The Earth’s natural environment is changing in ways fundamentally different from those at any other time in our history. Air quality and water supplies are increasingly vulnerable, growing numbers of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, land alteration is pervasive, and the global climate is changing. These present a new set of challenges for people, plants, wildlife, and the ecosystems upon which we all depend. Experts now trace these diverse environmental phenomena to the growing scale of human activity resulting from the exceedingly rapid rate of population growth and the high levels of resource consumption that define today’s world.

It took almost all of human history – until the early 1800s – to reach a global population of 1 billion people on Earth, and today there are 6.5 billion of us! The population has grown more since 1950 than in the previous four million years! We are adding about 74 million people per year to the planet, and the United Nations predicts that we will reach approximately 9 billion people by mid-century.

In order to be successful at leaving a legacy of wildlife and wild places for our children, we must take human needs and behavior into account. We know that when women and families have the ability to decide the number and spacing of their children, they generally choose to have smaller, healthier families. This is why voluntary family planning programs are so important. International family planning provides people with the information they need to make responsible decisions for the future of their families. Investing in voluntary family planning programs is a common sense solution and is key to the National Wildlife Federation’s efforts to achieve a sustainable balance among the world’s population, environmental quality, wildlife habitat and our finite natural resources.

While most population growth is occurring in the developing world, we cannot ignore the role that we in industrialized countries, especially in the United States, play in resource consumption. With just 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 25% of almost all global resources. Such a disproportionate "ecological footprint" means that a person born in the United States will have 280 times the environmental impact as a person born in Haiti. If nothing is done to address unsustainable consumption in industrialized nations, as well as the high rates of growth in poverty-stricken countries, the impact that human beings could have on remaining habitat and natural resources will be unprecedented.