The Numbers Game - Myths, Truths and Half-Truths About Human Population Growth and the Environment.
To ignore population as a central issue while talking about sprawl, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, agricultural land and animal habitat, global warming and many other crucial environmental issues - is to deny reality. Yet it's one that the green movement ignores for fear of alienating a public that may associate family planning with abortion or see attempts to curb immigration as racist, but the numbers of people added to the planet each year roll back any progress made by conservation measures.
Only in recent history has humankind discovered the means with which to increase the average human lifespan and reduce infant mortality rate: sanitation practices and modern medicines. With these discoveries, we have multiplied our numbers faster than ever before, going from 1 billion to 2 billion in only 123 years, such a brief moment in human history. As is the nature of unchecked growth, the momentum accelerated and the world went from 5 billion people to 6 billion in only 12 short years. The balance of nature has been drastically upset and the environment is already paying the price. The good news is that mankind has made another discovery, this one to check birth rates: modern contraceptives. This, coupled with the desire to have fewer children, (since now so many children are living beyond infancy) has led to a decline in birth rates, starting in the 1960s. Abstinence, delaying of marriage, education, contraceptives, empowerment of women, and the funding of family planning and reproductive health the world over will alleviate the population momentum that will result from 2 billion young people entering their child-bearing years. ...
"It's not because people started breeding like rabbits.
It's that they stopped dying like flies."
... Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute
The world is growing by more than 76 million people a year. At the current rate of growth, even accounting for a continual decrease in the growth rate, the world population is headed for double digits within 50 years. Every 20 minutes, the world adds another 3,500 human lives but loses one or more entire species of animal or plant life - at least 27,000 species per year. The world population has doubled in the last 40 years. It took just 12 years to leap from 5 billion to 6 billion. It took about 18 centuries for the earth to reach its first one billion inhabitants. The world is adding a city the size of Los Angeles every two weeks.
Birth rates are falling worldwide but death rates are declining even faster. A tiny fraction - only 7 percent - of the world's people live in countries where population is not growing.
If fertility remained at current levels, the population would reach the absurd figure of 296 billion in just 150 years. Even if it dropped to 2.5 children per woman and then stopped falling, the population would still reach 28 billion.
1.2 billion people worldwide are living on $1.00 a day or less.
http://www.overpopulation.org/