IN A WORLD WITH 7 BILLION PEOPLE

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by: Elizabeth Currie

On Monday October 31st, 2011 the population of the earth reached 7 billion people. In some people’s minds, that probably sound pretty fantastic, when in actuality it is the exact opposite. The earth surpassed its ideal population long ago. According to a David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University, the ideal population for the earth is closer to 2 billion, if not slightly less.  At the current rate we are going to reach 12 billion within 60 years. I find these numbers absolutely ridiculous! There are way too many people on our earth currently for it to be able to sustain itself for very much longer (in earth years).
If something isn’t done about population control then the future for our children and children’s children doesn’t look to be all that great. Professor Pimentel also suggests that we could get our population down to 2 billion within 100 years if we only each couple has 1.5 children. 1So in no way are you reproducing more children then are currently on the earth. Each couple would have either 1 or 2 children, since you can’t have half of a person. There can’t be any more of this ‘Duggar family situation’ where you can have 19 kids. Those families are the reason we have gotten ourselves into this mess in the first place. And the problem with families that size is that children that come from larger families tend to then have larger families of their own. So each one of those 19 children is probably going to have quite a few children of their own, and it just snowballs from there.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that sometimes a woman can have multiple births (triplets, quadruplets, etc) and I would not go as far to say that you would have to abort 1 or 2 of the embryos so that you can reach your limit of 2; that would just be unethical. There will be some families that don’t have any children at all so the count of zero children for some couples would even out the average to the 1.5 when there are situations of multiple births. But I think that by and large something does have to be done about population control so that those that have to deal with this situation in the future can at least have a fighting chance to be able to sustain the population.
I don’t think anyone wants to ruin the future for our children. The problem is that most people don’t think about the future, they are more concerned with the present. So, yes, for the current population on the earth we won’t have to worry about the huge issue of sustainability in our lifetime. But your grandchildren and great-grand children will have to. I don’t think it’s something that people are purposefully procrastinating from, but it’s a pretty important issue and the sooner something is done about it the easier it will be to fix it. As well, we are already trying to find more sustainable ways to get our resources. The fishing industry is already hurting greatly. And if we have a problem now, just think what the problems will be 40 or 60 years from now. Something needs to be done now or very soon, otherwise we are going to reach the breaking point and there will be no turning back and reversing once we have reached it. We still have a chance to be more than just a tiny blip in the earth’s life span (which is what we are currently), and I think that we should try our best to stick around as long as we can. In the words of Helen Lovejoy from The Simpson’s, “The Children! Won’t someone please think of the children?”
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Mass Bird Death on Georgian Bay

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On October 23rd, 2011 hundreds of dead birds were found upon the beaches of Georgian Bay, Ontario, around the Wasaga Beach area.  At the moment, the deaths are thought to be the result of botulism poisoning.  Now, I’m not an expert on botulism or birds by any means, but to me if the accumulation of the birds was over a few days then that does sound like it would be reasonable.  However, this all happened over night! How is it possible that hundreds of birds ate poisoned fish or muscles at pretty much the exact same time, and therefore all died at around the same time?

            I’m angry about this situation because this is not even close to the first time that mass animals deaths has happened.  There is a map on Google that shows you where they have been found, and to be honest, it’s primarily the USA.  In most cases reasons were found, ranging from ones that are relatively believable, such as the temperature shock in the lake (fish on the St. Clair River beaches) to ones that are just ridiculous, such as New Year’s fireworks (Blackbirds in Arkansas).
           
            To me, if there were only a few incidences of mass deaths, then maybe some of these can be explained away.   But there are so many cases with excuse after excuse, and it just makes me angry.  There is clearly something going on with the environment: even if it turns out that these birds died from botulism poisoning, botulism was never found native in the Georgian Bay before.  It is due to the fact that ships brought the zebra muscles over from warmer waters.  While these zebra mussels have had unforeseen benefits, they have also managed to pose a growing ecological issue.  As the summer water wanes and the mussels die, botulism, a naturally occurring disease, infects the mussels.  As it moves up the food chain, the disease spreads into fish stocks and then the lake bird population.

The amount of times that people have been the cause of environmental disasters keeps increasing and it needs to stop.  The human race needs to stop affecting the environment.  If we keep interfering then eventually the things that we are affecting are going to be the things that we need to survive.  Right now, when humans over-hunt or over-fish, we just make laws against killing those items.  The problem is that when we can’t fish one type of fish then another type of fish is just going to become stressed.  It’s just a vicious cycle; everything needs to be made sustainable.  There should be laws about fishing and hunting preemptively, before there is a problem.  If things are controlled before there is a problem then there never will be a problem.
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