Overdevelopment Overpopulation Overshoot

Please take 2 minutes to read the below.

If you agree in concept with the cascade presented, please enter your name and email to join the growing number of individuals worldwide WHO SEE THAT WE ARE ALL IN TROUBLE and WHO ARE SEEKING TO TAKE ACTION at the individual, household, neighborhood, city, state, and national level.

1. Exponential Population Growth

In 1800, there were 1 billion people on the planet. Soon after 1900 – one hundred years later – this number had doubled to 2 billion. Fifty years later it was 4 billion . Today there are more than 7 billion people on the planet with predictions of 10 or more billion by 2100. If you were born after the 1920s, you, me, we are all part of exponential population growth.

e.g. it’s not just Africa or India or China … it’s all of us.

2. Earth’s “Carrying Capacity”

Some state that the “carrying capacity” of the earth – or the continuing ability of the earth to produce enough food to feed all mouths without chemical fertilizers and genetically modified crops – is sufficient to sustain about 3.5 billion people. Today, we’re more than twice this number. A good thing or no?

Without fertilizers and pesticides – allowing for a doubling of agricultural outputs in turn allowing for a doubling of the world’s food – there never could have been a doubling of the world’s population. These fertilizers and pesticides have run off into water ways resulting in “dead zones” such as the northern Gulf of Mexico and have been proven as contributors to cancer.

3. Environmental Degradation

So when it gets cold people need heat. And when they get hungry, people need to cook. In either situation, people burn what they’ve got … be it wood, coal, oil, gas, animal dung, or Uranium. Along with eating and keeping warm, in the drive to become more “western” and “wealthy”, less developed countries seek to industrialize in hopes of “developing” more jobs and greater numbers of consumers, who in turn produce ever greater amounts of trash.

Suffice to say that all of the above, plus our day to day exhaling and even the exhaust from the vehicles that take us to and from work, has resulted in unsupportable amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. This CO2 has begun to impact the global climate. Likewise as this CO2 is filtered and partially absorbed by the world’s oceans, they in turn are becoming acidic.

4. Massive Extinction

Certain studies have stated that the above behavior of OUR homo-sapien species has over the last 100 years resulted in the extinction of upwards of 40% of ALL the other species on the planet both plant and animal. When talking about “invasive species”, maybe we should stop for a second and consider our very own.