Yesterday I was sitting in an office waiting room and I picked up a National Geographic and was skimming it and came upon this article, which I found totally fascinating.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text
I'm not a big follower of the news and so I tend to miss stuff like this, but basically, this year our world population will reach 7 billion people. I found it so fascinating to see the exponential growth in our population over the last 100 years and the graph of expected continued growth and to hear different people talk about the issue. You can certainly read the article and see what you think yourself. I came away from the article with a few things.
First, I feel a tiny bit guilty about having another kid now. I would be more globally responsible if I only had 2, which is the "replacement rate" that we are aiming for. But, too late now! (although I was made to feel slightly better hearing that it is really not the U.S. or Europe or China that is the problem as we have reached replacement rate or less, it is Africa and India, who have continued exponential growth that are adding to the world population more than we are).
Secondly, it may be our consumerism that does us in, not the actual number of people. The article suggested that more people around the world are going to move into the "global middle class" and that means they are going to be consuming more, which is great, because there will be fewer starving and poverty striken people in the world, but if they start consuming American style then we're totally screwed, the world can't provide for 7 billion people living like we do. (which really gets back to the point of all of us cutting down on our consumption of food and products that I have been thinking/talking about for awhile now). It makes me think about when we were kids and our parents told us to eat everything on our plates because there are kids starving in Africa. Now we'll be saying the opposite, encouraging our kids to take less food onto their plates, buy less at the store, so that there will be some left for other people.
And lastly, and to me the most poignant because I actually see it occurring when I see patients, is the increasing elderly population. Since we've now reached replacement rate in our country, we're going to have a problem because of the mid-century baby boom where the exponential growth took place. The total number of elderly are not going to be proportionately matched by the younger population since the population growth rate has now stabilized. How are we going to physically care for all of the elderly people? Not to mention financially care for them which is obviously a huge problem already (social security, medicare, etc.). We haven't structured our society with a system that might allow for us to care directly for our parents (unless we purposefully choose that, which is a great choice I think, but not an easy one with expectations for work and housing and providing for our own children). As physicians we see this too often, where an elderly patient starts to get demented, but still thinks they can handle things themselves but then clearly becomes potentially dangerous to themselves when left alone (leaving the gas on the stove, leaving food out, soiling themselves and not being able to clean up). Then we have to try to get someone to intervene, sometimes an adult child will step up and take their parent into their home, or do the hard work of finding an affordable living arrangement (hard to do, if you've ever looked at the cost of assisted living facilities -- especially the ones that don't smell like urine -- you will want to start saving your money now). But sometimes we end up having to call Adult Protective Services, who are the only people who can help in these scenarios, and even they can't really do that much other than to force someone to take responsibility for the person. They are so busy we have to call them multiple times to even get anything to happen and it sometimes takes months. It is a sad statement about our society, the way we treat our aging population, and it is going to become an even bigger problem I think as our population grows.
Anyway, you can read the article and see what you think. Feel free to comment.
