Inst. for Population Studies/ HowMany.org

About Me

It took 250,000 years for civilization to reach a population of 1 billion. Today, we add 250,000 people to the planet each day. It took a century to add the second billion of us on Earth. Today, we add 1 billion more every 12 years. Amid this unstable growth scenario, more than 1 billion human beings do not have enough food and safe drinking water; global warming is disrupting our ecosystems and threatening billions of people with dislocation and conflict; energy resources are becoming scarce, dangerous and expensive; and sprawl destroys 2.2 million acres of forest habitat and farmland every year. While there are many numbers and arguments for the Earth’s maximum sustainable human population, they all hinge on the question: In what manner shall the Earth’s species live?