The Earth Cannot Support Six Billion People

The Earth Cannot Support Six Billion People

The United Nations Population Division estimates that the human population will number six billion on October 12th, 2000. For those of us born approximately a quarter-century ago, that colossal number is two billion more than the four billion that inhabited the Earth when we entered it. Moreover, it represents a doubling of the population in less than forty years.

Most of us, however, have little grounding for such mind-boggling numbers. Most of us literally cannot conceptualize numbers of this magnitude, when it's a struggle in itself to keep track of the number of digits. Most of us in our everyday lives have no need to conceive of such vast amounts of anything.

Yet there are good reasons to attempt to do so. Meteorologists have warned us that pollution linked to the tremendous and growing resource use of the immense and expanding human population will lead to a greater frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as a rise in global temperature; the last decade would seem to support such a suggestion. Biologists have gloomily predicted that many of the Earth's species will be exterminated within the next century, as a direct result of the human domination of the landscape. Social scientists are well aware of the putatively causal link between overcrowding and social conflict, violence and war, and we already have no shortage of these three evils. Even now humans have seriously impacted most ecosystems on Earth, and use more than half of the fresh water accessible for consumption. It is a fundamental truth that on a planet with finite resources, unrestrained growth is an impossible practice to sustain; all of the signals woul...

... middle of paper ...

... quantities once every other day? By eating dairy, bean and grain products for protein we can greatly reduce our intake of harmful saturated fats and cholesterol: on the whole we're likely to benefit from such a switch. But the easiest ploy of all would be to limit waste. It sounds so simple, and yet at Princeton's dining halls it is not an infrequent occurrence to see a student throwing away platefuls of food.

We can do better. As Meadows et al. proclaim in "Beyond the Limits", the state of the world is not a prediction of doom, but a challenge. It's a challenge to navigate this world through the next century without social collapse. I would add that the present situation also represents an opportunity: an opportunity to make our lives more meaningful by foregoing certain indulgences and leading rich lives in the pursuit of higher, more ethical goals.