For many years I have been worried that human civilization is having a serious negative impact on the life sustaining capacity of our planet. I see many issues that present serious problems for humans and all the creatures with whom we share planet Earth. Excessive resource consumption, excessive waist production, and massive production of toxic substances to name a few. Population growth is also one of the worst problems we face. It has been a concern of mine since I was in high school in the late 1960s. The sheer number of people and the rate of change of those numbers is part of what drives the seriousness of all the problems I listed.
Looking for information on this topic I came across a website called ourworldindata.org (Our World in Data). This site has lots of interesting information, but the section that drew my attention was on World Population Growth.
Most of us know the human population is increasing. Nevertheless, it is difficult for any of us to fully comprehend the nature of this increase because a single human lifespan is only a tiny fraction of the time the human species has existed. Each of us learns about the world from the time we are born until we die, and it is challenging for us to extend our perspective much beyond the scope of our own lifetime.
The following is a written chronical of human population growth. If you don’t feel like trudging through all the statistics I am laying out in the next paragraph, just skip to the two graphs that follow that paragraph. They illustrate this issue better than any written description can.
The human species first emerged about 200,000 years ago. As recently as 10,000 years ago the world population was no more than a few million. 200,000 years ago, it was only a tiny fraction of that (for all practical purposes, nearly zero). Today it is nearly 8 billion. While the total number of people on the planet today is a concern, an even greater concern is the rate at which that number has been changing. If the rate of change had been completely uniform over the 200,000 year history of human existence, we would have added about 40 thousand people to the planet every year, or about 110 people per day. But it has not been even remotely uniform. It took about 190,000 years for the human population to grow from essentially zero to 4 million, adding only about 20 people per year to the planet over that span of time. Then over the next 10,000 years (up to the year zero AD), about 190 million people were added to the planet, about 20,000 people per year… a thousand times greater rate of growth over the preceding 200 millennia. Over the next 1,800 years an additional 800 million people were added to the planet (reaching a total of one billion). That is about 440,000 people added to the planet every year since the birth of Christ. From the year 1,800 to today, roughly 200 years, we have added nearly another 7 billion people, about 32 million people per year. The year I was born there were about 2.5 billion people on the planet. Today there are more than 7.5 billion, which is three people living on planet Earth today for every person alive on the day I was born. The next two images provide a graphical representation of the information presented in this paragraph.
The population explosion is not the only serious problem we face, but it very well exemplifies the severity of our self-inflicted problems. I hate to offer such a bleak picture. Especially, since I see no way out of this mess that will not be very painful for everyone. While it saddens me that we are bringing so much suffering onto future human generations, I grieve even more for the other creatures with whom we share this incredibly rare and precious life sustaining planet.
