Nobody then really had any idea,there were few censuses.Leeuwenhoek started with an estimate that around a million people lived in Holland .Using maps and a little spherical geometry,he calculated that the inhabited land area of the planet was 13385 times large as Holland.It was hard to imagine the whole planet being densly populated as Holland which seemed crowded even then.Thus Leeuwenhoek concluded "there couldn't be more than 13.385 million people on earth ;a small number indeed compared with the 150 billion sperm cell of a single codfish.
The number of people does matter,of course.But how people consume resources matters a lot more.Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others.The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty :the slum dwellers in Delhi ,the subsistence farmers in Rwanda,while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.
The world bank has projected that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the global middle class,up from just 400 million in 2005 .That's a good thing.But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline powered cars at the same rate as now.Its too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born but not too late to change how they and rest of us will produce and consume food and energy .
In 1798 Thomas Malthus ,an English priest and economist stated that population necessarily grow faster than the food supply ,until war ,disease,and famine arrive to reduce the number of people.As it turned out the last plagues enough to put a dent in global population had already happened .
For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenial optimists,who believe that humanity will find ways to cope and improve its lot.History has so far favored the optimists,but history is no certain guide to the future.Neither is science.It can't predict the outcome of people vs planet . How many of us there will be and how we will live depend on choices we have yet to make .We may see to it that all children are nourished ,educated to solve problems could change the future significantly.An un check population growth could lead to famine !
Seven billion of us already ,nine billion in 2045.Let's hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
The number of people does matter,of course.But how people consume resources matters a lot more.Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others.The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty :the slum dwellers in Delhi ,the subsistence farmers in Rwanda,while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.
The world bank has projected that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the global middle class,up from just 400 million in 2005 .That's a good thing.But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline powered cars at the same rate as now.Its too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born but not too late to change how they and rest of us will produce and consume food and energy .
In 1798 Thomas Malthus ,an English priest and economist stated that population necessarily grow faster than the food supply ,until war ,disease,and famine arrive to reduce the number of people.As it turned out the last plagues enough to put a dent in global population had already happened .
For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenial optimists,who believe that humanity will find ways to cope and improve its lot.History has so far favored the optimists,but history is no certain guide to the future.Neither is science.It can't predict the outcome of people vs planet . How many of us there will be and how we will live depend on choices we have yet to make .We may see to it that all children are nourished ,educated to solve problems could change the future significantly.An un check population growth could lead to famine !
Seven billion of us already ,nine billion in 2045.Let's hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
