Abstract
Human use of natural resources has continued to increase dramatically in recent years, as a result of complex linkages between increasing population and increasing per capita consumption. This has begun to have significant effects on the planet’s climate and long-term life-support functions. Future projections of human population range over an order of magnitude by the year 2100, depending on assumptions about rates of fertility and mortality, and indicate a significant aging and urbanizing of the population.
This text was originally published as: Lourdes Arizpe, Robert Constanza and Wolfgang Lutz, 1992: “Populations and Natural Resources use”, in: Dooge, J.C.I.; Goodman, G.T.; la Rivière, J.W.M. (Eds.): An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 61-68. Permission was granted on 28 May 2013 by Ms. Claire Taylor, Senior Publishing Assistant, Legal Services, Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, UK.
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Notes
- 1.
A more extreme position likens human population to a cancerous growth bound to kill its hospitable planet.
- 2.
We refer to population numbers in the sense that the physical presence of human bodies on the surface of the Earth becomes significant because of what these bodies do: they breathe, eat and use the resources of the Earth. A body which does none of these things has no impact on the earth systems.
- 3.
In some instances birth rates even increased slightly due to better maternal health conditions.
- 4.
Other kinds of outflows have involved fewer numbers: the slave trade across the Atlantic, six to twelve million; political refugees in all countries of the world, 14 million.
- 5.
“Perhaps nine-tenths of the population increase in Northern America and Oceania and two-thirds of that in Latin America could be directly attributed to European migrant populations within Europe’s demographic outshoots in the vast, formerly thinly populated land of the Americas, Oceania and Northern Asia. Altogether the areas of European settlements that comprised 20 % of the world’s population in 1700 claimed 36 % of that total by the middle of the 20th century” (Demeny 1990).
- 6.
A typical combination of such factors at a regional scale in Latin America is given by Stonich 1989): “Agricultural development in the region has been highly uneven not only in terms of the spatial distribution of people. Political-economic factors related to the expansion of export-oriented agriculture constrain access to the most fertile lands of the region (in South Honduras). This has resulted in a highly uneven distribution of population in which the greatest population densities occur in the highlands, the areas that are the most marginal for agriculture. The growing population in the highlands with inadequate opportunities to earn a living has led to a parceling of land among more and more people, with agricultural production expanding into even more marginal areas. Growing rural poverty stimulated outmigration from the more densely patched South into other parts of the country, thereby decreasing population pressure in the region awhile simultaneously augmenting urban populations and escalating pressure on tropical forest areas in the remainder of the country”.
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Acknowledgment
Much of this chapter is taken from the previous work of the authors, which benefited from the collaboration of many individuals, among them: Herman Daly, Joy Bartholomew, Richard Rockwell, Charles Perrings, Cutler Cleveland, John Cumberland, Margarita Velázquez, Bruce Hannon, Bob Ulanowicz, Christine Halvorson, Veronica Behn, and Alan Scholefield.
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Arizpe, L., Costanza, R., Lutz, W. (2014). Population and Natural Resource Use. In: Migration, Women and Social Development. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice(), vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06572-4_12
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