Read at : Google Alert – desertification
http://sustainablepopulation.blogspot.com/2008/10/problem-statement-for-population.html
Problem Statement for Population
Global human population is rising from more than 6.7 billion, having quadrupled in less than a century. Every 5 minutes 650 more people are added to human population – this equals a million person net gain in just over 4 days and another United States every 3 to 4 years. The U.S. itself is adding 2.5 million people per year to the existing 307 million, on its way to 450 million by the year 2050. Despite strong myths to the contrary, population continues to grow in the New England region as well. NECSP research shows that an aggregate of 67,000 people are added to the 14.25 million citizens of the six New England states each year. Vermont’s population expanded by 2.5%, or 15,081 people, from the year 2000 to the year 2006 – continuing an upward trajectory that has seen the state’s population expand 65% from the 1950 count of 377,747 to today’s 623,908+. If population were a stand-alone issue, reasonable people could honorably disagree about the optimal population density of a state, a region, a nation and the Earth, and perhaps the numbers listed above would not be cause for such great concern. However, as we witness the Earth giving off clear distress signals — examples being climate change, species extinctions, marine dead-zones and intensifying desertification – we no longer have the luxury to view human populations in isolation from the ecological crisis facing the planet.
Each additional human being increases the base of aggregate demand for the Earth’s natural resources and open space. Efficiency and technology can mitigate these demands to some extent, but logic tells us that ever increasing human numbers are an insurmountable obstacle to the urgent need to implement sustainable development strategies for human communities all over the globe.
Cutting per capita carbon emissions does little if the “capita” keeps expanding. Reducing groundwater consumption at the household level does little if the number of households keeps growing. Cutting personal protein consumption in half makes little difference when a net 650 more protein dependent people arrive on the planet every 5 minutes.
Many people who are staunch environmentalists have cowered away from talking about the ideas of human population stabilization because they don’t have a way to talk about them in a human rights framework — they rightly fear a continuation of north-south colonialism, patriarchal ownership of women’s wombs, or some sort of communist central planning of human fertility — all of which would be abominable disasters. Furthermore, woeful mistakes made in the name of population stabilization in the past, for instance the forced male sterilizations that took place in India in the mid 1970′s, continue to paint population stabilization ideas with a dingy brush indeed.
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