Impacts of Population Growth

February 10, 2013

Impacts of Global Population Growth

Throughout the past hundred years the world population has increased at an exponential rate to reach over 7 billion people. As the number of people living continues to increase at such a remarkable rate, the amount of space needed to sustain us on Earth diminishes every day. The air, soil, and water are polluted more than ever. Nonrenewable resources such as petroleum, natural gas, or minerals, are being depleted from Earth every day. Ecosystems are being destroyed beyond repair. It is time to realize that this rapid, continuous population growth is a serious problem. During the past century, exponential population increase has negatively and severely impacted the world and people living in it.

Population increase affects the environment in many ways. More and more people occupy the land on Earth, and each person requires resources to survive. This in turn equals environmental losses to sustain future populations, and simultaneously the environment is being polluted. Many pollutants, especially the toxic pollutants such as PCB's, arsenics and dioxin have spread globally. Our water and soil continues to become more and more toxic every day, and less able to produce what it once did (Pen, 276). Water and soil pollution are major concerns. Practically anything that goes into the ground, such as fertilizers and pesticides, eventually end up in the ocean, lakes, rivers, or ground water. The oceans are the largest ecosystems on Earth and provide us with an array of resources. Chemicals which make it to the ocean are killing marine population and ultimately lessening our source of food found in these waters. These chemicals also develop a problem with clean drinking water. Pollutants found in water today need to go through additional filtration cycles to be suitable to drink. Overpopulation is by far the worst environmental problem our world faces today (Monroe and Wicander 7). Our survival depends on a healthy environment and ecosystems. Unless we can start to control population growth we are going to destroy everything that sustains us.

While populations continue to increase, our nonrenewable resources continue to diminish at a relatively fast pace, considering the millions of years it has taken for them to be created. According to Billy Morris, a Geology Professor at Georgia Highlands, Earth cannot sustain an ever-increasing population under current conditions, unless we change our ways (Morris). We are extracting and depleting these resources more rapidly than we can replenish them. For example, petroleum, one of the world's most valuable nonrenewable natural resources, takes tens of thousands to millions of years to form. In order for these resources of which we have become so accustomed to begin to form, they must go through sensitive and complex chemical reactions at certain temperatures for long periods of time. As the world population surpasses seven billion people, it is clear that the ratio of resources available for our disposable and the rate we use them will not be able to sustain future generations. At some point in there will be no more. While there is no exact measurement of the amount of resources remaining for extraction, continuing to live as if they are limitless does not help prolong our rate of survival once they have been depleted. We are disrupting natural cycles of the ecosystem, and for the human population to sustain itself, population growth and size need to be in harmony with the changing ecosystems. Today ecosystems are under unprecedented attack by human activities due to the pressures of population growth. (Orimoogunje 56).

As population continues to increase, we need more land to produce food. The most suitable areas to sustain such growth, is the wilderness. Once we start expanding our agriculture into these areas more species will face extinction and we will ultimately destroy these lands by depleting the nutrients it contains and polluting it. According to Dumonte, studies estimate Earth's land that is available for food production