Population…A Problem That Most of the World Simply Disregards

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Population…A Problem That Most of the World Simply Disregards

There are over Six Billion people inhabiting the planet earth today and that number is growing. “In the six seconds it takes you to read this sentence, eighteen more people will be added” (Ehrlich 9). The total population of the World, projected on October 23, 2001 at 6:28:09 pm GMT was 6,181,600,089 people (U.S. Bureau of the Census). Each hour there are 11,000 more mouths to feed; each year more than 95 million. Nevertheless, the world has hundreds of billions fewer tons of topsoil and hundreds of trillions fewer gallons of groundwater with which to grow food crops than it had in 1968.

Millions of people every year are dying because they are not getting enough food. You see the advertisements, and television programs showing the starving children in Africa and other developing nations: their pleading eyes with helplessness. National Geographic shows the images of tropical forests on fire, beaches strewn with garbage and sewage, and refugee camps filled with hungry people unable to produce enough food because there aren’t enough resources to support the world’s growing number of people.

These problem do not only exist in far away countries…drive in any large city, you will be overwhelmed with the number of drivers filling the freeways, grid locked any time of day. Visit downtown and see the hundreds of homeless people on street corners, and lined up around the block in front of the shelters for a warm meal. Our news is filled with the nation’s crime, violence, and drug abuse. Global warming is old news, but it is killing us, our ocean level is rising, and our crops are going dry. We are cautioned about the AIDS epidemic because it is everywhere,...

... middle of paper ...

...t needs to understand the problem at hand, and recognize its far-reaching consequences.

Works Cited

Bouvier, Leon. “The Census Bureau’s 1989 Projections of Future U.S. Population:

Which Scenario Is Reasonable?” CIS Backgrounder. October 1989: 59-65.

Breland, H. “Family Configuration and Intellectual Development.” Journal of individual

Psychology. vol. 31, pp.86-96, 1977.

Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. The Population Explosion. New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1990.

Menk, Thomas. “Eco-Refugees Warning.” New Scientist, 10 June 1999: 33-35.

Running, Stephen F. “What If the Supreme Court Changed Its Mind?” Stanford Lawyer.

Fall 1988: 15-29.

Swerdlow, Joel L. “Changing America.” National Geographic. Sept. 2001: 42-61.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. World POP Clock Projection. 23 October 2001

<http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw>.

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