7 Billion & Counting
Today – 31st October 2011 – is a day for the diary as it marked the day when the world population officially hit 7Billion.
The next 25 years will see the world surpass 9Billion, and that is a conservative number, barring any major world epidemic (war is unlikely to have a material impact where as an epedemic could, just look at the past) so the world population could even hit 10Billion in our lifetime.
When you consider the current world consumption on resources, with the limited % of people in the First world (sic) compared with the Third world; there is a very serious problem ahead for the human race. Take, for example, the size of India with over 1Billion people. Just one province – Delhi, has over 200m people. Compare that with the whole of the USA of some 375m people (approx).
Just imagine the impact on the world economy and environment when large countries like India develops fully (as they will in time) and the resources they will consume in the process. When you factor in Brasil, China and Russia the future looks promising economically but pretty worrying from a population-over-consumption perspective.
As a race, we have no option. We have to work out a more sustainable way to live and as importantly, to grow. Nature has proven in the past that when any population of any specicies becomes too prevalent, it [nature] finds ways to deal with that to redress “the balance”. Look at any population explosion, regardless of how big or microscopic the species, Nature always finds a way to deal with it and although the human race is not there yet, if we continue to over populate and over consume; a tipping point will be reached where it will then be out of our control.
The good news is we are making progress. The major developments in all areas from food production, car engine technology to energy production etc are all steps in the right direction, they may not all be correct (such as the production of fuel from crops which take up valuable food-crop land) but they are all part of the journey to find the right solution. 100 years from now our current technology and methods may be laughed at. Just as some of the technology used in Victorian times seem laughable, they were often important steps to get us where we are today. We are at the dawn of our own eco movement and in years to come we will (hopefully) have innovated our way out of the impending problem we have. The world needs more innovators.
The car gets a fair chunk of blame when it comes to over consumption of materials and causing polution. It is said that all cars should be Hydrogen cell based as this is by far the cleanest and possibly the most sustainable technology we have produced to date – the problem is that it is just too expensive at this time, but so too were the first commercial computers (The Ferranti Mark 1) they were the size of a small van and cost several annual salaries of the average person.
