There is only one planet, and it has its limits

I've just finished watching the 2006 Swedish film The Planet... boy, how depressing.  Looks like things are going to get ugly, and uncomfortably soon.

The basic message of The Planet is that overpopulation is the main, underlying problem facing earth.  I agree.

My husband wonders why I even watch depressing films like The Planet. Fair enough, but I don't see the point in continuing to ignore a huge problem, especially one that will directly impact me and our children... and, if we get that far, our grandchildren.

In 2004, Larry King asked Stephen Hawking what worried him most. The great physicist's answer: overpopulation. According to Stephen Hawking, if population growth continues at the current rate, we will literally be standing shoulder to shoulder by the year 2600.

Sadly, long before 2600 we'll have exhausted our planet's resources. The earth currently has a recorded population of just over six billion. 12 years ago it was just over five billion. World population is growing by approximately 75 million people per year.

According to the World Overpopulation Awareness Organization, by 2050 at the current rate of growth our global food supply would need to be tripled (thereby necessitating a 1,000 percent increase in the total energy expended in food production) in order to meet the most basic of needs.

Before we as a planet fundamentally run out of food, prices of natural resources (including water, metal, oil, fish) will inevitably skyrocket.  There will come a time when a sushi meal, for example, will be prohibitively expensive even for the U.S. middle class.  We'll all start feeling sticker shock about the price of groceries by 2020 (at the latest).  By 2050 we'll look back on 2008 as the good ol' times, a time of plenty and relative abundance.

Some argue that an already developing massive water crisis is only expected to worsen as the population increases. Other changes impacting Earth's ability to function as a suitable habitat for human beings, such as global warming, desertification, overfishing, peak oil, soil degradation, deforestation, aquifer depletion and other environmental problems will significantly reduce the factors necessary for well-being. In other words: our standard of living will be nowhere near what it is now.

A Living Planet report stated that if we all want to live with a high degree of luxury (European standards), we're already spending three times more than what the planet can supply. Other reports, such as the one cited in the The Planet documentary, claim that we already consume five times more than that the planet can supply, giving the current population numbers and our standard of living. Although there is still no real consensus, it is expected that the amount of overpopulation currently lies within this range.

David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), place in their study Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. To achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States must reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population will have to be reduced by two-thirds, says the study. The authors of this study believe that a major agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050.

What this all boils down to is that we cannot, as a species, waste much more time without coming up with some semblance of a solution to the problem. While the number of humans continues to rise with no limits, the total amount of resources our earth has to offer started as a constant, and can only decrease.

My question is:  why isn't this in the public debate already?  2050 isn't very far away at all.

Global warming is acceptable conversation... why not overpopulation? As Juliette Jowitt put it: "Everybody is talking only about one half of the equation: the emissions we generate, not how we generate them. All the standby buttons and low-energy light bulbs are dwarfed by the pressure of a global population rising by the equivalent of Britain every year."

Post Script

A few days after I wrote this, The Economist came out with an article about the silent tsunami of food shortages currently roiling the world in some places (e.g., Bangladesh, China). 

Eugenics conspiracy theories abound.

Then about a week later (on April 21), Paul Krugman wrote this piece in the NYT about planet limits on world food supply.