While I toil away on a more substantive article (!), I thought I’d point you to an informative, even fun site concerning population issues. It’s a couple of pages of online course material on world population from a biology class at Western Kentucky University. They include a number of links which are well worth following. One, for instance, goes to a PBS site for a Nova program, circa 2000 I believe, on world population, containing lots of fascinating interactive elements, interviews, even sample posters from various country’s campaigns to lower their fertility rates.
Especially telling is the interactive tool (near the top of the page) in which you click the dot to enter your age. It shows you what the earth’s human population was when you were born and how much it has grown since. The amount of growth might shock you, no matter your age. But the older one gets, the shorter one realizes a lifetime is. And I think the older the reader of this post, the more astounding it will be to see how much world population has grown in such a short time.
Please pass the link to this post along to anyone who might be interested to see how much world population has grown in their lifetime.
Note that a few statistics in the materials, including the tool in the image above, appear to be a few years out of date. Still, the general ideas come through clearly.
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Image source: Sustainable Scale Project
Growth is Madness! 