World faces overpopulation 'disaster' as number of people is set to rise by 75 million EACH YEAR
- Global population is expected to peak at 9.5bn in 2075
- Annual rise is the equivalent of entire UK population
No way everyone could fit in Texas?
According to the U.N. Population Database, the world's population in 2010 will be 6,908,688,000. The landmass of Texas is 268,820 sq mi (7,494,271,488,000 sq ft).
So, divide 7,494,271,488,000 sq ft by 6,908,688,000 people, and you get 1084.76 sq ft/person. That's approximately a 33' x 33' plot of land for every person on the planet, enough space for a town house.
Given an average four person family, every family would have a 66' x 66' plot of land, which would comfortably provide a single family home and yard -- and all of them fit on a landmass the size of Texas. Admittedly, it'd basically be one massive subdivision, but Texas is a tiny portion of the inhabitable Earth.
Such an arrangement would leave the entire rest of the world vacant. There's plenty of space for humanity
Someone is suffering from the "Open Space Delusion", and this indicates the person making this argument has little (aka: zero) familiarity with the ideas and science of ecological carrying capacity. Any ecologist can tell you that it is not the number of a certain species a geographically discreet area can contain, it is the number that it can sustain.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify this point further, imagine a national park in Africa and its carrying capacity for lions. Although the enormous measured areas of a large reserve might allow us to physically squeeze hundreds of thousands or even millions of lions into such a park, to sustain even small numbers of lions, there must be vast game herds with populations large enough to allow a harvestable surplus of zebra and wildebeest. These vast game herds, in turn, require enormously greater expanses of grasslands to sustain their grazing and seasonal migrations, along with adequate supplies of water. As a result, approximately 250 square kilometers of "open-space" are required to support a small population of about fifteen adult lions and their young. Thus, to suggest that millions of lions might occupy a reserve simply because its mathematical dimensions can physically accommodate their bodies would constitute a gross misrepresentation of biospheric reality." (Randolph Femmer, What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet, 2010)
Human beings are no different -- we have "footprints" that extend far beyond our feet.
Putting aside considerations of what quality of life 6.8 billion people clumped together in Texas would experience, the true impact of one person living in a detached suburban-style home is much greater than using the space and resources existent on that one small parcel of land. For example, all 6.8 billion Texans would still need to expropriate land for food production; find energy; utilize resources to construct their homes, clothes, cars and consumer goods. They would still need to dispose of the feces, food scraps, carbon emissions, mercury pollution and other wastes of 6.8 billion humans.
It may be intellectually pleasing to imagine 6.8 billion people voluntarily living in Texas -- while the rest of the world went wild and free -- but the idea only works if the people are equivalent to cardboard cut-outs. It fails utterly when they are living, breathing human beings.
To examine the Open Space Delusion further, let us move to another example -- reindeer on St. Paul Island.
"In a classic study of a “boom-and-bust” population explosion Scheffer (1951) followed a population of reindeer on St. Paul Island, Alaska from 1910 to 1950. The island had no wolves, predators, or major competitors so that the reindeer population exhibited approximately 28 years of relatively unrestricted and unfettered growth.
The herd’s initial phase of exponential growth, however, was followed by a catastrophic die-off or collapse in which 99% of the herd died out by the close of the study. It is important to recognize that the herd occupied less than one-tenth of one percent of the area that remained theoretically available as their collapse began, so that the die-off took place even as “vast amounts of open space” remained seemingly available." (Randolph Femmer, What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet, 2010)