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The Population Equation: Balancing What We Need with What We Have Richard Dahl Abstract Doomsayers have long predicted that the world would have reached its carrying capacity by now, and that multitudes of people would be dying from thirst and starvation. Although millions today are afflicted with hunger and water scarcity, the direst predictions have not proved to be the case--at least, not yet. Population growth, though it is beginning to slow, will continue throughout the next decades. Environmental health experts believe that not enough attention is being paid to the role of population in ecosystem degradation, and applaud the recently released Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for the look it takes at this relationship. Although the future of the Earth’s resources looks grim, experts agree that if work were to begin now, and population issues addressed properly, the environmental situation could be reversed. The full version of this article is available for free in HTML or PDF formats. |
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