Population…A Problem That Most of the World Simply Disregards

Presently, 6.8 billion people exist on the Earth today. Combined, the entirety of farmland needed for these billions of people to be fed is equivalent to the size of South America. The population of Earth is still steadily increasing. Populations are expected to continue rising to 9.6 billion within the year 2050. Each one of these extra people also needing more healthy food, clean water, space, and energy to survive. When these extra bodies arrive, in addition to crop late the size of South America, an extra plot the size of Brazil will also be needed. This is not even including the land that every other creature on the planet needs to survive. When this is added to the calculation, eighty percent of dry land will need to be dedicated to

He believed that there would eventually be more people on this Earth than it would be physically possible to feed. Eventually, food would run out and result in a catastrophic mass starvation of the worlds population. The idea makes sense. People seemed grow on an exponential scale, eventually there will be too many people if we continued at that rate. This idea has evolved over the years, but the general idea remains the same. There will eventually be too many people, or will there? Several estimations predict that the human population will eventually level out. This means overpopulation is not the real issue. A new perspective on this topic will allow for an accurate goal post shift away from common misconceptions. This goal post shift will offer a new win-lose relationship for overpopulation in terms of environmental ethics.

In the expository styled documentary entitled Don’t Panic: The Truth about Population by Hans Rolling, he presents and supports the argument that despite the world’s growing population and the many challenges associated with this, there is still the possibility of creating a bright future for the generations to come. The universal truth presented throughout the documentary is that education helps people to evolve. Education is necessary for the development of future generations. This is observed through the quote “In my mother’s day, they use to get married young they had no chance to study. But now we can have big dreams of becoming a doctor or an engineer”

We currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined. Yet food productivity is set to decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to climate change; soil degradation and desertification, both of which are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world; and water stress. By the end of this century, large parts of the planet will not have any usable water.

nearly 7.3 billion people can be a disaster if we don’t use many resources. The over use of natural

In the article Overpopulation Is Still the Problem, Alon Tal (2013) claims that overpopulation remains the number one problem facing the world today and discusses various problems and possible solutions. Tal unveils the falsely assuring news stories refuting overpopulation as a problem. He particularly dissects Ellis Erle’s assertions, in the New York Times, concerning China’s seemingly magical works of technology. Erle comes to the conclusion that China’s amazing technology has and will always be able to keep them out of any problems regarding overpopulation. Of course Tal is able to rhythmically rebut Erle’s claims by explaining that, “Anyone with a teaspoon of historic sensibilities about the country 's environmental history might want to mention its long litany of famines which occurred precisely because carrying capacities were consistently outstripped by a growing population”. Tal then goes on to explain other problems linked directly to overpopulation in China like the food crisis from 1958-1961 which led to the starvation of over 20 million people. He also discusses the Chinese one-child policy describing it as “tough medicine” although the application of the policy was flawed he depicts how it has prevented the next round of famines. Tal ties the China population problems into the rest of the article which is mainly about how quickly the world is growing and what we need to do about it. He presents distressing facts like 1 in 8 people in the world suffer from

The current global population of 7.6 billion people is expected to reach 11.2 billion in 2100 (UN DESA), and as the Earth’s population continues to grow exponentially, the topic of environmental sustainability is being debated with increased urgency. In the past few years, many large-scale environmental issues have emerged due to human activities: climate change, air and water pollution, rising sea levels, habitat loss, species extinction, and worsening natural disasters are all becoming more and more prevalent. But perhaps our most immediate concern should be whether or not we will be able to continue feeding this ever-increasing population.

“For future generations, big trouble” (Gillis). Regardless of what those 1 in 5 people think, our future generations are in danger of heavier rainfall, longer and more intense droughts, more intense storms, destabilization of governments, waves of refugees, and melting of the polar ice caps - which would lead to the flooding of most of the world’s coastal cities. This could all take anywhere to thousands of years to play out, which provides a cushion of time for civilization to adjust, and hopefully it does. Although, the collapse of agriculture which would throw civilization into chaos much sooner. Studies show “efforts to limit emissions would reduce these risks, or at least slow the effects, but it is already too late to eliminate the risks entirely”

Our planet’s carrying capacity for prehistoric Homo sapiens was probably near 100 million. However, without their Paleolithic ways of life and high-tech technologies, the population would be much less - possibly a couple tens of millions. The advance of agriculture allowed even larger population growth to occur, demanding for even greater land-use practices to earn more nourishment from land. At some point, their farming systems could have supported a couple billion people. The world population is currently almost at 7.5 billion, but with our technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S. has estimated that the people born after we reach nine billion could be sustained if necessary expenses in food policies and anti-poverty

By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban areas. The human population will increase by about 3 billion people by the year 2050. This means that world human population can reach the 10.6 billion people in less than 40 years which is an increase of almost 40% (Demeny and McNicoll, 2006). An estimated 109 hectares of new land, the area of the size of Brazil would be adequate for the purpose, will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today (Monfreda et al, 2008). A growing population is not the only problem humanity has to face. Even today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished (Eigenbrod and Gruda, 2015), and, in addition,

There are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transport and far more

The human population of the Earth shows no signs of slowing down its rapid growth coupled with food scarcity as a result of drought and misallocation of resources by governments to provide a growing challenge to address the issue of world hunger, both within the US and worldwide. Over 7 billion people live on the earth today, and that number is expected to increase to 10 billion with the current growing rate of human population (Haugen 90). Being able to produce enough food

related to the idea of overpopulation, but the motivation behind it is far beyond just population

Countries with high average population density tend to be the same as those with large amounts of arable land (e.g. Canada has the 11th lowest population density and very little arable land at 4,73%) because large amounts of land are uninhabited. Generally, areas that are developing have higher population densities, however, less developed areas generally have more population growth.

The Earth is a dynamic, constantly changing environment in which the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere all interact. When one changes slightly the change is then felt through out the spheres. Humans need to understand that the change they cause can have a potential for a disastrous affect on the environment. From injecting the atmosphere with greenhouse gas, or deforestation, all the unnatural things done to the environment will have an unnatural affect that will have to be dealt with. We as humans have a moral responsibility to reduce global warming gasses by changing our modes of transportation, to stop deforestation, and increase government funding into research to inhibit global warming for