@Jennifer1984 Said 
Having seven billion people on the planet, in itself, isn't necessarily a cause for concern. There is plenty of room for us all. The entire population of the world could quite easily fit into France, and the earth has plenty of available resources to feed and water us all. So much for space and sustenance.
The problem lies in humankind's desire for resources... for wealth, property and consumer goods. That's where it all starts to go pear shaped. But even then, the planet still has massive resources which could sustain twice the present population, if only we weren't so greedy.
Estimates vary, but according to the UN, the population will reach 8 billion by 2025, India will overtake China as the most populous country on earth and although countries in Africa, South East Asia and the Indian sub-continent will continue to experience population growth, European countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain may even experience population reduction.
One of the central keys to the whole question of population is, of course, contraception.... that goes without saying.... but other factors such as the reduction in the infant mortality rate also contribute. When the global population reached 5 billion in 1987, one in nine babies didn't reach the age of five. Today that figure is one in sixteen. That is a remarkable and wonderful achievement but what it means is that more babies born are likely to reach adulthood and produce children of their own. Is that a major problem..? On the surface of it, yes, but I will come back to this in a minute.
At the other end of the scale, people are living longer, and that too is a marvellous achievement. Of course, we want these things to continue and even improve. It is a perfectly natural human desire to have a family, and also to live as long as possible. Those desires cannot (and should not) be constrained (notwithstanding that contraception is a means of family planning, rather than enforced restraint).
But getting back to infant mortality, it is believed by some that if we continue to improve the infant mortality rate, that will be beneficial to stabilising the population in the long term.
Brendan Cox, Save the Children’s director of policy and advocacy, said: “It may seem illogical that saving children’s lives is the best way of stabilising the global population, but the evidence is overwhelming.
In the poorest countries, where parents are often petrified that their children will die and leave them to fend for themselves, it’s understandable that they would choose to have larger families.
We must help to give them another choice. As we bring child mortality down, parents will feel more confident that most of their children will survive and have smaller families as a result.”
This strategy appears to be that, when families in the poorer nations realise that they don't have to produce so many children in order to survive, they will embrace contraception more readily and once that is achieved it will become more culturally acceptable and widespread, thus... at the very least... slowing down population expansion.
But to apportion blame only to the undeveloped nations is wrong. We in the west also have to be aware of our own culpability.
Dr Mark Whitehead, a reader at Aberystwyth University’s Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, said there is a stark contrast between the developed and the developing worlds.
“If everybody in the world lived as we live in the UK, we would need two planets to sustain us. If everybody lived as people live in the USA, it would take five planets.
To apportion blame in terms of population growth is missing some of the point, particularly in terms of resource use. We need to be paying much more attention to figures like our ecological footprint, rather than seven billion people on the planet. The fact that more people now live in urban rather than rural environments is more significant than the seven billion figure, in coming decades it will be that more people live in urban slums. It’s clear that if you want population growth to stabilise and be sustainable, the eradication of poverty is the key goal.”
So, according to all this, it is not so much the figure of 7 billion people that is the problem, it is a combination of factors and they are caused by, and affect, different regions and peoples.
Where we go from here is all our responsibility. It is a global problem, and it will take a global resolution to sort it out.
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Nov 02, 2011 @ 00:36:01
. Trey Songz would be in the unemployment ranks. 
