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Population Issues

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Submitted By illiniguy22
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Many things threaten our world: war, climate change, and poverty are among them. While many people are concerned with our economy, our oil dependency, and dwindling food and water supplies, others acknowledge the simple reason as to why we are faced with these issues – the Earth is overpopulated. Exponential growth has been seen in our world population over the past two centuries, with a grand total of 7 billion (6.97 as of my last essay) people roaming the Earth today (Tomkin, 2011). Mankind has ventured a long way to reach the position we are in currently, and in this essay I will explain how we got here and where we might be headed, citing examples of previous efforts to combat overpopulation. I then will suggest my own solution to the problem, and then give detailed analysis as to why my method should be implemented. Over the course of mankind’s time on this planet, the population has changed rather drastically. Since long before the birth of Christ, thousands of years ago, the Earth had held a stable number of approximately one million people (Zhang, et al, 2011). The stability was vastly due to the scavenger lifestyle of early humans, a world where only the strong survived. Throughout the Middle Ages population increased to an estimated 250-500 million people, yet took hard hits due to disease and plague (Rosling, 2010). The flux in population was due to the invention of agriculture, which at this time was the sole reason that Earth’s carrying capacity had increased (Nisar, et al, 2011). In the early 19th century, a drastic population boom occurred. By 1804 Earth’s population had reached one billion for the first time, and it didn’t stop there. From 1804 it took just over 100 years to double the population, finally reaching two billion in 1927. The snowball effect continued throughout the 1900’s with population hitting three billion in

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