For this blog, I wish to select my topic as Human Population. In completing the readings last week and conducting research on Malthus, I became increasingly interested in this subject. Specifically, I became aware of the exponential growth we have experienced in the last two hundred years and its effect on this Earth. I am interested in the new problems that will arise due to huge populations that the world has never seen. I hope to learn about why humans got to this position. And then look at future population growths and the problems that will arise. Furthermore, I want to look at the future course of the human population and its preservation of Earth. Through this blog, I hope to gain valuable information on the subject of Human Population and becoming informed solutions to these complex issues.
Pros:
ReplyDeleteThe style and tone of this blog are appealing. I like how this paper kept the readers informed by making various comments weekly. I liked how the author started with the different periods of history and explained how agriculture/food played a role in human population. The author started with hunter-gather societies and said how the low calorie intake played a role in woman’s reproduction leading to woman only having a kid every four years. The author explains the Neolithic demographic transition in great deal and illustrates it with a picture. The author makes it clear that the Neolithic demographic transition was an increase in deaths of 5 to 19 year old, which suggests there was much larger birth rate at that time, explaining the changes in population size.
The author does a good job explaining the industrial revolution and how the roles of energy, more specifically fossil fuels played a role in human population. The author took an extra step in his blog by reading the paper by Thomas Malthus and does a good job analyzing it. The main point from the paper I got was that populations would grow in areas where there are enough resources. Also when the resources are limited the population won’t grow or don’t survive.
Cons:
The organization of the blog could have been better. The author should have started with the overall numbers or tables to illustrate what the population is. It would give readers an idea of how the human population has increased exponentially this last century. The reader then would have wondered what were the causes of the expansion? The author could have started with how the population of the world is at 7 billion today and due to that is a major problem. Another flaw of the paper was how did agriculture expand? You can’t talk about the expansion of the human population without talking about the Haber-Bosch synthesis. Due to both the contributions from Haber-Bosch and fossil fuels it transformed areas into agriculture fields. The large scale agriculture before both Haber-Bosch and fossil fuels supported 100-700 people per km^2. This was a dramatic increase in order of magnitude. After the invention of Haber Bosch and fossil fuels it supported 600-10^6s people per km^2. Due to the Haber-Bosch process the global population grow to seven billion. Another flaw of this paper was it didn’t give the impacts that we humans have made on the environment. In class we learned the different aspects humans made such as: pollution, killing of whales, deforestation, and oil spills.