7 Billion People and Counting: Concerns From Around the World
Great roundup of opinion found in the Detroit Free Press:
What’s the biggest issue facing humanity as the global population reaches seven billion?
Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper asked for an answer from correspondents around the world. Here are the replies, including a link to that from the Free Press. Note the recurring theme of fresh water, not a problem here in the Great Lakes region, but a critical issue for millions of people in many regions.
Population Explosion Continues – 10 Billion People By End Of Century
So much for a population peaking and declining by 2050 (the so-called “Demographic Bomb“). The UN is now saying that the Earth’s human population will carry on growing exponentially, as reported by the New York Times:
The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.
Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.
The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers…
‘Free Human Vasectomy’ Offered In PETA Contest
Was this an April Fools’ joke or did PETA just enter WTF territory? Via PETA:
It’s a two-fer: Get your animal companion fixed, and get yourself fixed too! Human overpopulation is crowding out animal life on the planet, and dog and cat overpopulation is creating a euthanasia crisis that is a crying shame. Disappearing wilderness, vanishing water resources, and pollution is the price that future generations will pay for more human births, while losing their lives is the price that millions of homeless dogs and cats pay when guardians neglect to “fix” their companion animals.
Every year in the U.S., an estimated 6 to 8 million lost, abandoned, or unwanted dogs and cats enter animal shelters. The best way to combat the companion-animal overpopulation crisis is to have your cat or dog neutered. And with a global population of almost 7 billion humans, more of our species could use a (voluntary) snip too.
Now,…
A Quick Journey Through 1970s Apocalypticism
Paleofuture Blog, which look at predictions and visions of the future as previous generations imagined it, has a video feature examining the colorful weirdness of apocalyptic doom-and-gloom in the 1970s. In that decade, frightening documentaries such as Future Shock and The Late Great Planet Earth caught the zeitgeist by foretelling the fast-approaching destruction of humanity at the hands of overpopulation, dehumanizing technology, Communism, ancient prophecies, and natural devastation. Viewing these works today, they are a reminder that the world probably isn’t going to end, and we’ll make it through to tomorrow.
Earth Could be ‘Unrecognizable’ by 2050
Via Discovery News:
A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.
Earth Day: Save The Planet By Not Having Children?
With Earth Day 2010 on this 22nd of April, I wonder how much the Green movement and the greater media at large will debate this opinion from Lisa Hymas on Grist:
In 1969, graduating college senior Stephanie Mills made national headlines with a commencement address exclaiming that, in the face of impending ecological devastation, she was choosing to forgo parenthood. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all,” she told her classmates.
I come here before you today to make the same proclamation — with a twist. I am thoroughly delighted by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.
Making the green choice too often feels like a sacrifice or a hassle or an expense. In this case, it feels like a luxurious indulgence that just so…
WTF: Georgia Congressman Thinks Overpopulation Will Make Guam Sink (Video)
During a hearing with the House Armed Services Committee last week, Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia attempted to explain his concern for the stability of the island of Guam if 8,000 new marines and other naval personnel were to be stationed there.
“My fear that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,” said the the Georgia Democrat.
Hmm, after reading the follow-up statement to clarify Congressman Johnson’s testimony, I’m still looking for the evidence of “metaphorical” speaking … not really seeing it. Check out the video and the follow-up statement in this clip from MSNBC’s Way Too Early with Willie Geist:
Population Wars: What’s Next, Explosion Or Depopulation?
In a new article by Paul Farrell, he argues that the good old population bomb is going to explode:
So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?
The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?
News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”
The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.
Well that’s not exactly a new argument. In fact it’s been around for decades and if the predictions made in the ’70s had come true, we’d already be experiencing most of the apocalyptic things that Farrell’s worried about now. There’s actually a couple of new films that expose the argument not only to have been fallacious in decades past, but an extremely dangerous mistake now. Check out the trailer for Demographic Bomb and please post comments as to who you think is right.
