are truly astounding.  If you look at how long it took the human race to get to 1 billion people, you'll be shocked (and probably scared like I was) to see how much faster we reached 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 billion. HINT: Skim and look for my bold sentences if you don't want to read the explanations (fascinating, but hey):

"...There is more: In one day, 200,000 acres of rainforest also vanished, and 13 to 15 million tons of toxic waste, most of which is carcinogenic, was dumped into our air, soil, and water.

So, we have a problem. The story we tell ourselves is that this problem is the result of overpopulation, but there is some confusion in this explanation. For the first 190,000 years of human history, human population around the planet was relatively stable at anywhere from 25 to 75 million people. Then, about seven to ten thousand years ago, we began the age of pyromania - that is, we started using fire to smelt metal from rock, and with the help of metal tools, we became better farmers and hunters who were more efficient at producing food.

And logically, as with any animal population, if you increase the food supply, the numbers grow. The result was that our population increased slowly from 50 million people up to 250 million at the time of Christ, and we reached 500 million by the year 1000. And, somewhere between 1500 and 500 years ago, we began using ancient sunlight for the first time.

Up until then, human beings were fed, clothed, and sheltered entirely by current sunlight -- the sunlight that falls on the earth and is absorbed by plants, converting its energy into plant matter. There was also a 90 million year period, from 300 million years ago until 210 million years ago, called the Carboniferous Period, when the earth was covered by enormous plants that emitted a high level of carbon dioxide.

The average temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now. These plants absorbed this carbon dioxide and eventually became what we now know as coal. We started using coal during the last 1,000 years, and now consume a million years worth of ancient sunlight each year by burning it. Pretty amazing, when you think about it.

Once we learned how to use ancient sunlight, we didn't have to maintain reservoirs of current sunlight in the form of forests anymore. We could cut forests down, use the land for crops, and produce more food -- and people. So our population grew rapidly, and we reached a population of one billion in the year 1800, after 290,000 years of human history. Then we became even more efficient in our use of ancient sunlight.

We began drilling oil wells, and it took only 130 years to reach two billion. Oil could be transported easily and burned in engines, so we could have a hundred horses pulling a plow in the form of a tractor engine. I mean, the energy stored in a handful of gasoline will propel a car -- thousands of pounds of steel -- for a number of city blocks. And the oil it comes from is three to four hundred million years old.

We reached our third billion in only 30 years, by 1960, and our fourth billion took only 14 years -- 1974. By this time, we used ancient sunlight not only to produce food, but also to kill off our competitors with pesticides and herbicides. Then our fifth billion took 13 years -- 1987 -- and our sixth took only 12 years -- 1999. If you talk to biologists and medical professionals, they will tell you that there are only two precedents for such a steep curve, or spike, in a biological system.

The first one appears when you are periodically measuring the pathogens in the blood system of a person suffering from a blood-borne disease. This sudden spike, which is called amplification, means that the patient's immune system has collapsed, allowing the pathogen, or disease organism, to run amuck. In other words, they are about to die. The other precedent is called cancer.

As a consequence, we have gone from consuming five per cent of the world's fresh water and eight percent of the planet's available energy, in 1850, to consuming over 50 per cent, which is why we are losing 120 species every day.

They have to compete for what is left...."

by Tom Hanc on 04/06/2008 12:02:02 PM EST

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Appreciate you both doing the work of arguing my position ;).  I fear that I don't have the energy to try to change someone's mind sometimes.  Indeed I am talking about the long term.  I don't fret when people choose to have a child or two, but population needs to be part of the discussion of environmental degradation or we are only treating the symptoms rather than the root of the problem.  Those who don't already see environmental degradation on every front, from water shortages and quality, to air quality, to the plastic that is filling up the bellies of seabirds, to climate change, to extinctions, either are not paying attention, or just don't really care about the non-human environment.  We are inseparable from our environment though, and ignore that to our species' peril.  Jarett is right about one thing--after pondering whether humans actually provide any benefit to the planet, I wouldn't mind seeing them bring their numbers WAY down.  So, count me among those who are quite existentialist and unsentimental about continuing the family line.  My parents' genetic line dies with me. 

by desertpear on 04/06/2008 03:02:35 PM EST

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