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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rapa" data-source="post: 716871" data-attributes="member: 212">It's an old question. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus said population would race ahead of food supply, but he wasn't the first. The early Christian writer Tertullian said (around AD 200, in De Anima): "We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us... Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning of the human race becoming excessive in numbers."That was when the population of the whole planet was maybe 100 million or so. We reached the first billion mark by about 1850. By 1950, it was about 2.5 billion. In less than one short lifetime, this figure doubled. It passed six billion in the late 1990s. Note that: humans took 150,000 years to get to the first billion. The most recent billion arrived in just 12 years.Nobody knows how many people the planet could hold. The UN predicted this week that fertility would decline and longevity would increase until the global population stabilised at nine billion in 2300. Some optimists have argued that the planet could support 1,000 billion; others look at what is happening right now and wish that it had stayed at ancient Roman levels.Joel Cohen, the Rockefeller University population biologist, argues in a 1995 book (How Many People can the Earth Support?) that it isn't a question like "How old are you?" which only has one answer at any one time. Cohen argues that you could fit one billion people each a metre apart, into a field 32km square. So everybody in the world would fit easily into Yorkshire. But it takes 900 tonnes of water to grow a tonne of wheat, and there is only so much water, so much land and so much sunshine. Human action has its own "ecological footprint"; there has to be so much land to provide food, clothing, shelter, medicines, building material, fresh air and clean water for any one human. It takes, according to some calculations, 2.1 hectares of land and water to provide for one average human. The important word is: average. The American footprint is about 10 hectares. So if all humans lived at US standards, we'd need another four Earths.<a href="http://pnews.org/ArT/YuR/HNeed.shtml" target="_blank">http://pnews.org/ArT/YuR/HNeed.shtml</a></blockquote>

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