Population How do we deal with in the 21st century, Environmental


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Population How do we deal with in the 21st century

Population How do we deal with in the 21st century The mere size of the number is staggering, enough to make anyone wonder of the doomsday predictions are correct. Today the world population has 5982 million people and growing at an exponential rate of 1.4% per year (United Nations, 1999). This means that by the year 2010 there will be 901 million more people to feed, clothe, and house. That is 5982 million people X 0.014 = 93 million, an average increase of 1.6 million people a week, 227,000 a day, 9400 an hour. At this rate it takes about: 5 days to add people equal to the number of Americans killed in all US wars. 9 months to add 75 million people, the number killed in the bubonic plague epidemic of the fourteenth century, the world's greatest disaster. 12 years to add 1.17 billion people, the population of China in the mid-1990s. Since 1960, the number of Americans has increased from 179 to 270 million. By 2025, that number is projected to increase by 65 million, the equivalent of adding another two states the size of California. Unless something is done, the world's population is projected to be 8054 million people by 2025 and could triple to 14 billion by the next century. Population: How do we deal with it in the 21st century. The pessimistic view led by Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, states that as a result of our population size, consumption patterns and technology choices, we have surpassed the planet's carrying capacity. "Our ability to sustain ourselves in a habitat for a long period of time. And that the growing pressure on the world food resources point to hungry times ahead as Third World population continue to explode." The world may be at its biological limit, and the only hope lies in family planning and a continued search for new ways to produce food" (Miami Herald, Jan 1999). Mr. Brown's concerns about population pressure are far from new. Most people associate these concerns with the name of Thomas Malthu, whose essay on the principle of population, published in 1798, argue that food production could grow only at an arithmetical or linear rate, but population exhibit exponential growth. In contrast to linear growth, exponential growth generates huge number in a very short period of time. Because of exponential growth, a population can reach a habitat's carrying capacity in a surprising short period of time. Malthu thought famine must ensue: a world of growing chaos, anarchy, disease, and corruption as hungry refugees surge across borders and sail on rubber tubes in unfriendly seas in search for food as nations fight over scarce resources. Humanitarian disasters such ass the one in Rwanda are a herald of the new era of resource limits. But if these apocalyptic prophecies come true, it will not be simple, man has been too fruitful and has been multiplying too fast. Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa before the current civil erupted. Its Hutu and Tutsi people are battling over tribal hatred and political power, not for resources. Before the war, Rwanda was about to reap to a copious harvest when the killing started. In Haiti, as well as in Cuba, the situation is similar not prompted by lack of resources but rather by political and dictatorial regimes. Recent scientific studies confirm that the Earth's basic resources are vastly greater that what are needed to feed the10 billion people who are almost certain to inhabit the Earth by the middle of this century (Ralph Hardy, et al). The real threat is not that the Earth will run out of land, topsoil, or water, but that nations will fail to pursue the economic trade and research policies that can increase the production of food, limit environmental damage and ensure that resources reach the people who need them. Indeed, embracing the myth of environmental scarcity could ironically prompt governments to adopt policies that virtually guarantee that the apocalyptic future that environmentalist foretell really does come true (US News and World Report Sep 1998). We are living in an unprecedented time in human history. The Earth has never witnessed a period of such explosive growth in human population. While the more-developed nations are experiencing human fertility rates that are near their replacement level of fertility, many less-developed nations are experiencing human fertility rates that are two to three times grater than their replacement level of fertility. Given the limitations on the earth's ability to sustain human population, many population experts are concerned that fertility rates is in less-developed nations will not decline far enough soon enough to prevent economic and ecological consequences. So how do we deal with the population in the 21st century? When we call for help, we normally expect government to respond and to require or persuade people to act in a responsible manner. Our calls for action reflect a belief that only government has the political authority and financial resources to develop and implement successful public policies to protect our concerns. For our purpose, we consider public policies to be those things that government do or decide no to do. Since help normally comes from what government does, it is important therefore to understand how policymakers typically perceive population problems and make decisions about them. For policymakers, concerns about population growth are only one of many issues that deserve attention. The amount of attention that can be devoted to a single issue is not only limited but also subject to pressure from individuals and groups advocating a wide variety of competing goals. As the dissonance from the Cairo 1994 World Conference on Population and Development demonstrated, world convocations have a way of getting hijacked in one of two directions: into paralyzing debates on narrowly focused issues such as abortions, or diverting and overly global discourse on whether the world is going to run out of food, space or breathable air (Carrington, 1994). Public policy does not reflect a holistic perspective; rather, it reveals considerable fragmentation at all levels of government. Hence, there are always contrasting views about the best war to achieve a solution or even hoe to approach the problem. Can we agree? As Time magazine reported "The Cairo Conference on Population and Development was supposed to be a landmark meeting, a harmonious gathering of nations to establish the principle that the key to curbing population growth lies in giving women more control over their own health and reproduction. Instead the conference was on danger of falling apart before it even got started. Although many issues, in fact, more than 90% of a draft document has been agreed upon by representatives of 180 United Nations member countries. The remaining 10% contained some bombshells. The Cairo conference on Population and Development was the culmination of multinational efforts that began twenty years ago, in August 1974, when the international community met in Bucharest, Romania for the first intergovernmental political meeting on population. The major achievement of the Bucharest Conference, in additional to focussing worldwide attention on the subject of population through the United Nations, designated World Population Year 1974, was the adoption by consensus of the World Population Plan of Action. This document, which became one of the major international sectoral development strategies, is today the most comprehensive international statement ever adopted on population and its interrelationships with socio-economic development. The plan has serve as the guidepost for the formulation and implementation of population policies and programs by national governments and has been the basic framework for technical cooperation in population among countries. As a conceptualization of population issues and their integral relationship with economic and social factors the plan is successful in perceiving the population problems. Certainly, it would be hard to find a better measure of its success than the fact that, among developing countries today, there is a universal commitment to population policies and to programs to implement them. Bibliography:

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