Population & The Environment Essay

Discussions regarding the environmental go along of increasing population densities across the globe never lose their currency. From Thomas Malthus to Paul R. Erlich and onwards, in that respect is a persistent concern that a growing international population may non only reach a tipping point in which the planets ability to provide for it is stretched to its limit, precisely begin to have detrimental effects in the form of environmental problems.This concern is not simply a field of numbers, hardly a matter of how industrial civilizations have consistently failed to curtail anthropogenic impacts. As Donella Meadows (199) opines, not only are there so many more than of us, but each of us is bigger when one measures the amount of energy and material we use and the amount of pollutants and waste created by the industries we have created to sustenance our energy and material use. In effect, The number of commonwealth is not what degrades the earth its the number of people time s the flow of energy and material each person commands. One of the most frequently cited heart by which highly dense populations negatively impact the environment is through intense car use. Alex Steffen (2008) notes that intensifier car use within a finite geographic territory is not only a spacious contributor to greenhouse emissions that are warming the planet, but they also command a orotund amount of resource use through the inputs necessary to maintain highway infrastructure, build the actual cars and open fire them.Granted, the resource consumption and greenhouse emissions caused directly by individual(a) automobile ownership is absolutely no surprise to anyone, but the less obvious implication that Steffen reports is that exhaust emissions are only a piece of the environmental impact of the automobile. Over the course of the mid-20th century onwards, the increasing prominence of the automobile as come apart of modern living has necessitated the construction of great highway infrastructure.The result is that when you factor dense populations with intense private ownership and use of automobiles is that not only is there a massive amount of greenhouse emissions, but the amount of pavement this infrastructure commands can contribute significantly to the heat island effect which has become a concern among urban planners as of late. Heat islands not only emergence the amount of energy expended on indoor air conditioning, but they can worsen air quality. (Steffen, 2008)As such, Steffen argues that no matter the prominent lengths that todays automobile manufacturers go to in order to make their automobiles into shiny fuel-efficient emissions-reduced green things to gormandise the eco-minded consumer, it will not be enough to remediate environmental impacts brought about by car use. payoff for example the push towards biofuels, which is essentially, a push for auto manufacturers, in collaboration with energy companies, to make automobiles that be come on renewable agricultural products that emit a reduced amount of greenhouse gases.While there is much fuss in the mainstream press about the extent to which the biofuel industry is cannibalizing the food supply, a more overlooked concern is the manner in which the expansion of industrial agriculture to such a massive scale negatively impacts the environment. Simply put, the principal concern is not the ability of agriculture to feed populations, but rather how the expansion of the food supply, combined with the accommodations made for biofuels, has a deleterious effect on the environment.Manning (85-89) notes that the unvarying and unsustainable approach of industrialized corn-based agriculture is detrimental to the health of the soil. As such, there is a possibility that the massive conversion of lands towards the production of corn could recreate the conditions of The Great Dust Bowl, a period in the American heartland which saw hundreds of thousands of would-be wheat farmer s plow the soil to death to profit from golden grain.Thus, as civilizations increase in population density, so too do their demands in food and automobile use, effectively exerting a greater toll on the planets natural environment. In any case, we mustiness be mindful to remember that the problems inherent with a massive human population should not lead us to conclude that humans have no ecologically acceptable place in the planet. Humanity is not a virus on the operating system of the planet. Rather, what human society should begin to acknowledge is that it must begin to take a more comprehensive look at its impacts in order to position them thoroughly.REFERENCESMeadows, Donella. The Deep Six. Grist. 12 October 1999. Retrieved online on March 14, 2009 from http//www. grist. org/comments/citizen/1999/10/12/deep/index. html Steffen, Alex. My Other car is a Bright Green City. Worldchanging. 23 January 2008. Retrieved online on March 14, 2009 from http//www. worldchanging. com/arc hives/007800. html Manning, Richard. Against the Grain How horticulture Has Hijacked Civilization. New York North Point Press, 2004.