Growth Population

This is my second Action Project for my last term, Food For Thought. In this course we are studying in this unit is to see what a global food system looks like, and to understand the human and environmental impacts of this system. For this Action Project we had to choose a global issue that is happening in the world. We had to research a lot about our our issue and how to learn more about it. We had to find way to fix that issue and named three ways we could do that. We also had to find a way to address that issue that we are learning about. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was recording the project. Since I had to record something I made many mistakes but it all ended well. Please learn more about the project down below.

 

How many people can the earth hold? There are about 7.125 billion people living on Earth right now. Many Scientists think that the Earth can hold up 10 billion people. According to Live Scientist: “So 10 billion people is the uppermost population limit where food is concerned. Because it's extremely unlikely that everyone will agree to stop eating meat, Wilson thinks the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth based on food resources will most likely fall short of 10 billion.” My position is that I think too many people are being born in the world and soon the earth won’t have any more room for more people. One of the reasons why we have so many people here today is because many years ago people died much younger due to disease and lack of proper nutrition. Life expectancy was very short. Now people are much safer and healthier than they were before with food security. My solution is that we need to colonize other planets. In 2027 nine people will go to Mars and start a community. That community and others like it will have to grow dramatically. The development of food systems can be traced back to the origins of the production of food surpluses. These surpluses enabled the development of settled areas and we can use this on Mars.

We may have to have more than one earth by the rate humans are growing. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” This is a global issue because in the next 9 years the world population would be more than 11 million more than the earth can hold. This means soon there would have to be more than one earth.

Many civilizations had a growth problem but each one had a different way of fixing it. According to BBC News: China had a one-child rule. If they had a girl, sometimes the girl was killed or abandoned in order to get a boy. Other countries use ultrasound to abort girls and have boys. This is causing a population imbalance with too many men in some countries and not enough women. That may lower the birthrate. The earth had less people before because there were a lot more diseases like the Black Plague. After the Black Plague a lot of the people were dead and the food was bad. The Black Death it was caused by Yersinia pestis bacterium. The Black Plague first exploded in Europe between 1347 and 1351. According to Empires Of Food: “It’s likely that 10 percent of Europeans starved to death around the year 1316.63 Worse carnage lay ahead. In October 1347, a mere generation after the famine, the bubonic plague hatched in Sicily.” The estimated number of deaths was 75 million people. After that it got better since they made food better and finds ways for people not to get diseases. Now people are still dying from some diseases but less than it was before. What we can learn from history is that advances in food and health change the birth rate. Now we have cures that can help us with some a disease. According to the Empires Of Food book: “By growing and storing food surpluses, the monasteries became business, cultural, and financial centers, as well as dietary hubs. Monks were such noted businessmen that one medieval writer observed that, around one monastery, the River Seine was a channel for vessels that trade in many goods. Abbots signed trade agreements with other abbots. The monks at St. Denis, for example, had a long-term arrangement to buy salt, wine, and oil from their colleagues in Marseille.” What this quote means is that the monks fixed the food that caused so many deaths. They used that to preserve food and made it better to make the food healthier.

A couple of ways I have so we can reduce the population growth is Even some people will inhabit Mars that is only 9 people out of 7 billion people that won’t do anything to help the population be smaller. We need population control. Supplied can be sent to Mars for the people and more people can stay on Mars and other planets. People could try and make a rocket or something that can travel to Mars and back to earth more easily and faster. A last way to reduce the population growth is to have everyone educated or to focus on having every young person educated. Three ways to address the population growth is “provide universal access to safe and effective contraceptive options for both sexes.” “Guarantee education through secondary school for all, especially girls.” “Integrate lessons on population, environment, and development into school curricula at multiple levels.” People will say it will be expensive to educate and it will take too long to give the supplies to Mars. Yes it will be expensive but we could create robots to help us. We could also find away to make it shorter for the time to get to Mars. In the meantime people need to have less children.

Soon there would have to be two earths in order to withstand the population growth. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” My recommendation to achieve slowing population growth and finding new planets we must make it's a priority. My last thoughts are that we need hope for our earth because of how the population is growing. If we keep on making more and more people be born on earth the world might die of hunger and diseases.

WORKS CITED

Abhiprerna, Abhiprerna Smit. "10 Effective Ways to Control Population - List Crux." ListCrux. 31 Jan. 2016. Web. 02 May 2016.

Bryan Bryan. "Civilization and Economic Growth." Civilization and Economic Growth. Web. 02 May 2016.

"China to End One-child Policy and Allow Two." BBC News. NA, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 10 May 2016.

Cohen, Joel E. "June 2016." Discover Magazine. Web. 02 May 2016.

"Food Systems." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 10 May 2016.

Fraser, Evan D.G., Andrew, Rimas “Empires Of Food." Arrow, 2011. Print.

"Nine Population Strategies to Stop Short of 9 Billion." Worldwatch Institute. 11 July 20012. Web. 02 May 2016.

TechMediaNetwork, 2011. Web. 02 May 2016. 

Wolchover, Natalie. "How Many People Can Earth Support?” LiveScience.