As of now, mid-year 2013, the world human population is about 7.2 billion. That's billion with a B. At the moment we are adding about 75 million more people every single year. The city I live in, Portland, Oregon, has about 600,000 people. Every single year, we are adding the equivalent of 125 cities the size of Portland to the human population.
Every person we add to the population comes with a requirement for water, food, shelter, and a whole range of other resources and services. Problem is, the Earth is not expanding. Our planet - the only one we have - has only a finite amount of resources. When we add the equivalent of 125 cities the size of Portland to the world population every year, the water, the food, and everything else those people need has to come from somewhere.
Deforestation, ocean resource depletion, climate change, and fresh water scarcity are just a few of the global scale challenges we face at this moment in time. In every instance, the primary driving force behind these profound challenges is human population growth.
I became a population activist thirty years ago. There weren't very many of us at that time. Those of us who were committed to expanding the public's awareness of the population issue were and still are up against a mountain of ignorance. People just don't want to talk about population. They don't want to connect the dots. I joined a group called the Population Education Committee. I worked with them to create a couple of booklets that presented the reality of population growth. We focused on reaching high school and college age students with our message. We produced a couple of education videos for a teen audience. One was called Jam Packed. The other was called, The Cost of Cool. Both of these videos won awards. They were good videos, and are still being used to this day in school classrooms across America. But, there's no denying, part of the reason they got the recognition they did was because there wasn't much else available on population at the time.
In 1985, when I began my population activism, the world population was about 4.9 billion. Since then, in just the last 28 years, the population has grown half again in size - 2.3 billion more people, all needing a piece of our Earth's rapidly diminishing resource pie.
The news is not all bad. We have slowed the rate of population growth. In 1985, we were adding about 82 million more mouths to feed a year. Now, were down to about 75 million. Many countries have reduced their population growth to replacement level [ 2.1 babies per couple ] or even less. But there are still many nations, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that are overwhelmed by high human fertility. These highly fertile places tend to be the same places where women are treated like property, good only for child bearing. A big part of ending population growth is educating and empowering women in the poorest places, where human fertility remains unsustainably high. The other part of the solution is to assure access to contraception to all women. Reproductive choice is a basic human right. Every child should be a wanted child.
Bottom line: in 2013, the world is in a tailspin, largely because there are simply too many people chasing after too few resources. Moreover, the level of ignorance that still exists on this issue is shocking, given how much the world has been impacted by population growth.
I just watched a new video about human population growth. It offers clear evidence that we remain in very deep trouble where population is concerned, to a great degree because people are still in denial about this very obvious cause of the biggest challenges we face.
Here is a link to a terrific little video that presents the population problem in a very effective way... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kIRDRFuN3BQ
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