Measure growth in prosperity’s terms


Can humanity survive its continued growth in population? Joel Cohen explores the issue in The New York Times as global population is set to hit the seven billion mark. “Henceforth we need to measure our growth in prosperity, not by the sheer number of people who inhabit the earth,” Cohen says.

Categories: Demographics, population
John de Rosier

2 Responses

  1. Victor Blackthorne says:

    The continued growth in population is why all of the efforts at dealing with greenhouse gases are nothing more than efforts to push off today’s problems to another generation. In a world where people starve the Liberal interest in protecting the environment will fall to population pressure.

  2. iknowtruthismine says:

    Seven billion of us peeing in the closed ecosystem we call Earth is already showing negative impacts on the health of the planet, and increasing numbers, especially in a world where the current have-nots, are reaching for their share of the pie, are only going to make things worse. When I was born, there were less than 3 billion of us on the planet, and we were already extracting finite resources at a rate that was leading us toward trouble. Now we have many nations trying to “catch up” to our wanton waste and misuse of resources that are spewing hundreds of millions of years of stored carbon back into the atmosphere, changing the climate, decreasing arable land, stressing fresh water to its limits, and quite possibly raising the global temperature to the point where the oceans give up millions of years of stored methane (in methyl-hydrates) in an explosive end to survivability at all. We need to lower the population to a point where we can parasitically exist on the skin of our host (Earth) without killing it. A comprehensive study done by a cross section of the best minds in many fields determined that number to be 2 billion, and if we are unwilling (and we seem to be just that) to do so, we are going to commit species suicide sooner than you might think.