Overloading Planet Earth - My Freshman Research Paper
A little bit of background: When I was in 9th grade I started to become more world concious. Things were changing globally and my trip to Europe was coming up. I was ready to make a difference in the world and the first way I knew how was to write about it, even if the only two people who were going to read what I wrote were my teacher and whoever happened to peer review it. At the time I realized how much humans manipulated planet Earth and I started to realize the toll that people took on the "natural world". This was my way of coping and my thoughts on human overpopulation, and what it does to the planet.
Overloading Planet Earth
7,248,569,832...7,248,569,833… 834… 835. ("United States Census Bureau."). That is the human population growing. In the time it took you to read those numbers around four children have been born and two people died. By the time you finish reading all of that one international immigrant moved into the US. There is a point in time where these numbers become harmful, and we have already passed them. The planet is running out of ways to provide for humans, while some are in poverty, others are using up more than enough for ten people. It is time we started thinking about population growth, food consumption, and the future to solve the problems that could be resolved with a bit of education.
Nearly half of all American high school students have sat through a sex education course for at least one semester (NCSL). These classes are focused on safe intercourse, and usually do not touch on how large the human population is and how big it is getting. In the last 45 years, the world population has doubled, reaching the height of 7 billion (“Life Expectancy”). The drastic change in population is due to a few key factors, one of which is fertility rates. Although rates are dropping after the ‘baby booms’ in the 20th century, they are still high. The global fertility rate, as of 2013, is roughly 2.1 children per woman. An article by Warren Robinson explains that the average of 2.1 children does not account for the countries that have high birth rates and low birth rates. “... roughly one-third of the world’s population is reproducing above a replacement level and mostly in the very poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and... Latin America and the Caribbean. These areas are offset by Europe, North America, Japan, and… Asia, all of which have below-replacement fertility.” (Robinson). Overall, this means that the population is growing slower than it has been in the past, but the population is still growing too rapidly to sustain. Sustaining the homes is not the issue in this case. The problem is regulating how much every person consumes and uses in their day to day life. How long these people are living is also a factor. With strengthened medical knowledge and slowly lowering child mortality rates, people are living longer than ever. “... population growth accelerates because the decline of death rates precedes the decline in birth rates.” (Sanderson). As children are living through their younger years, adults are aging slower and longer. In the last hundred years the average death age has more than doubled, trailing after medical improvements. Robinson explains that as human fertility rates lower, under the rates in the past, human medical abilities continue to thrive, leaving a huge group of retirees with no one to watch over them.
Each single person active in the labor force will be obliged to support two or three retirees, reducing their own standard of living accordingly. The consequences of this shift in the age distribution have been highlighted by journalists and commentators (that is, non-demographers), and this “population implosion” is made to appear fully as ominous to our future social and economic orders as was the “population bomb” several decades back. (Robinson)
Many suggestions have been made to combat the overpopulation of humans, but all have failed or brought more morbid consequences to the table. “Even one-child policies imposed worldwide and catastrophic mortality events would still likely result in 5 billion to 10 billion people by 2100” (Main). For instance, China’s one child policy caused hundreds of infant deaths. Based on cultural and economic ideals, many people in China who had a daughter as a first child would put her up for adoption or, in many extreme cases, kill the child. “... many families either abandon female newborns or abort the children altogether to ensure that their one-allowable child is a male.” (“China’s Gender Imbalance…”). Since most people only want male children, there would be an imbalance of genders. Educating everyone to understand that benefits of now could potentially alter the future of the human race, there would be less difficulty implanting laws to change our society. “Our great-great-great-great grandchildren might ultimately benefit from [family] planning, but people alive today will not" (Main). For now, educating people on fertility rates and world population is as much as we can do. If everyone was educated on these things, they may rethink the decision to want a large family or change their decisions to benefit the planet.
Another large problem with having billions of people is being able to sustain them. The Global Footprint Network reported that every year humanity uses up the same amount of resources that an Earth and a half could make. "That means it takes the Earth just under 18 months to produce the ecological services humanity needs in one year," (qtd. in "Mankind Using Earth's Resources Faster than Replenished."). If every person lived like a lower-middle class American, according to writer David Gutierrez, all of humanity would need five Earths to sustain them. This has as much to do with what people eat as it does with what people use to make the food they eat. According to the article Price Differences: Organic Versus Non-Organic; Store Versus Farmers' Market, a group of college students in Maine did a survey of five grocery stores. “...wide range of differences, from 10 percent less for organic brown rice to 134 percent more for organic ground beef. The mean cost for organic items surveyed was 68 percent higher than for non-organic…”. Most people go for the cheap option, making it easier on their wallets, but non-organic foods are generally sprayed with chemicals that harm the environment. As well as making the environment healthier, organic foods make people healthier, having more antioxidants than non-organic foods and 69% higher concentration of a stroke reducing, natural chemical (Nierenberg). When people buy more non-organic foods it is causing humans to use up more of the Earth than they can sustainably grow back, especially when the chemicals used to make fruits and vegetables more appealing are hurting the planet. In this sense, humans are using too much of the Earth to make food that is worse for them and harming to planet more. When talking about food that is worse for humankind, people can not help but think about obesity and by extension, America. The United States is the most obese country in the world, followed by China and India (US News). By this same token, humans also think about starving countries, Burundi and Eritrea (Guy-Allen). There is a large imbalance between people who have too much food and too little food.
The average American has an ecological footprint of nine global hectares (23 acres), or the equivalent of 17 US football fields. The average European's footprint is half that size, but still too big to be sustainable in the long term. At the other end of the scale are impoverished countries like Malawi, Haiti, Nepal or Bangladesh, where the footprints are around half a global hectare, or 1.25 acres - often not even enough to provide for basic food, shelter and sanitation, the report said. ("Mankind Using Earth's Resources Faster than Replenished.")
Where some people have so much food, it seems surprising that others have so little. When it come to giving, humans are not naturals at it. It is clear that even though some people have more than they need to survive, they do not give much to let other people do the same. Many people fail to see how population and consumption have close effects. “...Regional consumption patterns amplify the environmental impact of a population, making the two factors (consumption and population) difficult to evaluate separately.” (Zehner). Zehner makes a point that shows that because people are causing the huge difference in food consumption, there is a very small margin to prove that population and consumption have no ties. If the whole planet was educated on how to better their way of eating, both for them and for others, then there would be less of an imbalance between countries, making it easier to regulate population growth. Two studies done on different sides of the planet came with the same results. Gunnar Vitterso, a Norwegian scientist, ran a study with people buying organic or non-organic foods. He began with the statistics from 2000 versus 2013, running those through the statistics of age and gender. He then surveyed and found six common barriers for reasons that they did not buy organic foods. Access, price, information, benefits, quality, and labeling. One of the more prominent out of those is information. Several people have no idea how organic foods are better compared to non-organic foods, which makes it easier to buy the cheaper, better looking foods. Another group of scientists (Verain) that did the same survey in the US came out with similar results. Educating people on how organic foods can be better for humans can help sustain the environment of the planet they live on. Educating people on the benefits to nature and humanity can help change the way they see food and the waste that comes from it.
Keeping the planet clean is in humanity's best interest, but not just eating healthier can change this. Renewable energy can help keep the planet healthy. “Human activity is overloading our atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions, which trap heat, steadily drive up the planet’s temperature, and create significant and harmful impacts on our health, our environment, and our climate.” ("Benefits of Renewable Energy Use."). Humans need to clean up their act, not only for themselves, but for the other organisms on the planet. Not only can the problems of overloading cause humans to leave the planet, it can change the whole dynamic of human society. Most people have read a book like, The Giver, or watched a show like, The 100, where humans have to be under watchful eyes to keep them from destroying themselves without trying. Of course most of these stories have a happy ending, but in reality, Earth cannot hold humans for much longer. Educating people on how population and sustainability can help keep the Earth safe for everything living on its surface, could change the way humans look at what they do and waste. Cleaning the planet and working to keep it clean can change the outlook on tomorrow.
Education is something people think about in kids and teenagers, believing that after all those years in school there is nothing left to learn. This is where people are wrong. Humans can learn all sorts of things as they get older, including how to sustain the planet and humankind’s life on this Earth. Educating people on population growth, consumption rates, and the future of our planet can change the way we live and lengthen our time on this Earth.
Works Cited
"Benefits of Renewable Energy Use." Union of Concerned Scientists. Web. 27 May 2015.
"China’s Gender Imbalance Crisis ‘Most Serious In The World,’ Direct Result Of One-Child Policy." The Inquisitr News. Web. 20 May 2015. <http://www.inquisitr.com/1774295/chinas-gender-imbalance-crisis-most-serious-in-the-world-direct-result-of-one-child-policy/>
Gutierrez, David. "Supporting World Population at U.S. Consumption Rates Would Require Five Earths." Natural News 26 Mar. 2008. Web. 29 Apr. 2015. <http://www.naturalnews.com/022890.html#>.
Guy-Allen, Clea. "The World's 10 Hungriest Countries." Global Citizen. Web. 25 May 2015.
"Life Expectancy." Our World in Data. Web. 20 May 2015.
Lutz, Wolfgang, Sanderson, Warren, Scherbov, Sergei. The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Development. London: Earthscan, 2004. Print.
Main, Douglas. "Even a Pandemic Wouldn’t Create a 'Sustainable' Population, Study Says."NewsWeek 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Apr. 2015. <http://www.newsweek.com/even-pandemic-wouldnt-create-sustainable-population-study-says-280338>.
"Mankind Using Earth's Resources Faster than Replenished." The Independent 25 Nov. 2009. Web. 29 Apr. 2015. <http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/mankind-using-earths-resources-faster-than-replenished-1827047.html>.
NCSL, 2015; Guttmacher Institute, 2015; Powered by StateNet
Nierenberg, Danielle. "Is Organic Food Better for You?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com. Web. 24 May 2015.
"Price Differences: Organic Versus Non-Organic; Store Versus Farmers' Market." Price Differences: Organic Versus Non-Organic; Store Versus Farmers' Market. Web. 24 May 2015.
Robinson, Warren. "Population and Sustainability." Resources Magazine. Print. http://www.rff.org/Publications/Resources/Pages/182-Commentary.aspx
"United States Census Bureau." Population Clock. Web. 25 May 2015.
US News. U.S.News & World Report. Web. 25 May 2015.
Verain, Muriel, Hans Dagevos, and Gerrit Antonides. "Sustainable Food Consumption: Product Choice or Curtailment." Appetite (2015). Web. 29 Apr. 2015.
Vitterso, Gunnar, and Torvald Tangeland. "The role of consumers in transitions towards sustainable food consumption. The case of organic food in Norway." Journal of Cleaner Production 92 (2015): 91+. Academic OneFile. Web. 2 June 2015.
Zehner, Ozzie. The Environmental Politics of Population and Overpopulation. Digital image. Http://www.academia.edu/879574/The_Environmental_Politics_of_Population_and_Overpopulation . 1 Jan. 2012. Web.
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