Future Population Trends
Lea Stretz & Andrew Wilson
The Earth’s
population is growing incredibly fast. By 2050, we there will be more than 9.7
billion humans living on the planet, compared to the 7.6 billion we have today.
However, such exponential population growth comes with problems; we wont have
enough resources to sustain so much life. As Malia Brown stated, the population
grew 5 billion people in just 50 years, between 1950 to 2000, when it took 300
years to grow just 1 billion between 1700 and 1900. This vast evolution is
mainly due to a globalization of the population and longer life expectancies
then ever before. In Robertson’s text, we read about why it is important to
think of the future and how we will feed and sustain our growing population.
Currently, the
majority of the population lives in urban areas, and that is only becoming
truer due to urbanization. Those urban areas will be soon saturated, and people
will have to move to rural areas, destroying agriculture and wildlife resources.
Natural energy sourcing is important to explore and improve as well as new
sustainable technologies for building and powering homes and infrastructure.
The lack of fresh
drinking water is perhaps one of the most pressing issues facing our population
today. Our massive population’s contributions to climate change are causing sea
levels to rise and fresh drinking water to dry up. Cape Town, South Africa will
be the first modern, major city to completely exhaust their fresh water supply.
The city is putting in place restrictions on water consumption, and we must
quickly find new ways to source fresh water to Cape Town, as the restrictions
will ultimately only temporarily help the problem, but will never solve it.
Finding the urban
infrastructure of the future is crucial and should be one of our first concerns
as the population continues to grow. Perhaps looking back to times when we
contributed far less toxins to the environment is the answer. We can’t stop the
population from growing, but we can change how we consume and produce.
WOW! You are so right when you write, "...the urban infrastructure of the future is crucial." Yes, it absolutely is so and your suggeston of looking back to past times, when we used less checicals is aa great suggestions. Yes, we mst reflect before we move forward. Your image of the dark earth, on the dark background is moody and dark.... which we don't want the future to be... it is so thought provoking, all those 9.7 billion people concentrated in those few areas.... well done!
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