Seven Billion People – and counting

 

The United Nations has designated 31^st October 2011 as the day that the seven billionth citizen will be born.  World population has been increasing more and more in the last few decades, and the trend continues upwards. There were three billion of us in 1960; by 2085 it is expected that there will be ten billion people competing for this planet’s resources.

 

This summer, a visitor to one of our stalls suggested that Friends of the Earth should be addressing the issue of population growth before anything else, as all the other things that we campaign on arise from the simple fact that there are too many people in the world. As Sir David Attenborough pointed out earlier in the year in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts, there is no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve if there were fewer people, and no problem that does not become harder – and ultimately impossible to solve – with ever more.  And yet, he went on to remark, there seems to be a taboo on bringing the subject into the open.

 

So is it unsustainable population growth, rather than climate change, that is the real inconvenient truth, the elephant in the room that no one wants to mention?

 

We feel it’s worth discussing, so we ‘re joining forces with the local group of Population Matters to plan a public meeting, date and venue to be confirmed but provisional date Monday 5 December. It should be an interesting evening.

 

For more information see http://populationmatters.org/ , and for Friends of the Earth’s position, have a look at http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/population_policy.pdf