Transition Towns Marin
A place to pull together all resources in this region working on sustainability, climate change, post peak-oil community, based upon the Transition Initiative model.
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Created: Jan 30, 2009
Updated: Nov 21, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Population - content development
What trend data, images, quotes and statements would you use to clarify and explain the implication of population growth?
Please add to these headings or add key points under them. If you have
graphs, references, images or other useful resources please also add
them to this space.
If you have a thought for a specific slide, please put it down (as below) if need be with a with a brief note as to why you think it is an important message or fact. Each slide will be accompanied by notes and references, so if you have these please include them here as well.
"A considerable number of today’s known animal and plant species are likely to be extinct, largely due to
expanding infrastructure and agriculture, as well as climate change (Figure 4). Food and
biofuel production together will require a 10% increase in farmland (by 2030) worldwide with a further
loss of wildlife habitat. Continued loss of biodiversity is likely to limit the Earth’s capacity
to provide the valuable ecosystem services that support economic growth and human well-being."
"Water scarcity will worsen due to unsustainable use and management of the resource as well as climate change; the number of people living inareas affected by severe water stress is expected to increase by another1 billion to over 3.9 billion"
"Health impacts of air pollution will increase worldwide, with the number of premature deaths linked to ground-level ozone quadrupling (Figure 6) and those linked to particulate matter more than doubling. Chemical production volumes in non-OECD countries are rapidly increasing, and there is insufficient information to fully assess the risks of chemicals in the environment and in products."
The Outlook Baseline projects world primary food crop production to grow by 48% and animal products by 46% to 2030.Under current policies, areas for biofuel crops are projected to increase by 242% between 2005 and 2030
Source - OECD Environmental Outlook to 2030.
SLIDE: POPULATION GROWTH OVER TIME - illustrates the exponential nature of popn. growth and current and expected popn. levels.
SLIDE: the historic role of agriculture in facilitating the expansion of our population and resource consumption
SLIDE: Population growth as a positive feedback phenomenon
SLIDE: WHY IS POPULATION GROWTH SUCH A DIFFICULT ISSUE FOR SOCIETY TO TALK ABOUT? - to look at why society, govts and business as so averse to looking at this issue.
SLIDE: WORLD MAP OF PER CAPITA CONSUMPTION VS NATIONAL POPULATION FIGURES - to illustrate the debt carried by the developed world in terms of resource use and to reflect on the relationship between income and family size
SLIDES: What are the consequences of not addressing our growing population? Likely consequences for ours and our children's generation, the environment, civil society, security etc
SLIDES: What are the consequences of population stabilization and decline? A brief look at the fact his will not lead to a collapse in society and local economies
SLIDES:How do we tackle this issue? How can we support developing nations to address population growth through improved global equity, empowering woman ...Key strategies for the developed world ....
- Populations trends and population dynamics 101
- Nearly 80 million people are added to the earth's population each year
- World population will have an urban majority. In 2008, for the first time, half of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Worldwide, women now average 2.6 children during their lifetimes, 3.2 in developing countries excluding China, and 4.7 in the least developed countries. Lifetime fertility is highest in sub-Saharan Africa at 5.4 children per woman. In the developed countries, women average 1.6 children. The United States, with an average of 2.1 children, is an exception to this low-fertility pattern in the world’s wealthier countries. In less developed countries, 18 percent of the population is undernourished. In the least developed countries, 35 percent of the population consumes fewer than the minimum calories required to lead a healthy active life. That figure rises above 60 percent in several sub-Saharan countries.http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2008/2008wpds.aspx
- Drivers of population growth - genetic, social, decreased mortality, economic, religious/cultural
- The interaction between population and resource consumption
- Food and population - trends, interactions and implications
- Inequity and population
- The implication of not addressing population and the benefit of fewer feet.
- What to do - spread the word and call for humane and responsible action, if you haven't had kids yet consider these issues in deciding the size of your family.
There are no easy answers to the questions: “How many people can the earth support?”, and “At what level of well-being?”. Cohen suggests we think in terms of three possible (and non-exclusive) solutions:
- Make a bigger pie: Increase human productive capacities through technology and innovation
- Put fewer forks on the table: Reduce numbers and expectations of people through such means as family planning and vegetarian diets
- Teach better manners: Change the terms of people’s interactions through improved planning and government to enhance social justice.
Of all the environmental issues we face in the new millennium, none is more important than global
population growth. Population growth drives deforestation, the expansion of agricultural land,
the pollution of air, water and soil, and suburban sprawl. Human activity, such as urbanization and
development, fragments wildlife habitat and drives many species to extinction. Changes to our landscape
are occurring faster and on a larger scale than ever before. (National Wildife Federation -
Global Population Growth: The Numbers and What They Mean)
The United Nations Millennium Campaign would like to share an analysis showing that since the inception of aid (overseas development assistance) almost 50 years ago, donor countries have given some $2 trillion in aid. And yet over the past year, $18 trillion has been found globally to bail out banks and other financial institutions. The amount of total aid over the past 49 years represents just eleven percent of the money found for financial institutions in one year. The UN Millennium Campaign is urgently calling on rich countries gathering at this week’s high-level summit on the economic crisis to make no further excuses that they lack resources and to urgently deliver on their aid commitments.
Comments (1 - 6 of 6)
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Hi Steve - thanks for that considered piece. To pick up on our previous discussion on this, whilst there is a relationship between population growth and food, we need solutions that will work in our socio-political framework or they simply won't be considered. The main population growth is in parts of the world where most people are hungry - whilst we in the developed world waste and sqander waste amounts of food ( and everything else). Perhaps one of the best things we can do is improve food to distribution to help reduce consumption in the developed world and to assist the developing world to reduce population growth - which as we know tends to decline when woman are empowered and families have improved health and well-being. I'd go as far as to speculate that over-consumption by the developed world of the world's resources is helping drive population growth in the developing world, as well as running down planetry heath. If this suposition has any merit, then perhas we need to target over consumption in the west as a core element of any responce to population. John |
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Unwelcome science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth in our time. Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former. Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules. Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers. Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter. From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide. In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur. We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050. Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems. For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond. Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms. To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right. If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective. According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more. Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people. Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers. The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable. Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities. Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food. Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans. Thank you. Steven Earl Salmony |
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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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Hi John. There's an error on this page (marked with red boundary). It's a copy-paste of images not hosted in WiserEarth (which is not allowed for security reasons). You will need to upload the image to WiserEarth manually using the editing toolbar (there's an image upload button there). Here's a 'unoriginal' blog post, a remix of stuff I picked up along the way. Might be useful: Best, |
... here are two stories from different parts of the world - South Dakota the other from the city of Manila. South Dakota has lost population, Manila just the opposite and of course there's the butter story, or lack of it in Japan in 2008 (not posted here), all stories about hunger and people. I think the frame for population expansion should focus around the notion that there is not enough food to go around right now (the reason can be economic, or shortages, or lack of water or what ever the excuse is - it does not matter}. What maters is the following, if human population expansion continues our species will literally eat up the planet.
sourced: http://www.argusleader.com/article/20090713/NEWS/907130312/1003/business
Grip of hunger pervades state
Survey to put face on problem, provide hint of its depth.
STEVE YOUNG • syoung@argusleader.com • July 13, 2009
An old couple who outlived their meager life savings, or a mother sitting with an empty plate while her children eat - those are the faces of hunger in South Dakota, a new survey shows.
Feeding America, a national network of more than 200 food banks serving all 50 states, has just wrapped up one of the most in-depth domestic hunger studies ever done in this country. The results will be released this winter.
What the study wants to know is how the recession is affecting people. It wonders whether clients' needs are being met adequately, or being met at all.
So from February through May, volunteers surveyed more than 36,500 agencies and 62,000 clients nationwide. In South Dakota, 371 people or families were questioned at 40 different food banks, shelters, soup kitchens and other sites.
What volunteers Diane and Ritch Wilson heard as they worked in Freeman and Sioux Falls almost broke their hearts.
"When you listen to what so many of our population out there are dealing with, there are some that have a lot of medical problems that created the situation they're in," Ritch Wilson said. "There are some who committed themselves to a lifelong career that was low-paying but extremely rewarding. So they never were in a position to ever create any wealth, any savings."
Diane Wilson interviewed a young mother who had lost her job and was looking for food for her child.
"There is a part of me that says, 'Just come home with me,' " Wilson said. "You can't do that, of course. But it was so emotional. You see people struggling so hard."
The volunteers said they were surprised by the degree of hunger that exists, and by its diverse demographics which range from the chronically needy to the middle-class family who just hit a bump in the road.
"I was surprised by some of the stereotypes that you have, that people are using the services because they're down and out, but maybe there was more they could be doing," said Barb Clinton, office manager at HelpLine! in Sioux Falls, who conducted 40 surveys. "I found out that wasn't true, that this was a last resort for most of them, and they were doing everything they could not to have to be here."
Kay Torney, network services manager for Community Food Banks of South Dakota, said the survey should show providers here how they're doing compared to other states.
It also should reveal whether all parts of the state are being adequately served, or if changes are needed, particularly in rural areas,
"When I go into Hyde County, and they are talking about starting a pantry because they're seeing more and more people in need, more elderly needing help, then this survey could show us that," she said. "It could be a real tipoff to us that we need to do more work there."
Reach reporter Steve Young at 331-2306.
source: http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=486550&publicationSubCategoryId=64
The growing population
ROSES & THORNS By Alejandro R. Roces Updated July 14, 2009 12:00 AM
A friend told me about how crowded a place the city of Manila is getting to be. Streets are filled with both vehicles and commuters, trains are always jam packed with travellers, people are lined up to avail of varied forms of services in agencies day by day, you go to the malls and they are filled with people, the sick line up to get treatment in hospital emergency rooms, and generally, have to wait to get admitted due to lack of rooms. Even resorts, hotels and vacation places get bookings in advance to meet the growing demand, defying the perception that hunger and poverty exists. It is common to see long queues in public places like airports, restaurants, banks (ATMs for that matter), movie houses and even lotto booths. It was a lot different during my time when people were not too occupied and in a hurry — there was no traffic then, there were no lack of classrooms and books, and since there were no big malls and fancy restaurants at that time, folks mostly stayed at home. Life was a lot simpler.
In the 1900s, the population in Manila was only 800,000, compared with the burgeoning population of 12 million today. Countrywide, the National Statistics Office (NSO) reports that population grew ten-fold in over just one century, from 7.6 million Filipinos in 1903 to 76 million in 2000. This number has grown to 88 million in 2007, with about three babies born every minute. This is a serious problem considering that our economy is not unaffected by the escalating global economic crisis. An economist of the University of the Philippines has commented that population growth is a crisis in itself, a silent crisis, which is upon us. And this is why we already have deficiency problems in the provision of basic resources. In fact, the growing population is a major factor in the hunger and poverty problem, access to education, the lack of food and water, health deficiencies and environment degradation.
World Population Day was commemorated last weekend (July 11) all over the world to remind governments all over the world about the urgency of the problem of growing population. The theme for this year is “Fight Poverty: Educate Girls” is a serious reminder that empowered and educated women hold the key to the continued security and well being of the world’s people. It keynotes the basic human right of individuals, particularly women, to freely and responsibly decide the number of their children. More importantly, people must strike a balance between following the Lord’s commandment to “go and multiply” with the basic tenet of responsible custodianship over the children that the Lord has blessed us with. With the resources on Earth that the Lord has laid up for our use, we must be able to raise them well. Hence, the need to take care of our resources and environment also comes to fore.
In my age, I have all the blessings one could wish for. I have a daughter, Lizzie and her husband Monty, who take good care of me at my age, grandchildren who make me happy and proud. The only thing I ask from the Lord is peace and tranquility, a peace that comes from knowing that everyone is taken care of and no one is in want. I know it is not a perfect world, but we can make it possible if only everyone will look after each other’s needs.
View previous articles of this column.