Are you sick of everyone? As the population grows, so do the stressors on the earth and one another.
We all know that stress is increasing in our lives and that stress makes us sick. According to Woodson Merrell, M.D., one of the world’s experts on stress, “Up to 80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced.” But one of the main stressors in our lives often goes unnoticed. It’s population increase. We know population is increasing and the world is getting more crowded. But how much more crowded?
When I was growing up in southern California I remember being surrounded by open space. Orange County really had miles and miles of orange groves. When I was seven years old in 1950, the world population was about 2.5 billion. Seven years later when I was getting seriously interested in girls it had grown to 2.9 billion. When I got married at age 23, world population had grown to 3.4 billion and when our first child was born it was 3.6 billion. Today we’re looking at a population over 7 billion. When I visit southern California, all the orange groves are gone and it’s wall-to-wall people, cars, and pollution. No wonder I’m feeling the stress of overcrowding.
Every year I have a birthday party, but I rarely think about the birthday party that the planet is having. Each year 70 million people are born. Every day I wake up, rub my eyes and roll out of bed, and the world is hosting an additional 200,000 people.
According to the organization World Population Balance, “Massive social and environmental problems including political instability, loss of freedoms, vanishing species, rain forest destruction, desertification, garbage, urban sprawl, water shortages, traffic jams, toxic waste, oil spills, air and water pollution, increasing violence and crime, continue to worsen as our numbers increase.”
I believe over-population is a stress it’s time to address. Are you ready? Here is a list of resources recommended by World Population Balance:
Arithmetic, Population, and Energy
In this classic video, Al Bartlett demonstrates clearly the ramifications of constant (percentage) growth over time. A must-see!
Chris Martenson’s Crash Course
This compelling video seminar describes the interdependence of our economy, environment, and energy systems, and the limits of our present economic model of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.
Lester Brown’s organization is “dedicated to providing a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy—an eco-economy—as well as a roadmap of how to get from here to there.”
Using video and social communications to inspire people to take positive action leading to a sustainable future—worldwide.
Calculate how much land is required to sustain your lifestyle on this Web site, and learn more about your ecological footprint.
This beautifully crafted site helps readers visualize numbers as large as a quintillion by representing them as stacks of pennies. It’s a great teaching tool!
Plan B 4.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown
This bestseller calls for a worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before they spiral out of control. It provides a plan for sustaining economic progress worldwide. The entire book is available for reading online as well as for purchase on paper.
This U.S. Census Bureau page provides two of the more authoritative population counters on the Web, one for the world’s population and one for the U.S. You’ll also find links to population projections for the near past and near future.
This page shows the U.S. Census Bureau’s best estimates of the current world birth rate, death rate, and population growth rate, shown per year, month, day, hour, minute, and second.
Read more on The Good Life.
Image of crowd on the edge of a cliff courtesy of Shutterstock
This is not a popular thing to say, but the environment does not actually feel stress or become stressed. The planet does not actually get stressed out. The earth does not actually have feelings or a consciousness or even a health. The earth does not actually care if we make the planet unlivable to humans. It will continue to be the earth no matter what we do. “Stressing the environment” is a great metaphor, but it’s not objective reality. I’ll put it this way: the Earth feels the stress of human activity the way that Santa Claus feels the stress… Read more »
As an introvert, I’m totally sympathetic to these concerns. I feel uneasy when places start to feel more crowded. BUT: We need to distinguish between “stressor” and “stress.” The “stressor” is the thing outside yourself that you are noticing or that has an effect on your body. The “stress” is your internal reaction to the stressor. Ultimately, much of what we call “stress” is something you do to yourself, not something coming from outside. We need to take responsibility for our own feelings of stress. We can’t just blame external things for causing us stress. For example, it’s the WORRYING… Read more »
Of course I’m thinking today-
Compared to being eaten by a tiger or dire wolf, dying of small pox, tetanus, pneumonia and succumbing to any of the other 100s of causes that made people old at 30- how much stress are we under?
I’ve been saying this for years. There’s no question in my mind that this is a huge issue and a major stressor.
Wall the boarders and much of the Southwest’s pop issue will fade over time. But then that’s not fair…or some river-of-tears like that. No one seems to mention that the boarder-jumpers from “down there” totally skip the health screening that legal visitors participate in. We see every freakin disease that was successfully eradicated within our nation, now waltzing across the Southern boarder. Why does not one face on the TV or in the news say word-one about that? In New England, we see anemic k-12 student populations and/or closed schools. Just not an issue here…away from the warm-climate boarder. funny… Read more »
We need to talk about this more.
@mike- but we won’t, we’d rathe talk about sex workers selling BJ tapes and trying to perfume that as PSAs. Or jump ugly on someone’s Christian faith….
This piece is too close to real science.
Thanks Jed
Part of our addictive culture is to bombard us with so much sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (not that any of these things are bad), but when we are constantly bombarded with it, our brains can’t focus on the things that are really stressing ourselves and our planet. So, try turning off the T.V., your computer, your phone, etc. and just let your mind think and your heart feel for a bit. You’ll be surprised at how much less stressed you feel and also more ready to tackle the problems in our lives that really need our attention.
The book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond will keep you awake at night thinkkng about what has happened to human societies throughout history when they overpopulated and overexploited their resources, with examples from Easter Island to modern day Haiti and Rwanda. Worth reading.
A little less than 100 years ago the flu pandemic knocked off something between 3 & 5 % of the worlds population. This was in a time where population density was a fraction of today’s and travel was via steamship. There will be another pandemic- it will be truly pandemic in 72 hours- probably spread by reporters flying from one hot story to the next- there is no way that governments will have the resources to do anything except let it burn it’s way through the population. My suspicion is that were a disease similar to the 1918 flu to… Read more »
Sometimes a blind pig does find an acorn-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/anticipating-the-next-pandemic.html?ref=health
And yet, people flock to new technologies that let them connect and interact more than ever before. They crave constant social contact and attention nonstop, even if it’s in smaller and smaller doses (texting, Twitter, etc.). What’s up with that?
I suspect that our constant desire to reach out through the internet is, in part, a response to the loss of real-life face-to-face interaction and connection and a response to the stress we feel as more and more people come into the world wanting more and more of the Earth’s resources.