Mother: Caring for 7 Billion

The type of world in which

our ancestors lived for

hundreds of thousands of years

women probably had four to

six children in a lifetime.

Half of those children would die

before they could reproduce.

So the only thing we can

be sure about

in human population studies

is that for the last 100,000 years,

people on average,

had two children to succeed them.

Or there would have been a population

explosion a thousand years ago.

In just the last nanosecond

of human history,

which began ten thousand years ago

with the advent of agriculture,

we began to change the way

we looked at the earth;

something that we separated

ourselves from.

It is the basis for our

civilization today.

We have spread notions

of proper sanitization

as we have vaccinated for diseases,

as we have provided for famine relief

and basic levels of health care,

we see an unintended consequence

of our best intentions.

By adding fossil fuels

to our agriculture,

we have allowed population

to simply skyrocket.

Almost 100 million babies will come

into the world this year.

The rate increases.

More babies mean finally,

still more babies.

When these have reached

the age of 40

the world will have doubled

its numbers.

Helpless, harmless infants.

In the 1960's,

population was growing at an

unprecedented rate,

the highest in human history;

as famine developed in South Asia

spreading fear to the rest

of the planet.

these are harsh words.

They serve to describe the

coming crisis

in population and food supply

that's aptly called

the "population explosion.

I started talking about

the population issue

because it hadn't been discussed.

People had not made the connection

between what was happening

to the environment

and the fact that our population

was growing like a skyrocket

and that's where "The Population

Bomb came from.

Ann and I wrote it in about

5 weeks of evenings.

It was a political track basically.

The world started grasping the

urgency of the situation.

Advocacy groups, such as

Zero Population Growth,

emerged in the US in the 1960s.

For the first time,

population growth was linked

as a major factor

responsible for the global

environmental crisis,

at the first Earth Day in 1970.

Probably, the burning

of fossil fuels, right?

Probably cars, I would imagine.

Meat.

Meat?

Meat?

Garbage.

That's like the main thing,

in my opinion.

Oh, people.

Oh, people.

The number of people.

- OK, that's true.

- People are consuming.

We're growing.

40 years later,

the environmental message

has not changed.

Apart from a few persistent groups,

population growth is barely

being mentioned.

It's as if the issue has been diluted

among all the others;

even though population growth

and human consumption

are the major factors

in our on-going environmental crisis.

Oohh...

About... uh... 1 billion.

- Maybe over a billion?

- Yeah.

What do you think the population

of the planet is today?

More.

A lot more.

It was 3.7 billion...

in 1970,

and now it's 6.8 billion.

Oohh...

Way off.

The problem is not that

we haven't had

an environmental movement

and that not that some

effective things

haven't been done.

It's a big cultural change,

but not fast enough.

Since the first Earth Day we have had

a fivefold increase in recycling,

yet, we are producing more

trash than we did in 1970.

And this is pretty well

agreed upon today

by conservation biologists

and ecologists,

people who study this...

as we spread out we

disrupt habitat

whether we destroy it or

simply disrupt it,

it is eliminating species

now at rates

unheard of since the fifth

mass extinction

and that was the one that wiped

out the dinosaurs.

The distinguishing characteristic

of this mass extinction

is that it is the only one caused

by one species

and we're it.

The human species

is quite

unique in the sense

that our consumption pattern

is not just driven by our appetite.

An elephant has a similar

consumption pattern

no matter what.

But people,

they can decide not only,

how to eat

but also how big their houses are,

how much else they consume,

how many clothes they have, etc..

So, there is no inherent limit to

consumption for an individual.

We have a compound problem

of rapidly growing populations.

At the same time as

our demand for resources

is increasing

but the size of the planet is not.

Now we are at global overshoot.

Our demand is larger

than what nature can regenerate.

And there is no need to

think about anything like

limits because

we've never had to encounter them.

We see ourselves as this tiny,

pimple on a pumpkin.

Our world population dynamic today,

is much different than in 1970.

Although it is growing

at a much lower rate,

it is more than ever at the

center of our global crises.

We are adding about

50 Million new middle class

each year;

modeling their consumption habits

from the unsustainable lifestyle

of the developed world.

A triumph for progress and poverty,

but a ticking bomb for

our civilization.

The world is already giving us

warnings and clues

about the looming global crises

that we can't afford to ignore.

Agriculture has always been

susceptible to

supply side shocks

caused by climatic conditions.

We're seeing a different

situation now;

the demand for agricultural crops

is on a strong upward trend.

What we're seeing in the

world today is

the demand for food,

now driven by three forces;

one is population growth,

the second is rising affluence,

2-3 billion people

trying to move up the food chain

consuming more grain intensive

livestock products,

and the conversion of grain

into fuel for cars.

The grain required

to fill a 25 gallon SUV tank

with Ethanol,

would feed one person for a year.

Norman Borlaug,

who won the Nobel peace

prize in 1972

for bringing about the

Green Revolution.

He saw

the Green Revolution as a way of

buying, maybe thirty years,

in order to,

solve the population problem

and he said if we don't do that,

we're going to have

a terrible situation.

And the fact that we're peaking

in oil production,

which is a key aspect of agriculture

almost everywhere,

availability of food globally

is going to plummet.

The big issue

is going to be water.

We see in some countries now, where

farmers are using virtually all

the technologies available

to raise yields.

The market realizes that

things are tightening up.

As one observer said,

"Land has become the new gold.

And the more affluent

importing countries

like China, like South Korea

and even India now

are acquiring large chunks of land

around the world.

It's enormous in scope.

Rising food prices,

combined with rising unemployment,

have sparked riots and

political unrest.

Every year,

there are about 78 million

more people

living on the planet.

That's about 220,000

people everyday

competing for both natural resources

and for economic opportunities.

Stretching further the capacity

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