In this post I will talk about the idea of overpopulation versus overconsumption. When you really start to think about it I believe the world is both overpopulated and is over consuming its resources. These two terms however a distinctly related, and must be talked about together.

Overpopulation

If the world is overpopulated each individual will therefore have to consume less for the system to be sustainable. Since the planet is a finite resource, there are simply only so many resources to go around. To make this clear one can use an analogy. Try to think of the earth as a large circular cake. Imagine now that every individual on earth is getting an equal slice of the cake and the cake is cut into approximately 6.8 billion equal pieces. It is logical to think that the more people that are born (or in this case come to the party) the smaller each slice must get to accommodate each new person. As you can see as the world population increases, the amount each person can consume must decrease. Today the world population is nearing 6.8 billion (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=global+populatio) and is expected to near 8 billion by the year 2025. This means that each person must keep consuming less and less to insure sustainability, however in reality we are actually consuming more putting ourselves into ecological debt.

A glimpse of the future?

http://www.senescence.info/society.html

Overconsumption

To understand the idea of overconsumption we can again turn back to the idea of the cake. Imagine now that western countries are the birthday boy/girl and are consuming a large portion of the cake greater than their equal allotted slice. This therefore, means that all of the other individuals must consume less and less, meaning their slice gets smaller. In today’s society with the growth of developing countries such as China, India and Brazil they are starting to demand a bigger and bigger slice of cake similar to that of western countries putting us into what is known as ecological debt. The concept of ecological debt is simple. The earth is a renewable resource, however when we are in a state of ecological debt we are using up the earth faster that it can renew itself. This is best described again for through an analogy. For example, say we put 100 dollars into a bank with an annual compound interest of 10 %. If each year we only take out 10 dollars, one could argue that this could continue forever. However currently we are taking out 15 dollars. Each year then the principle gets smaller and smaller meaning the interest gets less and less. If the earth resources are the 100 dollar principle we are in a sense indebting ourselves saying at some point we are going to take out less than the interesting we are accumulating allowing the principle to build back up to the 100 dollar point. One can see however that as the principle gets smaller and smaller it becomes more difficult to do this. This is an interesting article on ecological debt (http://jades.socioeco.org/en/lbavadam.php).

Overconsumption??

http://www.plu.edu/~hoodbs/deforestation/home.html

What can You Do?

Educate others and consume less. Family planning education needs to be implemented immediately in areas of growing population (especially the third world). Consume less; make an effort to use only what you need. Avoid large spending and instead focus on family and friends. You don’t need two of everything!

Vedio of The Week

Uncommon knowledge on Global Population and consumption check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7Y3MYXWPI