Wings for Wisdom
Setting Free the Wisdom Confined in Copyrighted Works
In the great race between education and catastrophe, this would accelerate the education of concerned citizens in creating a just and sustainable world. Precedents exist for others to follow.
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Oct 21, 2007
Updated: Jan 16, 2010
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Human Population Growth and Impacts
Quotations
"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."
"We have to educate all of our people to an understanding of the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth’s finite resources. We must educate people to recognize the fact that growth of populations and growth of rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained."
Featured Resources
World in the Balance: The Population Paradox
Investigating the impact of forces that are radically changing population in both rich and poor country.
Arithmetic, Population and Energy by Dr. Albert Bartlett
The retired Professor of Physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder examines the arithmetic of steady growth, such as 5% per year, the doubling time for such growth, and the large numbers one gets when steady growth continues over modest periods of time. The examination then turns to what happens when one has steady growth in a finite environment. These concepts are applied to populations and to fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal. A series of recommendations is given for dealing with the problems that are revealed by the very simple arithmetic.
Population, Resources, and Human Idealism by Richard Heinberg
“An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits is a setup for disaster.... If we want peace, democracy, and human rights, we must work to create the ecological condition essential for these things to exist. In other words, a stable human population at--or slightly less than--the environment’s long-term carrying capacity.”
Featured Organizations
A US-based, grassroots, population organization that educates young people and advocates progressive action to stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained by Earth`s resources.
Population Communications International
PCI seeks to work creatively with the media and other organizations to motivate individuals and communities to make choices that influence population trends encouraging sustainable development and environmental protection.
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Issue Description
Human population growth and impacts refers to the environmental, economic, and social impacts that result from human overpopulation on local, regional, and global scales. Such impacts include the environmental impacts of increasing demand from overpopulation for energy that exacerbates climate change, and of the degradation of natural resources from overfarming resulting in food scarcity.
Overpopulation has serious consequences for sustainabiity and the total environment. A simple model has been used to sketch these consequences:
I = P x A x T
where I is environmental impact, P is the number of people, A is the affluence per person (a measure of consumption), and T is a measure of the effects of technologies on the extraction and use of resources.
Currently, all are increasing over time, thus increasing local and global impact, increasing environmental impact and thwarting sustainability. ]
Did You Know?
- An estimated 4.3 people are born every second around the world. (Source: Population Reference Bureau's 2006 World Population Data Sheet)
- Today, 31 countries, or under 8% of the world population, face chronic freshwater shortages. By the year 2025, however, 48 countries are expected to face shortages affecting more than 2.8 billion people, 35% of the world's projected population. (Source: Overpopulation.org)
Keywords
overpopulation, sustainability, scarcity, resource depletion, environmental impacts, carrying capacity, food supply, energy use, natural resource consumption, demographic alarmism, birth rate, death rate, rate of natural increase, population doubling time, infant mortality rate, total fertility rate, population under age 15, dependent population, life expectancy, percent urban population, age structure, sex structure, age at first reproduction, post-reproduction age, age classes, Ehrlich-Holdren Model, nonrenewable resources, marriage age, educational opportunities and fertility, family planning, U.N. International Conference on Population and Development, pronatalist, immigration, migration
Related Portals
Comments (1 - 7 of 7)
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An excellent discussion between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth can be read here... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change
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I took a look, www.panearth.org. I think everyone should take a look... feeding a growing population can be a danger to us all, so now what? The more food that is created, the greater the population, it turns the values game on its head. Creating more food seems to be illogical if the object is to stop or reduce population growth.
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Good people, friends and colleagues, PLEASE NOTE that apparently unforeseen and clearly unwelcome research on human population dynamics has just been published in the current issue of the journal, HUMAN ECOLOGY. The article to which I want to draw your attention is "Genetic Feedback and Human Population Regulation" by Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D. Additional scientific evidence of the human overpopulation of Earth is available at the link, www.panearth.org. Thanks to all, Steve Steven Earl Salmony AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population, established 2001 http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176 |
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So were do we see the growing impacts of overpopulation - one might look at water as one of many impacts.
WiserEarth might need to look into how to curb the impacts of overpopualtion, but the question is, who is WiserEarth? Is there a place to talk about the impacts? How does this issue play out in the 'rights of nature' movement? This being one ov many examples. Is there away way to move over-arching-issues (issues is a weak term here) into a rallying place for a unified action point to take off from to help resolves many of the other issues that are impacted by overpopulation? Questions, questions, questions. |
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Hi Frank,
Try googling for "optimum population". My quick research on this a while back puts it around 3 billion. But that should be higher if we manage to globally improve the A and T factor of the IPAT equation. But again, limitting P still looks easiest and most effective.
Bowo |
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How many people can this planets ecosystem maintain - 10 billion, 20billion, 40 billion or 120 billion? I have no idea. Somewhere there must be some information that can help establish a number. Does anyone have a clue?
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It seems to me that any "truth" about climate science needs to be coupled with the best available science about human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth.
When the moment of 'throwing out life preservers' occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that loom ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin' while Earth's ecology was destabilizing and its resources were being recklessly dissipated. Father Greed could be seen ravaging Mother Nature. Global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, but there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.
At bottom, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to humanity by the skyrocketing growth of human population numbers on Earth.
Despite the unfortunate, inhumane ways a "ONE CHILD PER FAMILY" policy was implemented in China, the policy could be vital for the future of humankind and life as we know it in our planetary home. The immediate, free, universal and compassionate implementation of a voluntary "one child per family" policy could decisively limit adverse, human-driven impacts on Earth's body and its environs, and do so more powerfully than any other conceivable human intervention.
Given the visible, converging global threats to human and environmental health that were presented to the family of humanity, the humane implementation of one child per family could have been an indispensible centerpiece of a set of adequately designed, actionable programs that served to actually rescue a good enough future for the children and coming generations.
If a root cause of the global threats on humanity's horizon, now and then, is the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers, our willful denial of this primary cause could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the children to reasonably address and sensibly overcome these threats. Then the children are likely being directed down a "primrose path" to confront some unimaginable kind of ecological wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen. When the life preservers have to be deployed, the children will not understand why the catastrophe is occurring. Because their elders refused to acknowledge the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth and, therewith, to "diagnose" adequately certain distinctly human-induced global dangers to human wellbeing and environmental health, the children will not know what hit them, why it is happening, and what is required of them so as not to commit the same mistakes made by the elders.
This is only a guess but please note the likelihood that history will not be kind to the woefully inadequate leadership provided by my not-so-great generation of arrogant, extremely foolish and avaricious elders.