The Damaged Lobe

In a packed hospital in the Philippines shortly after midnight on Halloween day a small infant lay as crowds of photographers snapped pictures and ogled at the newborn little girl named Danica.  Amid the fanfare the parents were presented with a small cake by attending UN officials celebrating little Danica’s arrival.  Why all of the attention paid to this seemingly normal baby born to two working class Philippine parents?  Danica represented the seven billionth human on earth.  Just one hundred and seven years ago there were only an estimated one billion people on the planet.  Although it can’t be said with any accuracy what the human population of the earth really is, it could be less or could be more, it represents a milestone in the human race.  What Danica signifies, whether she likes it or not, is a problem of human growth that has gone seemingly unchecked for the last century.  In an age where people live longer, infant mortality is down and we find new ways to combat our only true natural enemy, disease, we can only expect the planets population to increase.  It seems the only thing that slows down human growth is a bad economy.  Birth rates are down in the United States and have been declining since the big financial meltdown.  It used to be that birth rates dropped during tough times, such as during a drought or a minor ice age.  But now we have to put things like being upside down in our mortgage or having two car payments first before we bring a new human into the world.  But this seemingly abstract way of determining whether or not we hit our mean of 2.02 children may have a short term benefit.  The world will one day reach a point at which we can no longer support the population that expects to have food, shelter and clothes.  Where exactly is this tipping point of humanity?  No one really knows for sure. It won’t be that one day the world collapses in on itself from the weight of civilization.  It will be much more insidious. 

Economics is the study of markets.  We live and die financially by how our markets perform through the trade of both international and domestic goods and services.  One thing you learn in economics is the law of supply and demand and price elasticity.  Currently goods such as food for instance, have little response to price elasticity, meaning that if the price increases for food demand will largely remain unchanged.   As the earths population grows however so will demand and this will have an impact on the price of commodities such as pork, meat, fish, wheat and corn.  The reason for this I believe is that the population will also increase demand in other areas and therefore increase prices for basic commodities not to mention there will be less to go around.  Petroleum products will skyrocket, a commodity with a great deal of elasticity and the cost of getting those goods to market will increase and at the end of the day, being a free market, producers of commodities will still need to make a profit to keep their business running.  Nowhere else will this impact be felt more than in the developing world where families are already struggling to get by on no more than a few dollars a day.  Yet it is the developing countries where we see the highest birth rates.  While population growth is slowing in the United States, except for those looking for a higher welfare check, populations in Africa and Asia continue to explode.  Europe will see a population decline in the next century but overall the population of the planet is expected to hit ten billion by the end of the century.  Population growth is exponential and while efforts at education and using contraceptives will be a key in the next hundred years to altering the growth rate urban areas around the planet will groan at the weight of humanity being pressed upon it.  Food prices will go up, we will see more starvation, famine and disease in the third world and perhaps even in developed nations also.  There just isn’t enough food and resources to go around.  In fifty two years the last drop of oil is expected to get sucked out of the ground.  It will have only taken one hundred and fifty years to accomplish that feat.  What will be next?  More forests devastated to make room for homes and farms and climate alteration will continue.  Human growth isn’t the only thing that is exponential, so is the increasing need for resources and raw materials.

One dynamic I find interesting in all of this crowded space is that most of us don’t know our neighbors.  We become more crowded and yet more and more we become isolated as individuals.  In a thousand years humans will have no vocal chords, no ears but will have an extra set of thumbs.  We will worship statues of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

That being said human growth is as much a concern as is global climate change.  If we are to succeed in slowing climate change then we must also address the population of the planet.  If in fact humans are to blame for climate change then we must be smarter about how we manage our own population.  Education and family planning will be key.  Jim Bob Duggar and his wife Michele just celebrated the birth of their twentieth child.  Folks, that is just unacceptable moving forward.  Granted they are bucking the trend, but we need to be smarter.  It boils down to cause and effect.  We continue to grow, we require more resources, we take up more land, we alter the climate faster by requiring more leveled forests, more bottled water, more farm land and more I-Phone 4s’s.  We must be smarter, build better communities, continue to seek alternative energy sources and leverage technology.  But first we need to get off of the cell phone and start talking to each other.  It’s time to find a common solution.     

If we don’t the results will be catastrophic.   

-SC

Goodnight to you all

Goodnight to you Jenny