By Victor Greto
7 billion. That’s a lot of people – and a lot of drama.
In less than the time it took you to open up your newspaper and read and ponder these words and graphics, in places around the world 266 children were born and 108 people died. By this time next year, there will be 83 million more people on the planet.
It took human beings hundreds of thousands of years to reach the first billion, more than two centuries ago. It only took us 130 years to reach the second, in 1930, and a mere 30 years to reach the third billion in 1960. Since we reached 4 billion in 1974, we’ve gone up a billion every dozen years or so.
Delaware may not be all that big, but our small American slice of earth seems pretty big when we drive across the United States, or if we take a 14-hour plane ride to Australia.
But is it big enough for 7 billion people? How about 8 billion people in 2023? Nearly 11 billion by 2050?
It depends on what part of the world you live in, said Dr. Bruce Allison, professor of environmental studies at Wesley College. Allison worked in Niger, Africa and Turkey to stabilize food production systems during the late 1980s and 1990s and studies the demographics of sustainability.
When the United States doubles its population by the end of the present century, to more than 600 million, we’ll probably be fine. We should have enough resources to sustain us.
“It’s not the numbers necessarily,” Allison said. “It’s where they’re located that matters. The problem is in the Middle East and North Africa, where you have water stress” – that is, people who don’t have access to at least 50 liters of water per day.
Forget oil, at least for a brief shining moment; when there gets to be this many people, it’s really about nitty-gritty things.
“There’s a lot of population growth around the equator, and there are not enough resources,” Allison said. “What you’re going to have with water and growth, you’re going to see a lot of wars, escalation of civil and across-the-border wars, in both Africa and the Middle East.”
Something’s got to give. We tend to think short-term, but think about it this way, Allison suggests. How long would it take for a pond to fill in one month if you kept doubling, say, the number of lily pads floating on it? If on Dec. 30 the pond is only half full, the next day it would be completely covered.
That’s one way to look at our increasing population. The more people there are, the more people there are to reproduce and take up resources and suck the life out of the slowly shrinking earth-pond. And the less time we have to keep putting off hard decisions.
There is some good news.
The rate of natural increase of births is actually much less today than it’s been for a while, at 1.2 percent (that is, 1.2 births per thousand people).
The leaders in population today are China, at 1.35 billion, India, at 1.24 billion, followed by the U.S. at a comparatively paltry 312 million.
But by 2050, India will have overtaken China, and Nigeria will have surpassed the U.S.
Nigeria? Yes. As any focused scan of the reams of data provided by the Population Reference Bureau indicates, most of the growth in world population is occurring in third-world countries with the least resources. They also have the greatest percentage of young people – in some countries as high as 50 percent of their populations, including Niger, Uganda, Mali, Angola, Zambia and Burundi.
By contrast, Europe and many first-world countries are closer to zero growth – or even negative growth.
The countries with the largest percentages of older people live in developed countries, including Japan, Germany (whose population is actually decreasing), Italy, Greece, Sweden and Portugal.
But what matters for the health of the earth is where the major growth is occurring. In Africa, the rate is at 2.4 percent, while in the Americas it’s only at 1 percent; in all of Asia it’s at 1.1 percent; Europe, however, is nearly at zero.
Here’s another way to look at it: women around the world average 2.5 children each, but they average about 4.5 in third-world countries.
A hint of good news, at least for the Middle East, is that the percentage of young people there is declining and will continue to decline.
The discrepancy between first- and third-world countries also is reflected in the statistic that about half of the world’s people live on less than $2 a day.
One of the main answers for this is education, Allison said.
Third-world countries tend to be both agrarian and community-based, he said, and with medicine their lives are extended and their infant mortality rate is lowered.
“They don’t need eight kids anymore to make sure they get four to help on the farm and take care of the parents. So, demographers are anticipating we’re going to get that education across and have some family planning.”
With the pond half full, at least that’s one of the hopes.
WITH 7 BILLION PEOPLE ON THE EARTH….
- If the average height of people is 5 feet 6 inches, and we lay down toe to head to toe, we’d run along for nearly 7.3 million miles, enough to go around the equator almost 293 times.
- If the average weight of a human being is about 156 pounds, the weight of the world comes to a tad fewer than 1.1 trillion pounds. We’re still a lot less weighty than the U.S. debt, but let’s not even try to estimate how much human waste 1.1 trillion pounds of human beings produce.
- 7 billion people would turn Delaware into one huge Woodstock concert. If the people of the world suddenly appeared here, they would be able to have their own space – but not all that much. If you take the First State’s 1.25 million acres and divvy it out 7 billion ways, you’d get 5,600 people per acre. That’s enough space to move a bit here and just a bit there, but not quite a square yard for each of us, since there are only 4,480 square yards in a single acre. Then again, if parents held their children….
- The U.S. is about 2.3 billion acres. If the world’s population came here, that comes to about 3.1 people per acre, or about a third of an acre for each of us.
- 7 billion is a big number but that’s nothing compared to the estimated 10 quintillion insects (that’s a “10” with 18 zeroes to the right of it) there are. The insect estimate was done by Dr. E.O. Wilson of Harvard University.