To Robert Sulnick’s piece highlighting population as an integral part of the climate change discussion, I would add that population is the centerpiece and source of the ecological problems facing our planet: Climate change and pollution are merely the expected results of an out-of-control population.
Imagine, if you will, 7.5 billion chimpanzees running around the planet, eating everything in sight, decimating ecosystems, and, literally, throwing their excrement everywhere. Horrible image, I know, but that’s pretty much what we do. We are, after all, The Third Chimpanzee (chimps, bonobos and humans) as Jared Diamond’s book describes so well. The actual planetary population of chimps is about 300,000; bonobos about 50,000; orangutans 77,000, and about 105,000 gorillas. Homo sapiens sapiens tips the scale at 7.5 billion, totally out of balance with biology and ecology. We have already created this horrible ecological disaster, and we have been in the midst of it since 1804 (when planetary population reached 1 billion).
Future projections are that our population will grow to our planet’s “maximum carrying capacity” of about 10 billion-12 billion individuals and then level off. “Level off” is a kind of benign term for the 3 billion-4 billion more people who will be living in abject poverty, will starve, and who will suffer the resurgence of vast epidemics, as well as premature death, and the terror of increased warfare and dictatorship as we fight for ever scarcer natural resources.