The question is, how long can we continue in this trend? What are the reserves of the planet? What are the available resources and the population’s maximum size that can comfortably survive with keeping an acceptable quality of life? The “acceptable quality” is very disputable because we use extreme consuming lifestyle differences across continents. Let’s try to understand how fast population growth already impacts the planet and its resources.
When the population grew twice – during the period of one “human generation”-, the population of wild animals faltered twice. According to Darwin’s evolution theory, we can say that the human population started the 6th mass extinction in the history of the world life evolution. Still, confidentially nobody can prove it, and we can accept even more fantastic alternatives to how life comes to the world. Even scientists say that’s the fastest mass extinction, even worse than asteroid in the dinosaur era. After the asteroid hit the Earth, the problem was that the first hit killed only the giant animals, and the climate change took thousands of years. The animals died much slower than showing trends of how we impact nature and wild animals now. Comparing these events is unrealistic, but confidentially we can see a mass liquidation of different biologic elements. Due to deforestation, millions of animals are losing their native homes, food, and vast spaces are changing from forests to the desert. We are cutting trees for retail consumption and using the land for farming and growing food for this growing population.
In the 18th century, when the population was not so incredibly high, trees covered about 60 million square kilometers of the land. During the past years, we decreased this size by 30% to 40 million square kilometers. Many world universities opened their programs for analysis of the Earth’s sustainability and availability of resources. With the current tempo of resource consumption (not only trees), but we are also going to the ecosystem’s fatal crash due to an insufficient number of trees within the next 40-50 years with the probability of 90%.
