Human Population Levels
Legend: Horizontal increments = 25 years.
Vertical increments = 220 Million people
Data:
Population in 1000 AD approx 275 Million.
Population in 2006 AD approx 6.5 Billion.
The Human Population graph from Zero AD to around 1,600 AD can be represented by a, nearly, horizontal line with a growth rate (slope) of approx 167 thousand people / yr.
Somewhere between sixteen and seventeen hundred AD the growth rate becomes a curve (exponential) and the population “explosion”began shortly before 1950. After 1950 the graph becomes a, nearly, vertical line with a growth rate (slope) of approx 200 thousand people / day.
Analyzing the Graph
Many things may be understood from this graph.
For example: The rate of change of the population over the last fifty years is nearly 300 times greater than for the preceding thousand years.
What that means is that on average the impact on our daily lives is 300 times more intense ‘now’ than it was ‘then’. Basically, the impact from one year back then happens in just one day now. That affects us across the board: Ecologically, physiologically, biologically, sociologically, psychologically..
And that means that our ‘worlds’are changing so rapidly that no one can possibly keep up. Everyone is trying to hang on to what they had yesterday, but they cannot. Stress is the accumulation of all these ongoing changes. The stress levels we live in now are enormous and disorienting and we are all being driven, at the very least, a little crazy.
Secondly, if we compare this population graph with those of rabbits or deer, they are remarkably, and dangerously, similar. In the absence of their natural predators, these animal populations will skyrocket until there is not enough food for all of them, and then the population will crash almost to zero. Without a course correction soon, the same thing will happen to us. When the oceans reach a critical level of pollution, the oxygen-producing phytoplankton populations will crash and the entire food chain will go with them. We could reach extinction by suffocation…
We could… But how about we don’t?
Since we are all elements in these earthbound experiments, we cannot, empirically, determine the true levels of cause and effect. Many closed minded, yet ‘powerful’individuals have used this as a reason to do nothing about issues such as global warming. Thanks, in part, to those people, the Greenland Ice is melting faster than science had predicted. So, we now know with some certainty that our energy policies and sheer numbers are having an enormous and perilous impact on the global environment. There is no longer any doubt;
What we do matters.
So let’s take a deep breathe and deal with it. All we can do is our best. But when we do our best, we know are all capable of great things.