Just how finite is the Earth and what are we going to do about it ?

To two crows and stormy: I'm not trying to paint a utopian picture or propose that all we need to do is establish Shangri La on the eastern third of the US.. My purpose was to illustrate that, with 7billion people on the planet, we still haven't reached the potential carrying capacity of the planet. We do have problems and, in some ways, we are in trouble, serious trouble. But my point is that the cause of the trouble(s) is NOT over-population. And if over-population is not the cause, then decreasing the population will not be the cure.

If it were possible to cut the population of the planet in half we would still have the same problems that we have now: war, crime, plague, starvation, et al. Matter of fact, according to your graph, we were at that point in approximately 1960. I remember the 60s. We had wars, crime, plagues, starvation in various places, just as we do now. Halve it again, circa the mid 1800s, there were all of the same problems then that we have now. And so on, clear back to Cain and Able, if you like. (Of course you can always argue the point that Able's murder was caused by excess population: if Adam and Eve had stopped with one child,... But I wax facetious.) A significant difference between then and now is the presence and persistence of environmental pollution. But that, I propose, has been caused by bad decisions, not excess population.

Stormy, I take note of the heart-rending picture of a starving child. It's graphic. It hurts my heart to see such suffering. But it's probably not the result of over-population. I'm guessing that it's either the result of drought or war. Drought is caused by weather patterns not over-population, and war is caused by human greed, hatred, fear, etc.

What I find frustrating, and have for decades, is that the discussion that almost always follows a question like "Is the world over-populated?" goes on with the a prioi assumption that it IS overpopulated based solely on the "incomprehensibly big number" of people on the planet, and nothing more. Ever since man started counting the number of people on the planet, every time a new, significant number is reached (10,000,000 - 100,000,000 - 1bill - 2bill - etc.) a new cry goes up that we're over-populated. But in order for that to be true, we'd have to know just how many people can the planet support?

Stormy, you put forth the figure of 7.68 billion acres of arable land. Let's assume that's accurate. With a population of 7 billion people, that's 1 acre of land per person. Isn't that enough? Don't go off about even distribution, etc. yet. Just answer this question: Is one acre of arable land enough to support one human being? Experience tells me yes, and more than enough. If that's so, then over-population doesn't exist, worldwide, and the solution to our problems lies elsewhere.

In 1979, John Jeavons wrote a book titled "How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine)" In it he outlined the methodology necessary to, "...grow a year's supply of soft fruits and vegetables in under two hundred square feet of soil per person with about ten minutes a day required for upkeep." In the late eighties, my wife and I and our four children lived in a house on a half-acre lot in a suburban area of the West Coast. We employed Jeavons' methods, modified slightly for our particular location. We also incorporated raising chickens and rabbits in our operation. (For a brief period of time, we also had a pygmy goat that a kindly (but semi-clueless) neighbor gave as a gift to our oldest daughter.) Our garden area was less than 1/8 acre, yet was able to produce enough vegetables and meat for a growing family of six.

I will own up to not living solely on the produce of our mini-farm. We still went out for fast food on occasion, and DQ was an occaisional treat, etc. Since we had many commercial orchards nearby we went off-site for fruits. But we had plenty enough room to plant dwarf fruit trees and eat from them if we had chosen to. In other words, when we got food from somewhere else we did so by choice, not because we had to. And all of this was done without using chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. (The only thing brought in from outside our half acre were seeds (we didn't save seeds from our produce, though we could have) and BT (Bacillus thuringiensis), a naturally occuring bacteria that is usually fatal to "bad" bugs but benign to "good"ones.) (And since we home-schooled our kids through middle school, school lunches did not contribute to our needs.)

So, I stand by my earlier assertion, "Is one acre of arable land enough to support one human being? Experience tells me yes, and more than enough."

I chose "Find another planet...?" simply because I didn't think any of the other choices were correct.

Consider these numbers and calculations:
The area of the continental US (not counting Alaska and Hawaii) is 2,870,084 square miles. (2.9x10to the6th)

Assume that two thirds of that area is uninhabitable; rivers, lakes, swamps, desert, mountains, et al. That leaves us w/ .97 million square miles.

At 640 acres per square mile, this hypothetical 1/3 of the US has 620.8 million acres.

Now evenly disperse the 7 billion people in the world over this 620.8 million acres and you find that every human being in the world, if placed on a land mass roughly equivalent to the United States east of the Mississippi River, would have .089 acres to themselves. Or 3,876 sq ft. Or a 62ft x 62ft. square.

A hypothetical "family of four" would have almost a half acre of their own to live on. If your personal point of reference is Hong Kong, Calcutta or Co-op City in New York, that would be an unimaginable luxury. If your p.o.r. is Montana, Wyoming or Texas, that's not even enough room to turn around in.

Utilizing bio-intensive gardening practices, it is possible to grow all the food needed for this family, as well as have a house and room left over for play and relaxation on this space. (And if you want to take a vacation, you've got all the rest of the world...)

I conclude that we have not even come close to over-populating the world. The problems we have in this world come not from over-population, but from greed, carelessness, hatred, ego, etc. Those, not over-population, is the problem.