Population and the Environment

One of the big things I always seem to come back to when I am looking into all the bad things that are going on with our environment these days it that there are just too many humans! Humans do lots of bad things for the environment but one of the major issues with this is that there are just so many of us. If there were far fewer of us then the bad things we do would have a much smaller impact. 

With that thought in mind I was very interested with an article I saw in the Oct 31, 2011 article of TIME called Head Count, which talked about how the world population just hit 7 Billion, and what impacts it is having. Mainly it was a lot of interesting facts that relate to this very topic. I'll give you a few here, they are really interesting stuff!

1. In 1804 the world Population was 1 Billion. So in just over 200 years the world population has gone from 1 Billion to 7 Billion!!!

2. The world population is expected to go to 8 Billion in 14 years, and then 9 Billion in 18 years after that. Yikes!

3. In the history of the world there has been approximately 108 billion humans. That means the 7 billion alive today represent 6.5% of the total history of human population. That is a lot of humans on one planet at the same time!

4. If you put the world's current population in a population density equal to that of NYC, we would all fit in an area the size of Texas. This was actually kind of comforting in a way for me. I mean 7 Billion is way too many, but it put it in perspective that it didn't feel quite so big.

5. 19% of the world's population lives in China. It's scary to think China is one of the emerging industrial countries, and they all ready have rules in place to reduce population growth. That is scary!

6. 50.4% of humans are Male. I just thought it was interesting how balanced this was.

7. 73% of the worlds population doesn't use the internet. I get it when I think about it, but this was very surprising when I first read it. We need to increase this number so more people can read Saving Green :)

8. The US is the third most populated country at 310 million, behind China at 1.3 billion and India at 1.2 billion.