who are population deniers, blame other factors than population for third world misery. Weld raises many points that I was able to really look at in a few different ways. Weld goes into detail on all twenty-one arguments and explains almost every aspect of population problems in her responses. The article was very helpful for this paper. MEADOWS Meadows is the author of a book called “Beyond the Limits”, which talks about the future of our planet in respect to such things as pollution, oil production, life expectancy, etc. Meadows provides several scenarios of what can happen to the Earth if the current trends continue, and they are not good. Here is an example of one of Meadows scenario in graph form: ________________________________________________________________________ In Meadows’ eyes, we as a planet have some bleak times in front of us if we don’t change our ways soon. ISSUE 1 HOW LONG CAN WE SUPPORT THE PLANET’S FOOD NEEDS? Ecologists at Cornell University have come up with some very interesting findings on this issue. They say that the Earth’s optimum population would be anything less than 2 billion people (200 million in the US). With the projections of the world population breaking 12 billion in 50 years, that is pretty scary. They say that if people cannot control the world’s population, it will be done through starvation and disease. One of the trends that they looked at for this information was the declining productivity of cropland and the availability of clean drinking water. The ecologists say that some of the effects can already be seen in China today. (Pimentel 1) I think that we as a society have gotten to the point where numbers don’t scare us any more. The above paragraph said that in 50 years, the world population is going to be over 12 billion people. Are we really aware of how much this is? The United States Census bureau has a population counter that they call th...
