We are Now 7 Billion

Today, the UN officially recognizes the arrival of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Never before have so many human beings been alive simultaneously. Never before has the Earth’s carrying capacity been so intensely taxed, as more people than ever before are moving into advanced stages of industrial urbanization. Even as we mark the arrival of the 7 billionth person, the average individual human being is demanding more resources than at any time before.

It was only 12 years ago that the Earth’s human population reached 6 billion. The human population has doubled in just half a century. An intermittent look at the UN’s population-tracking website shows a rate of expansion of roughly 9,000 new human beings added per hour. Now, cities are expanding at an unprecedented rate—see the 19-20-21 project for more—and it has become apparent that they are now demanding a level of consumption the planet cannot support.

We risk sliding from persistent abundance back into scarcity. We risk missing an important opportunity to ease intelligently out of the primitive economic assumptions of scarcity and deprivation. The 7 billionth person is a blessing and a sign of civilization’s advance in service of life, but the moment also serves to highlight a vital and unsustainable trend: we ask more than the planet can give.

We need to come to awareness of both how and where our demands have become irrational and learn how to harness our freedom and imagination, both existentially and in the work of the everyday and the mundane, to better serve the natural support systems that actually sustain life. This is no longer a matter of choice, preference or point of view; it is not an ideological agenda item. It is what we must learn to do if we are to sustain and enjoy the conditions for civilization as we have known it.

Population density varies widely, in fact widely enough to stagger the mind. There are 7,272 people per square kilometer in the densely populated city-state of Singapore. In the UK, also considered a densely populated country, there are 246 people per square kilometer. But, as the BBC reported this morning, Australia has just 3 people per square kilometer, one of the lowest population densities in the world.

Yet whether or not the 3 people per square kilometer that inhabit mostly the coastal regions of Australia are a stress on the natural environment now depends little on whether their immediate local activities put a strain on the halfway-local environment of the Outback. They are part of a global system of exchange of service, commodities and distribution, that is straining the whole environment, everywhere.

The “footprint” of even those population-sparse Australians reaches across the world, and is part of the global excess of consumption that now threatens to collapse the food supply and displace climate bands that deliver lifegiving monsoon rains. The planet cannot sustain 7 billion human beings comfortably, unless we invent a more rational economy that favors virtuous impacts. So, we risk fostering an increase in deprivation, conflict, displacement and injustice.

The moment we mark the arrival of the 7 billionth person is a milestone to celebrate, but also a caution to everyone everywhere. We need to get better at imagining and building a sustainable future.