Welcome from PopulationWatch!
I am a resident internal medicine doctor training in Chicago, Illinois. This page is currently under development. I hope to provide information on common sense medical issues and hope to correlate human health issues to the human population trends of the past, present and future.
Much of human history has been effected by the number of humans in a given region as well as on the planet total. The impact of a given population in any environment is ultimately determined by 3 factors: population, the affluence of the population (waste/pollution attributable to individuals), technological impact (waste/pollution from the means of production). In summary, I=(P)(A)(T). This simple mathematical relationship explains how the United States can represent 4% of the world's population yet consume >20% of the world's resources. The average U.S. citizen will consume over one hundred times the resources that a person in the third world will birth to death and in a world where 1 in 6 will spend most of their lives malnourished. Both the affluence and technology of the US far surpasses that of any other country. This affluence is not without a cost. Whereas much of the world suffers medical illnesses due to lack of resources we suffer much pathology from our excesses. I will try to give a short framework of how we got to this state below.
Ultimately the fate of the U.S. is now irrevocably intertwined with that of the rest of the world. We now import about half of our oil needs. And oil is the very heart of all Western economies. Indeed, the world's ability to achieve and increase the worlds population, which is currently in the range of 6.1 billion and rising 90 million per year, is in enormous part due to oil. Until the industrial revolution the entire world was a solar powered system. All human endeavors were powered by the calories and energy harvested from the environment, which in turn was governed by the solar energy input. We raised crops which we fed to humans and draft animals, ultimately using these calories to accomplish work. The solar input provided the conduction and convection energy necessary for weather which drove our sailing ships and windmills, melted the water to drive our water wheels, provided the trees we burned to run our smelters, etc.
This solar dependence is no longer the case. We now rely on fossil fuels to meet the lions-share of our energy needs at all levels. We no longer rely on a portion of agriculture production to feed draft animals, we use gasoline powered tractors instead. The effect is that our world civilization is now running on yesterdays energy as fossil fuels are a storage form of the energy input of the past. We have essentially removed the solar limit as a check on our numbers and put ourselves in a position of reliance on a finite resource. It is important to recognize this concept as all life on this planet has evolved to be constrained by this limit. The planet is, and always will be, an ecosystem made up of totally interdependent species that rely on a solar limited world. The predator needs the prey, the prey needs its vegetation food source, the vegetation needs the sun and the decomposers of the prey and predators and itself to provide the return of base constituents necessary to become the food of the prey, and so on. As with humans, when a species escapes this energy limiting concept its numbers are no longer constrained.
What is the relevance of the above? What does this have to do with medicine? Why would a doctor care? Why are you throwing math at me, I'm an American and no good at this? The answer is simple. We are in an unsustainable situation which threatens the health and very existence of every inhabitant of this planet (I remind you that most of these inhabitants have yet to be born). In addition, we are already being effected by our population, our affluence, and our technology. The human impact on our ecosystem is already threatening our ability to feed ourselves and having a real impact on our individual health. There is a real possibility that we may doom the future to a devastated planet in which they will be denied all possibility of living in anything resembling todays world. In a sense, as inequitable as the distribution of the technological benefits of this world are, we should consider ourselves to be in the glory days of civilization. We consume much more than we need in all things, waste is glorified, consuming for conspicuous motives whenever we want, the future always seems to look good, after all we can look forward to even bigger SUVs next year to drive alone in to the mall. What we need to appreciate is that the whole world will never live like the U.S. There simply is not enough energy to support Western style consumption worldwide for any real amount of time, let alone the use of fossil fuels necessary to get to that kind of world. We only have so much to spread around and the U.S. is already using 20% of what we manipulate yearly. If more of the world lived like the U.S. the supplies would decline even faster, the environment would degrade faster, and an end to the discussion would be brought that much sooner. In fact, the only way the West is able to consume the way it does is by depriving the thirdworld of the opportunity to do so.
Many of the the technological marvels that we employ are having health effects. We are continuously developing novel organic compounds (using oil as a molecule source much of the time) that have never existed before on the planet. Some of these we call drugs, or nylon, and some we call food. All of these have potentially dangerous effects on life, all life not just human. Some of these have greatly benefitted our overall health, others have already been shown to be dangerous, and time will only tell for the others. Some of these compounds, or the by-products of their production, resemble naturally occurring compounds like steroids, neurotransmitters, and other bioeffectors. The consequences of long term exposure may be to small to gage effectively while the cumulative effects of these exposures may be dramatic. We are now potentially effecting the integrity of our built-in cancer survailance systems, our nervous systems, hormonal axis, reproduction, etc. We currently have no reliable means to gage long term cumulative exposures to synthetics. What is certain is that we are absolutely reliant on them now. Synthetics represent one of those necessary technological elements that have allowed us to achieve 6 billion. It is doubtful that we could ever return to agriculturally produced textiles to clothe ourselves and still maintain enough land to feed and shelter ourselves, at least within the context of anything resembling an economy or a sustainable world. The same is the case with the use of plastics, fertilizers, and most of these compounds.
Please except the above as merely a disjointed preamble of what I intend to crystallize into a meaningful analysis of population and health. It is my contention that most of us have no true internalization of the gravity of the present and future human predicament. I ask that readers maintain an open mind and avoid the all to common pitfalls of filtering this information through religious or political viewpoints. The principles involved are profoundly biological in nature. It is an unfortunate fact of our nature that we assume the miracle of life on this planet has as its pinnacle the human species. We forget the human drama plays on a biological stage that is unconcerned with demographics and unforgiving of mistakes. I intend to make it a lifes work to raise the consciousness of people. Please stay tuned! While you are waiting please read what Plato was astute enough to recognize in his day.
Thanks to the good folks below I know you are visitor
