The topic chosen by my group for the semester long research project is population and consumption. Before delving into the project, I chose to do some reading on population and consumption. Through my reading, population was explained to me the simplest by Robert W. Kates, an American geographer, independent scholar, and professor at Brown University as, “the simple arithmetic of adding births, subtracting deaths, adding immigrants and subtracting out-migrants” (Kates 12). Additionally, I was able to grasp a greater understanding of what exactly consumption is. By reading “Population and Consumption: What We Know, What We Need To Know”, I learned that there is not one definition that can sum up the meaning of consumption because there are so many ways it can be viewed:
“For physicists, matter and energy cannot be consumed, so consumption is conceived as transformations of matter and energy with increased entropy. For economists, consumption is spending on consumer goods and services and thus distinguished from their production and distribution. For ecologists, consumption is obtaining energy and nutrients by eating something else, mostly green plants or other consumers of green plants. And for some sociologists, consumption is a status symbol when individuals and households use their incomes to increase their social status through certain kinds of purchases” (Kates 13-14).
Once I had a better understanding of the topic, my group decided that we should compare two countries based on their population, land area, biological resources, and consumption. Being that we live in United States, we chose to evaluate the United States as well as India because it has a larger population and land area than the United States.
To start off, we all found as much information about these two countries as we could. Some of the significant information consisted of: the population,