Driving Forces: Population
The earth’s population today is growing faster than planet earth can support its current increases. Demographers believe that the population worldwide will grow by 2.4 billion people by mid-century when the rate of increase will then begin to wane – raising the overall population to somewhere around 9 billion. The world’s rising population creates ever increasing demands for drinking water and water for raising crops and live food sources for protean. More than a billion people live today without adequate water supplies. These same people also live without proper sanitation sewerage treatment or sanitary landfills for discarding waste.
Most of the world’s future growth will continue occurring within the world’s poorest developing nations. Increasing world population is already influencing each of the other Driving Forces: Economics, Energy, Food and Agriculture, Technology, the Environment, and, Values and Political Structures. When we examine events taking place around the world today most civil unrest is directly linked to at least one of these forces. Programs directed at reducing population in underdeveloped nations require the remainder of the world to work together, improving education, resource conservation, economic development and employment security so that people within the developing nations have successful models to draw upon for transforming their lives into sustainable societies and governments.
Beyond addressing the issues of the current recession I believe America needs to be promoting a stronger international conversation around this planet’s health and its capacity to sustain humankind in the future. Is it possible that as global partners we could work together to manage and control population based upon the natural renewable resource capacity of each political jurisdiction? For the United States that would mean our capacity to balance population and productivity would be limited as to how well we can feed, cloth, shelter, employ and provide health care to the people of this nation within the develop-able limits of our own renewable, sustainable resources.
Do we have any idea today what the productive capacity of this nation is in terms of the population we can adequately sustain? If we can answer this question, perhaps we can help other nations and the world prosper.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!