professor Dr. Matthew Terry started talking about how many people can the Earth support. He said the Earth population has grown dramatically over the past 15 years and it would continue to grow exponentially. For example, when I was born Earth population was about 3 billion people now we have 7 billion people. It got me thinking about why is our population growing significantly and how is this going to affect our habitat. Earth is now overpopulated and there 's have to be some measures. Would it be ethical if we try to control how many babies you can have or try to limit our population? How has technology influenced our population growth? What would be the consequences if the Earth reaches its final capacity? How this is going to affect our environment and other species. These are just some of the burden questions I have about this topic.

Earth is the only place in the universe that can support human life. It is very important that we realize this fact and take very good care of it. Various human activities cause the destruction of earth. Human beings can live a few days without food and water however humans can last only a few seconds without oxygen. Various human activities lead to the aggravation of the quality of air. Gases produced by human activities mainly due to exploitation of resources and industrialization cause air pollution. Green house gases mainly chlorofluorocarbons; carbon