If someone from space looked at Earth 500 years ago, they would see something very different from what they would see today. Over the centuries, more and more people populate the Earth and this raises a question that is still debated today. Is this population growth harmful to the environment? The current world population stands at “6.7 billion people and the 2006 revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects presents an average projection by 2050 of 9.2 billion people and continuing to grow” (De Sherbinin 2007). This population growth has many effects, some positive and some negative. On the positive side, with every human newborn there is another group of people working to contribute to society. On the other hand, with every body placed on Earth, resources become scarcer, destruction of animal habitats occurs to provide housing, and climate changes due to the release of greenhouse gases from activities carried out by humans . A lot of research has been done on this particular topic and I'm going to analyze both sides of the debate, looking at many of the different aspects of why population growth affects us all. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay There are many different opinions on this topic and I will analyze two of them whose opinions are described in detail in the article “How Much are there any? Too Much" by Charles Mann. On one side, there are the Cassandras, "who believe that continued population growth at current rates will inevitably lead to catastrophe. On the other, there are the Pollyannas, who believe that humanity faces problems but has a good chance of coming out on top in the end” (Mann 1993). view of population and its effects on the environment For example, the Cassandras believe in the concept of "ecology" and believe that the world is reaching its "carrying capacity" and will soon no longer be able to support human life. On the other hand, the Pollyannas reject this idea because they have no evidence that this has happened in the past and instead believe that as the population increases, the economy will grow, allowing for. the Earth to continue to support human life (Mann 1993). This leads the Cassandras to “regard each new birth as the arrival on the planet of another hungry mouth” and the Pollyannas to “emphasize that with each new mouth comes a pair of hands” (Mann 1993). The Cassandras think more logically because they consider what might happen to Earth if the population continues to grow as fast as it currently is and they recognize the consequences that might result. They are based on numerous scenarios that highlight the need to act against overpopulation. In contrast, Pollyannas believe that nothing bad will happen because it has never happened. They are very optimistic and believe that if humanity runs out of one resource, it can invent a new one and continue to survive. Although this has been successful so far, the Earth is growing faster than ever and it will come to a point where humans will have exhausted everything they can and nature will no longer be able to support them. In 1798, a book was published anonymously. this caused an uproar in the population growth debate. Although it wasn't the first, it was one of the most influential and talked about. THEThe book was titled An Essay on the Principle of Population, the author of which would later be revealed to be Thomas Robert Malthus. In this book, Malthus revealed his predictions about the world and claimed that population would increase faster than food, thus causing world famine. In An Essay on the Principle of Population it is said: "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the Earth to produce the subsistence of man" (Malthus 1798), meaning that as as the population continues to increase, the world will no longer be able to support the needs of its inhabitants. Malthus believed that humanity should be aware that the world was headed for disaster if the population boom were to continue. Karl Marx disagreed with Malthus' prediction and felt that he did not take into consideration all future inventions. According to Marx, scientific and technological progress would increase alongside population growth, which would balance them and keep the world in harmony. Since Malthus predicted that the world would soon end and would not be able to survive for very long when he wrote his book in 1798 and the world is still alive today, Marx was right. However, the world today is becoming more vulnerable and in danger because it is growing even faster than Malthus predicted and science and nature itself do not seem to be able to continue to provide for the needs of humanity. . Food production is a problem which makes population growth a problem. In an article titled “Billions and Billions,” Kolbert explains, “the other uncertainty is the world's ability to support all these extra people. As many people, including Bill Gates, have pointed out, simply keeping per capita food production constant in the coming decades will require a second “green revolution” (2011). It seems that at this rate, the Earth will not be able to support the abundance of people that inhabit it. Additionally, because many people are in denial about how overpopulation affects the world we live in and how it affects us, we are not careful with our resources. For example, almonds. “Each almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce” (Hamblin 2014) and California continued to produce almonds even in times of drought. Additionally, during the first “Green Revolution” we used almost all the phosphorus used to enrich fertilizers and it is now running out. Then it could be oil, water, or arable land (Kolbert 2011), because people treat these natural resources as a finite resource, which they are not. Past events have proven that humanity finds a resource that benefits them and abuses it until it is on the verge of extinction. “As populations increase and economies grow, natural resources must become depleted; prices will rise and humanity – especially the poor and future generations, regardless of their income level – will suffer” (Sagoff 1997). If we can stop this depletion, limit population growth, and make the economy and resource availability more stable, this tragedy can end. Besides economic complications, overpopulation also has human-to-human consequences. With so many people populating the Earth, new diseases and germs inevitably appear, with humans having no defenses, as it is something they have never been exposed to before. It is said that: …every day, 110,000 people die of hunger, malnutrition and diseases linked topoverty ; 500 million people worldwide suffer from malaria; 1.2 billion people live in absolute poverty; 1.5 billion people do not have access to a supply of safe drinking water; 5 million people, mostly children under five, die each year from preventable waterborne diseases; between 150,000 and 350,000 Americans die prematurely each year from air pollution (Miller, 1996, p. 601). These are statistics from 1996 and the population has increased enormously even in this short period, making the number of deaths even more serious. Due to population growth, more and more people are exposed to malaria, famine and malnutrition, simply because there are too many people on Earth to contain these types of diseases and prevent them from spreading . It is also estimated that "by the end of the decade, 100 million more people will be infected with HIV" (Mann1993) which one would think would lead to a reduction in population growth, but this is not the case. case, because it grows too quickly to be affected. The fertility rate also plays an important role in why the population is growing so quickly. An additional 1.9 billion people have come to Earth and left, and history has shown that humans replace each other over time. Even if the fertility rate were low, the population would still increase because too many people have arrived and continue to reproduce (Mann 1993). A theory that analyzes this epidemic in detail is that of Malthus. He believed that humanity was trapped by the intersection of two things, one being its population rate. From Malthus' observations, he concluded that the world was and is currently experiencing "geometric growth, namely 1,2,4,8,16". It only takes 32 repetitions like this to go from an original pair to the current world population of more than six billion people” (Macfarlane). This supports the argument that the population is increasing while renewing itself, causing a double effect. This increases the human-to-human consequences that occur worldwide and makes life less sustainable. On the other hand, some people think that population growth is not something that environmentalists should worry about and in fact believe that it is something positive and beneficial. These types of people do not view each individual as a mouth to feed and a person who spreads disease, but rather as another set of helping hands and as someone who can contribute to society. People who believed this were generally called "cornucopias", that is, people who argue that human beings are themselves a resource. Julian Simon, who existed from 1932 to 1998, started this "cornucopia theory" and gave people information that led them to believe that population growth was a good thing and that there was no there was no cause for concern (Murphy 2006). Another piece of information that supports people in favor of population growth is the four-stage population growth model. This model predicts that in the first stage, birth, death and childhood rates are all high and life expectancy is short, resulting in rather low population growth. During the second stage, population growth increases as infant mortality rates and death rates decrease. This is when the population is growing rapidly because people still have large families, but they are now living longer. In the third stage, birth rates decline and death rates decrease whilelife expectancy continues to increase. Finally, in stage four, birth and death rates are low and life expectancy high, causing society to enter a phase of demographic stability (Caldwell and Caldwell 2006). Based on this information, it would appear that population growth is under control and benefiting society, but this is not the case. Another reason why environmentalists should oppose population growth is climate change. In the article Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Lynas states that "since the start of the industrial revolution, concentrations of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), have increased by a third » (2008). Carbon dioxide is released into the air in a variety of ways, including air pollution, habitat destruction, light pollution, noise pollution and waste. All of these contributing factors increase as Earth's population increases, which is why climate change is becoming such a significant problem. As more people inhabit the Earth, more cars travel on the roads, releasing more smog into the air, more homes and cities are built, increasing electricity consumption and the noise. More people means more waste, because poverty and homelessness are also increasing and the world simply doesn't have enough resources to go around. People believe that global warming is not as bad as it is made out to be because the human race continues to emit so much CO2 and very little is happening, but the reason is that increasing temperatures is about 50 years late. Future temperature increases that occur in our future will be the result of the carbon emissions we have released in the past. The Earth has already increased its temperatures by about 0.8 degrees Celsius (Lynas 2008) and this comes from a time when the Earth did not have as many people and technological advancements as it does today, so the increase from now on should be even faster. The results of the IPPC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) from February 2017 indicate: "For the lowest emissions scenario, in which global greenhouse gas emissions fall sharply, warming by 2100 could be as low as 1.1 degrees Celsius, while for the highest emissions scenario global warming could reach 6.4 degrees Celsius” (Lynas 2008). Even if the whole world reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, the temperature would still rise because we cannot change what we have emitted in the past. If the population continues to grow, reducing gas emissions becomes less and less realistic. This warming of the Earth is bad for many reasons, one of the main ones being the resurgence of old diseases. It is said that “there are now diseases trapped in the Arctic ice that have not circulated in the air for millions of years – in some cases, since before humans were around to confront them” (Wallace-Wells 2017). If the Earth's temperature rises enough, this ice will melt and release these diseases that our bodies and immune systems cannot defend against. Climate change also affects food production because it can reduce the amount of food that can be grown on agricultural land due to excessively high temperatures. Finally, there is the effect of population growth on the environment itself. In an article by Robert Chapman, he states, “overpopulation, although difficult to define precisely, generates.