Population Issues
Spaceship Earth – what population is sustainable?
Professor Tim Flannery in The Weathermakers says,
“In 1961 there was still room to manoeuvre. In that seemingly distant age there were just 3 billion people, and they were using only half of the total resources that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. A short twenty-five years later, in 1986, we had reached a watershed, for that year our population topped 5 billion, and such was our collective thirst for resources that we were using all of Earth’s sustainable production.”
“ In effect, 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth’s carrying capacity, and ever since we have been running the environmental equivalent of a deficit budget, which is only sustained by plundering our capital base. The plundering takes the form of overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere, which in turn leads to the large number of environmental issues we face. In the end, though, the environmental budget is the only one that really counts.”
Population & exponential growth - 7 billion and still growing!
Professor Albert Bartlett, Department of Physics University of Colorado affirms,
“Central to the things that we must do is to recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises.”
“To be successful with the experiment of human life on Earth we have to understand the laws of nature as they are encountered in the study of sciences and mathematics. The greatest shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential factor.”
Resources, economic growth & Nature’s limits
Dr John Coulter, President of Sustainable Population Australia
in a press release 25th September 07 states,
"Our leaders fail to acknowledge that mineral resources are non-renewable and will not last forever. They seem not to accept that future generations have a legitimate claim on the use of some of these precious minerals.
They continue to support the old fashioned notion of continuous growth: growth of both the economy and population as though somehow Nature is an inexhaustible cornucopia. And yet the evidence before their eyes is that Nature’s limits are clear and present.
Only a dynamic steady-state economy and a stable population are consistent with an environmentally sustainable future.”
(SPA formed in 1988. They actively promote sustainability issues. They have over 1,000 members across Australia, with 300 in the NSW branch. SPA holds public forums, distributes a bi-monthly newsletter to its members and lobbies for a population size and consumption patters that reflect resource limits. SPA believe that a healthy ecological balance within our life supporting ecosystems requires the stabilisation of human population numbers., SPA NSW branch email geho7@bigpond.com.)
There’s an elephant in the room
“There’s and elephant in the room that no-one wants to see. It’s called ‘Global Population’. In the past 60 years global population has expanded from 2.5 billion to 6.6 billion and is estimated to grow to 9.1 billion in the next 50 years.”
“The Optimum Population Trust indicates that 2-3 billion is a sustainable global population.”
“The runaway out-of-control population increase in humanity is the root cause of Climate Change, Global warming, water shortages, desertification, species extinction and any number of other environmental stressor in the world. It is our single biggest and ongoing issue.”
V. Guy, Byron Shire Echo, 17..4.07.
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