Human Overpopulation Causes, Effects and Solutions
We have about 6.8 billion people on a tiny orb only 8,000 miles wide and 24,000 miles in circumference that we call Earth. We add about a million and half people to our world population every week! How have we reached the point that many describe as global overpopulation? What is our Planet’s carrying capacity? Is zero population growth desirable, or attainable? What are the causes and effects of human overpopulation?
The family of humans, known as the hominids, has populated Earth, according to the fossil record, for 5 to 6 million years. The hominids transitioned from one genus to another before our genus, homo, appeared about a million and half to two million years ago. We transitioned through a number of homo species before our species, homo sapiens (“sensible humans”) emerged about 150,000 years ago.
For the 5 to 6 million years we hominids have been here (Earth has been here for 4.56 billion years in a universe that has been here 13.7 billion years), we have mostly been Stone Age hunters and gatherers. For the 150,000 years we modern humans have been here, we too have mostly been hunters and gatherers. About 12,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, our Agrarian Age began. Since then, we’ve mostly been agrarians. A little more than 200 years ago, in the late 1700s, the Industrial Age began in England. By 1850, it spread to Belgium, Germany, France and the United States. Over time, it spread to other industrial countries. About sixty years ago, we transitioned from the Industrial Age to the post-Industrial High Tech Information Age we live in today. It is an age that allows us to disseminate information almost anywhere instantly.
Over time, we accumulated people. Two-thousand years ago, our population was at 250 million. In the year 500 A.D., it remained the same. By 1000 A.D., we climbed to 500 million people. We reached 750 million people around 1500 A.D. We hit our first billion mark in 1800 at which time the Industrial Revolution kicked in. We added people more rapidly and began to move quickly in the direction of human overpopulation. Between 1800 and 1900 we added 600 million people. At 1900, we were at 1.6 billion. By 1960, in 60 short years, we nearly doubled that as we reached 3 billion.
In 1960, we humans had been here about 150,000 years. It took us that long to accumulate 3 billion people. How long did it take for us to double that number? Thirty-nine years! In 1999, we reached 6 billion people. It is estimated that we will be at 9.2 billion by 2050. This is an exponential increase in birth rate, leading to questions concerning Earth’s carrying capacity.
The Effects of Human Overpopulation
The effects of human overpopulation are multiple and ominous. As birth rates climb, natural resources get used up faster than they can be replaced, creating enormous economic pressures at home while the standard of living plummets throughout the rest of the world. As the result of having so many people who do not understand our reality and its behavioral demands, we have created an interrelated web of global environmental problems. We are depleting our natural resources: our forests, fisheries, range lands, croplands, and plant and animal species. We are destroying the biological diversity on which evolution thrives (this is being called the sixth great wave of extinction in the history of life on earth, different from the others in that it is caused not by external events, but by us).
With powerful new electrical and diesel pumping techniques, we are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables. We are systemically polluting our air, water, and soil, and consequently our food chain. We are depleting the stratospheric ozone that shields us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. And, we are experiencing symptoms of global warming: heat waves, devastating droughts, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, and a more rapid spread of diseases.
What is the solution for global overpopulation?
What must we do to ensure that population growth is not out of control? The answer lies in education. We humans are a very young species. We have been here for only a short time. We are like a child just learning to walk. We face grave challenges that demand a rapid shift in our behavior. Our teacher is our parent. Our parent is the natural world from which we emerged. In every way, in every facet of our existence, we must learn to align ourselves with that which supports life. There is no alternative if we are going to avoid catastrophic consequences.
With so many of us on a very small planet, and with the addition of so many more every week, we can no longer continue to relate to each other, our environment, ecological systems and biosphere as we have or we will succumb to the effects of human overpopulation. Nature, which could not care less, will eliminate us. We humans must grow up and learn to walk…hand in hand with each other and with our natural world. There is no alternative if we wish to sustain humanity and advance our civilization.
The Solution: Seven Words That Can Change The World…the DVD
Filed under: overpopulation
Thanks for this clearly written article. It is a thorny issue and central to all others, I think. No amount of recycling will cut it if we are adding a million new humans per week to our global population.
The article was a bit short on solutions and I just wanted to thank you for and recommend to others the DVD which I bought that explains more clearly the solution to this and other environmental issues facing our planet.
If you want further clarity on how we got here and where we go from here, get the excellent DVD, based on the book by the same title, The Seven Words That Can Change The World (from this site) As your many testimonials attest, these principles are well presented in your material and are key to our very survival as a species. Thank you!
Thank you for your response, Wayne.
Much appreciated.
Best,
Joe Simonetta
I found this website very interesting and informative. It was cleverly written and well researched. It was lot of help, as I’m currently doing a group project on overpopulation,( I’m only in grade school). Before I read this article I only had a basic understanding of overpopulation(I thought it was just too many people), but now I know alot more. Thanks heaps! I owe you!
Thank you very much for your comment. I’m pleased that you find the information helpful. Good luck with your project.
Best, Joe
This was a very informative article. I’m in high school and every week I have to find an article that relates to human geography and summarize and tell how it relates. Most of the time, the articles aren’t all that great and i don’t get all the points for it.
In my opinion, the worst has already occurred. The uncontrolled breeding of Homo sapiens coupled by their anthropocentric mentality has virtually wiped out the majority of animal species of the world (especially, the mamals, birds, and fish). At the risk of sounding misanthropic, living in a world alone with only this plague called “humans” is hardly worth it. Sometimes I don’t care that humans will eventually turn on themselve, and they will… whether it is via the nuclear bomb, genocides, etc., for, to me, the world has already had its biodiversity destroyed so much that it is no longer healthy enough to evolve into anything viable.
Tell me, why is there so much fuss in the streets about global warming and never any fuss about the human population explosion? I can go on and on with this sort of retorical questioning. But, you understand my rant. …. And, sorry for my ranting emotions poured out here.
Thanks for your note, Mark. It’s not quite that bad. We haven’t “wiped out the majority of animal species of the world”. Not yet and, hopefully, never. I agree that humanity is anthropocentric. We are a young species sorely in need of understanding the reality in which we exist, that has produced us, and the behavioral demands of that reality. Global warming (climate change) is perceived by many as life-threatening. It is (finally) being talked about seriously. Many don’t take population growth as the threat it is albeit there are many organizations dedicated to the issue.
I enjoy the essay and I am using it for a paper for my AP environmental geoscience class, but I would like to offer you another solution to the problem which has not gotten as much of a thought as it deserves; Space colonies. I know it sounds like I’ve watched too much star trek, but why is it so impossible to if not populate other planets, to create stations like space homes for people to live on? I think it would be more possible if we had better solar energy converters, but I still think it is a plausible idea.
Thanks, Nathan. It would take a great amount of time and technological prowess to do what you suggest. We have neither. We need to learn how to live on the planet on which we exist currently.
I liked your work a great deal and cited in my essay on overpopulation. However, despite your title, I havent been able to find any causes within your work. From the additional research that I have done on the topic, I have found the following to be the leading causes of overpopulation: increase in fertility rates, mass production and distribution of food, improvements in public health, advances in medicine, the relentless pursuit to combat disease, and most importantly education. Thanks for your insight.
Aaron, thank you for your comments.
The causes you listed for overpopulation are valid except education. I would think just the opposite. The more education, the less children women have. That is a fact.
When women are better educated and treated more equally, reproduction decreases.
Reproduction decreases also (countries go to Zero Population Growth) when the people become more successful (and better educated). This typically happens in First World countries.
Most of the population growth, I believe, continues to be centered in Africa and India.
Best,
Joe
I was surprised to find a few sites concerned with over population when I googled it.I’m 58 and can remember thinking that we had a population problem even when I was a kid.It surprises and angers me that conservation societies that solicit for money and help don’t mention over population as the root to all of modern earths problems,seems nobody in the public eye has courage enough to say anything about it.Sadly I don’t believe that there are any solutions to it,with TV shows like TLC’s 18 and counting and others like it that glamorise having huge familys.I think humans are just too stupid and greedy to ever do anything about it.Earth itself will be the one that handles the problem by killing us all off with starvation,disease and murder brought on by over crowding.
There are a few things that can create a more peaceful transiton to control the population growth. 1)Birth control/cotraceptives 2)tubularligation/vasecomies 3)education in third world rual areas about food chain versus population density 4)creating an international park/wildlife presserve service 5)in the meantime vertical farming and seed vault projects like the one in Norway
Until the Petri Dish Breaks
By
Stephen Lewis
lewis.stephen101@gmail.com
Climate change appears to be a symptom, population density and over-consumption of fossil fuel products being the cause. I have recently become an alarmist and have scoured the internet for information. I have found very conflicting information regarding the extent of the population problem. However, I am at this time convinced that at this growth rate, the Earth cannot humanely sustain life and will rapidly rid itself of the parasites within the lifetime of my grandkids. oooOOOHHhhh.
Even if my true vision is on a global scale and is possibly unnecessary, it could be beneficial in smaller pockets of over crowded areas, like Los Angeles or India. And the vision goes like this…
With the collective effort of all human beings and the understanding that this will help mankind, we set a date on the calendar at which time we all stop having sex for one month. (This proposal seems a lot easier to deal with than any of the other zero population growth scenarios.)
Nine months after this one month cease fire, and you can see that we are going to have a lot of highly trained nurses and doctors with nothing to do. Of course we prepared ourselves for this event, having thought it out completely. Those people that are affected by this lack of work would be assigned duties that assist the already going family planning centers world wide, dealing with the worst areas of population first. Well conceived missions that can they can complete in one month’s time.
Using the population growth estimate online, 150,000 people added to the population each day equals 1 million per week. With this proposal an estimated 4 million people will not be born because of this one month of abstinence from everyone. I used 61 years as the doubling time and that gives me 8 million people not having been born by the year 2071. Another 61years would equal 16 million people not having been born.
I realize this number is quite insignificant compared to the almost 7 billion population number, but once this idea has been put to the test and worked out, it can then be implemented several times at regular intervals until the population is not only under control, but the standard of living across the globe is exponentially increased. It can later be used as a dampening process to keep population growth rates in check and it doesn’t require extreme measures. Human beings are simply not having sex. It’s not like 70% of the population being sterilized by the other 30%. You know, the haves and the have not’s.
The big problem is how do we get everyone to abstain at the same time world wide? We all ready have the technology to globally make this process happen. The internet and phones are making communication possible anywhere. People are seeing the world in a larger view when they sing “It’s a small world after all”. Most importantly, I would rather struggle with mankind trying to complete this enormous task than to struggle with massive poverty, genocide, famine, war, caused by doing nothing at all. I am not in the delusion that man will instantly be better, however, doing something that large together would form some sort of bond. Plus without the strain of overpopulation, we could work on our other really terrible social skills. One of the bonuses of this plan is that just the act of trying increases communication on a global scale about problems that affect us all.
I like to think of life as the human experiment. I see the planet as our cage or Petri dish. So far, I believe there are no examples of an experiment that sustained its own life and moved out of the Petri dish and into the point of view of the scientist. I don’t know about the point of view of the scientist, but I do think we can rally for life at least until the Petri dish breaks.
Thank you for your time
Stephen
Dear Overpopulation Organisation,
You are elcome to use my overpopulation song “Know the Seeds We Sow” (free mp3 download at http://www.ilike.com/artist/Swayseeker/ ). Perhaps you would like to record it with your own musicians.
Regards
Eddie Miller (Swayseeker)
Well, that’s a very interesting article. I’m just thinking this way, why the number keeps increasing? can we do something to handle the number for, at least, remains the same?
World human population is expected to level off at about 9.2 billion around 2050.
I think the reason the population numbers keep going up and the reason some don’t see it as a problem is because we have been operating in this “fight for survival” mode for a very long time. It’s been what has kept us alive in the food chain. Now we are slowly waking up to the fact that we do not have to breed for survival anymore and that we have learned so much that we have taken ourselves out of the food chain. Education and family planning have been very helpful in slowing growth rates in underdeveloped areas of the world (as is evident in their lower than the United States birth rates). In my view, a pause of sexual activity is nothing more than planned abstinence which would have a measurable effect and buy some time in just 9 months. We as a society are getting smaller as knowledge and our world view are expanding. It is time to re-think who we are and our purpose.
Some people feel that the planet is plenty big enough and it could carry trillions. That may be so. The only thing that bothers me is that we are only at 6.8 billion and look how many problems we have. Some say we have enough resources to feed the planet now but we would rather play war games that make the problem worse than spend the military budget on worldwide issues. Even more, if we spent our military budget on feeding starving people, educating the 3rd world people to the current standard of knowledge and creating a comfortable standard of living for everyone, these nations would view the United States as peaceful and humanitarian and we would not be at war. Not that there would be no problems just that war would not be the solution. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that we are viewed as war mongers.
So to me, whether or not the planet has the ability to hold more people is moot because the issue is that even though the technology to provide for everyone is here, our system does not provide for everyone equally. It provides for the self serving first then trickles down so a majority of the people have to divide whatever is left, if anything. There has to be a bottom because there is a top and we can clearly see that people at the bottom are living our doomsday scenario right now.
It’s not realistic at this time for the planet to be involved in a mass reduction in population using a planned abstinence period as described in my article. However, it could certainly work for India where population is already the problem and when the population is at a manageable level, we maintain those levels using the family planning methods that have proven to be effective.
If we view ourselves as being different from one another, then I must sacrifice YOU so that I can live, if we view ourselves as one complete system then I must protect the one and begin to repair the damage caused by separatist actions.
My greatest fear is knowing that this overcrowding does not lead to a healthy life style so either nature will take care of that issue with plague, or HIV aids or man will take care of that issue with war and then indifference to the loser or even the idea of sterilizing the population to save the planet for a select few. This is why a very simple non invasive way of reducing the population is essential. It unifies individuals in a cause greater than themselves and leads us toward the truth that we are one and then to the further realization that even our planet is part of the solar system, part of the universe.
(Paradigm Shift)
People can know a thing and not apply it. Meaning, we can understand gravity and its effect on the planets but not consider the implications that has on our connectedness. We must understand our larger world view first and apply it to our daily lives in order to know exactly what to do to help ourselves.
In my opinion.
A bigger population causes more pollution from burning more coal in power stations. This causes acid rain and other problems.
One thing that could really help is to find an alternative to coal. Pyrolysis to produce fuel from hemp stalks, corn stalks and so on exists and this fuel could be used in power stations. http://saenergy.blogspot.com/ gives information about pyrolysis
To the earlier post from nathan - space colonies are an eventual solution, but as joe said they are very time consuming. i disagree however with the technology part of that. i have no doubt that we have the ability to create a habitat in the atmosphere, however the cost of doing so would be astronomical (no pun intended).
since there is very few viable options to curb the population growth, in an attempt to support it i would suggest research in ocean farms. a floating farm that relies on salt water to grow the plants. not only would this provide acres upon acres of new farming space but it would severely cut back on the amount of land used which could be re-grown into it’s natural state
I find in reading those sites that say that population problems are a myth that their evidence is very sparse and inconclusive. Recently I read Book 1 of the free e-book series “In Search of Utopia” (http://andgulliverreturns.info), it blasts their lack of evidence relative to their calling overpopulation a myth. The book, actually the last half of the book, takes on the skeptics in global warming, overpopulation, lack of fresh water, lack of food, and other areas where people deny the evidence. I strongly suggest that anyone wanting to see the whole picture read the book, at least the last half.
The outdated fertility replacement rate of 2.1 is also clarified.
i m happy to see that there are some organizations who take care for these causes and contributes to spread awareness among the people for saving our planet earth