Exponential Growth!

• Post a brief summary (1-2 paragraphs) explaining something interesting you learned in Chapter 1 or in class this week.
  

Okay, let me tell you about on of the things I learned about in class this past week, exponential growth. I have a pretty good grasp of whats going on in the world, but this blew my freaking mind! Obviously, one of the things that affect our environment is the sheer number of humans that have reproduced like unchecked rabbits, for the past two million or so years. This large volume of human biomass (I call it that because I think that is all some of it counts as!) grew steadily until the industrial revolution. In the mid 1700's it started, machines took over jobs humans had traditionally done, soon we were able to produce more things quicker. Food, medicine, and clothing were easily obtained, comfort increased, as did nutrition, and we were able to extract energy more efficiently from the Earth. We saw a leap in worldwide human population growth. Its estimated that even with a slower population growth (Around 1%, compared to 2% in the past) that humans will exceed 10 billion by 2050! The question posed is: "How much can the Earth handle"?, and not only that, how much suffering will happen to the "Have not's" when the global population of more powerful countries keeps growing? some will be able to maintain their lifestyle and most will suffer. How will we deal with the enormous amount of waste produced by so many consumers living beyond their means? Exponential growth is well documented, have a look at the graph above (Ecology.org) and you can see that our numbers are rising at an alarming rate. The science behind this lies in a simple mathematical formula, that when applied to our population rates, makes us Homo sapiens look like some kind of run away lab experiment! No wonder wild lands are under siege, we need the room! Have a look at this website and think about why our population is so out of control.....

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populations-grow-the-exponential-and-logistic-13240157