How Many People Can The Earth Support By Joel Cohen

In his book, How many people can the earth support? the author Joel Cohen writes about earth’s population, ecology, climate, social organization, resources, history and most importantly about the history of earth’s capacity carrying potential. The main issue of his book concerns the lack of resources the earth is facing and how we as human specie can cope with that. He is saying that we are coming to an era where we do not have enough water, food and other major commodities, even though he do not highlight any particular resource in the book. Actually, he somehow tries to evade answering the question, which is in the title of the book. Throughout the book he is raising questions, which often start with “How many…?”. That is because Cohen thinks

Here one of the continuous arguments is that Earth’s support do not only consist the number of people in the earth, but also the features of economics, environment and culture. Cohen takes into perspective also the economic growth and takes critical position considering its inconsistency. He describes that global economic system does not take into notion depletion of unowned stocks, their environmental and social costs and ignorance of human need. Growth of population also has many environmental impacts. He argues that human activity is closely linked to environmental problems, and when population growth is fast, the environmental problems get worse. He brings up the issue of trade-offs, for example trade-offs among burying municipal wastes. In his opinion, environmental vulnerability increases as humans move into cities and consume more. Third negative feature of population growth according to Cohen is cultural implosion. Due to migration and technology the rural and urban regions have shrunk the world, bringing cultures into contact and into conflict. He thinks that this cultural cohesion has raised problems on employment, cultural conflicts, gender inequality and distressing income gaps. Cohen says that these problems put aside also issues concerning the negative effects of population growth to environment. It is interesting to read about the important factor of regulating population. He says that it is hard to find solutions to this, and also highlights that the time is short for correcting our