Population growth and its impact on our future
Text and drawings by Frits Ahlefeldt, Hiking.org
Today we are heading towards 8 billion people on the planet, each one of us striving to do our best to get the most out of our time here. Each one of us, trying to live and get clothing, fuel, housing and food every day in a world of limited resources
We humans tend to live for the next day, next meal, car, job or vacation, growing up learning a craft, getting married and reproducing, loving our kids and paving their road ahead as well as possible without looking up.
In 1959 we were “only” 3 billion people on the planet, and the experts believe we will pass the 8 billion mark sometime around 2024, as things look today.
The challenge is that our sheer number, and our global and ever more craving lifestyle and culture, we are demanding cars, smartphones, roads, cities, resorts and timber faster than the planet can provide it. We are draining every resource, every place, as much as we can, for profit, for survival or just because someone above us told us to do so.
When we look at the global population approaching 8 billion of us, it is amazing, so many stories, so many lives, so many feelings and so many destinies. We live longer, stronger and more connected lives every day.
Check out worldometers.info for a updated live picture of the state of the life on Earth.
A few countries have tried hard to change the course of destiny and alter the curve from heading vertical into an unstoppable crash. Most famous are China with its one child policy. Being one of the countries in the world with the largest population, this has made quite a splash… especially in a cultural dimension.
But very few other countries than China are able to control their population growth. Take most of Africa, here the understanding of what it means to be a human, ones responsibility, relationships, power-structure and the whole culture is very very far from how the Central Committee of China can put the amount of children people can get into law with a simple central decision.
The resource challenge – Earth and its carrying capacity
In the way we live today we are fast reaching the end of our current lifestyle with cars, eating meat, buying more and more. But like zipping sugar-water out of a glass through a straw we do not experience the challenges gradually, but only when our own personal or national straw is not long enough any more.
Today we globally produce more goods and food in a day to feed the world, than the whole world did in a year, just a few centuries ago, and nobody want to slow down the production-lines, instead we are all competing on expanding, up-scaling, refining and accomplishing and producing more and more in less and less time.
The pollution and waste problem of a 7+ billion people world population
Every day the rising amount of people on the planet creates a new gigantic amount of waste. Things that can no longer be used by us and we dump instead, first into the nearest waste-bin, and then either into the oceans or into huge landfills, or burn and release into the atmosphere as destructive chemical gases.
Every second the world population now throw out an unbelievable unsorted mix of synthetic plastic, paint, left-over pesticides, chemicals, life-destroying quicksilver batteries and other poisonous metals and non-fixable electronic devices. On top of it we adds gene-modified substances, outdated foods of all kinds, and medicine drugs, clothing, cars, nuclear cooling water – And to that we continually add human waste, and industrial farming waste. Mixing it all together to a very destructive cocktail, we up til now has been confident that Earth will keep swallowing for us every day, without it having any influence on our population growth.
Finding place – the double food and habitat problem
Finding new and ever more space for an ever more and larger world population is getting harder and harder. There is simply not much space left on the planet that is not either being used to produce or transport industrial food and goods around ( farmla