How Many People?

I am in Darwin for a conference with the grand title ‘Creating a Vision for a Greater Australia – big ideas for a big country’. Chief Minister Clare Martin and The Hon Dr Barry Jones AO will both be speaking this morning.

It is interesting to ponder that in about 200 AD when the world population was about 200 million Quitus Septimus Florence Terillianus a Roman citizen was worrying about population. He wrote:

“farms obliterate emply places, plough fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts, sandy places are planted with crops, stones are fixed, swamps drained, and there are such great cities where formley hardly a hut .. everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude … We are burdensome to the earth. The resources are scarcely adequate for us … already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.”

In 2005 there are more than 6 billion of us, with a projected population of 9.5 billion by 2050, at which point human population growth should plateau.

Scientific America has a feature on population in its September (2005) issue. Prof Joel Cohen writes that

“… the dramatic fall since 1970 of the global population growth rate to 1.1 or 1.2 percent a year today resulted primarily from choices by billions of couples around the world to limit the number of people born. Global human populations growth rates have probably risen and fallen numerous times in the past. The great plagues and wars of the 14th century, for example, reduced not only the growth rate but also the absolute size of global population both largely involuntary changes. Never before the 20th century has a fall in the global population growth rates been voluntary.”