Production and Consumption Habits of Humans

Human population increasing is called "Human Population Dynamics": patterns or process that affect growth or change with the human population; if rexources aren't limited, the population can grow faster. Modern day humans were hunter-gathers, who main source of food was animals. "During the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, climates changed worldwide, and a lot if large mammals had been the mainstay of the humans diet, and they became instinct" (Turk & Bensel, 2011). This made them change their way life.

We then 'started cultivation food and started eating more plants and less meat" (Turk & Bensel, 2011). Ended up having bigger families when they stayed in one place.Agricultgure became the main thing of human life and population began increasing.

As population increased, people began living in villages, towns, cities, and this made overcrowding and caused the "build of wastes, poverty, and diseases" (Turk & Bensel, 2011). Black Death was the first major outbreak of a Bubonic Plague (1347-1351), which in turn decreased population by 50%.

In the 17th century, we began advances in medicine, science, agriculture, and the industry allowed the growth of the human population to grow fast. The Industrial Revolution had a big impact on population. Factories were built (which children worked in), which helped with the survival and family sizes increased. "Medical advancements increased control over diseases and lengthened the average lifespan" (Turk & Bensel, 2011). By the 19th century we had a population of about 1 billion.

20th century had a impact event; birth rates decreased highly in developed countries, due to the fact they were able to practice birth control.

The fossil Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) was a indictor for the environmental performance. The CED was "divided into 2 product categories "energy production" and "material production"; "transport" and "waste management" (proquest, 2012). They also believed that "unusefulness of fossil CED as a stand-alone indicator for environmental impact is limited by the large uncertainty in product-specific fossil CED-based impact scores" (Proquest, 2012). Major reasons for the uncertainty are that "non-fossil energy related emission and land use, such as landfills, radionuclides, and land used for agriculture and forestry".

Its said that the more people we add to our population, it causes more damage to humanity's critical life-"support systems' than did the previous addition" (Turk & Bensel, 2011). Reasons are because of this: "Human's became the dominant animal, for being smarter. To support additional people, they would have to move to poor lands or drill wells deeper, or tap increasingly remote sources to obtain water-and then so end more energy to transport