Today’s guest commentary in our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth Study comes from Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Paul is, of course, famous for penning The Population Bomb in 1968. You might be interested to know that his wife, Anne co-wrote the book. She and Paul have written many more books since then, none as famous and Earth-shaking, but all very important and worth reading. I want to thank Paul and Anne for writing this specifically for our Limits to Growth blog series. I’ve encouraged them to share it as well at the web site of an important initiative they support, called the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. GrowthBusters is also a participant in that initiative, and I recommend you explore it.
”As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”
– Sir David Attenborough
First, let’s pick up our exponential growth demonstration. If you’ll recall, we began with a single grain of wheat in a beaker. Each day of the demonstration, we double the amount of wheat in the beaker. This is equivalent to a growth rate of just under 3% per hour. This makes it a good fast-track demonstration of what’s happening in the real world. 3% annual growth is a common economic objective. About 15 nations have annual population growth rates near or above 3%. Las Vegas, Nevada was growing faster than 3% annually until the housing bubble burst. Last week we left off at Day Nine, with 256 grains of wheat. Today let’s double that:
