Planet Earth is 8,000 miles wide and 24,000 miles circumference. Considering we humans are at a population of 6.8 billion people, and adding a million and a half people every week, things are starting to look crowded. It’s time our species acknowledged that we have an overpopulation problem. We must start living a different way – its no longer a question of maintaining our standard of living, but of surviving on a planet that is losing its basic ecological infrastructure. Difficult questions need to be asked: do we need population control? How can we attain zero population growth? What are the causes, the effects, and the solutions to the exponential human birth rate, and how do we overcome the overpopulation problem?

The hominid family (that’s us) has inhabited Earth for five to six million years, according to the fossil record. Hominids evolved from genus to genus several times before the homo genus appeared a million and a half to two million years ago. We continued to evolve as a species before reaching homo sapiens – sensible human. This occurred approximately 150,000 years ago.

Hominids have populated planet Earth for five to six million years. In contrast, Mother Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the Universe is 13.7 billion years old. During the time of the hominids we have been almost exclusively hunters and gatherers. Likewise, for the 150,000 years that we home sapiens have been around, we too have been hunters and gatherers. It was only 12,000 years ago that we began domesticating plants and animals. Since then, we’ve depended upon agriculture to fuel our population growth – this is known as the Agrarian Age.