It’s safe to say that the human race is thriving. Between 1959 and 2009, the world’s population more than doubled from under three billion people to almost seven billion. While the rate of growth is expected to slow over the next four decades, Earth is expected to be home to over nine billion people by 2050. That’s a lot of people for Mother Nature to manage.
Space issues aside, the biggest concern on an over-populated planet is whether or not there will be enough resources to go around. Last week, British investor and Co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) Jeremy Grantham offered what Business Insider called a “startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.”
Grantham opined that the world has suffered a permanent ‘paradigm shift’, where the number of people on Earth has now outstripped the planet’s ability to support us. Of course, this is nothing new – the notion of a growing global population of humans consuming a finite supply of natural resources can only lead to one end, can’t it? And this is very much why “the prices of metals, hydrocarbons (oil), and food are now beginning to reflect that”, notes Grantham.
But the purpose of this piece isn’t to tread well-worn ground about the planet’s perils. So forget about fossil fuels, drinking water, crops, ice-caps, trees and animals for now. What we’ll be looking at is all those elements that go into helping you do what you’re doing right now. Whether you’re reading this on your laptop, smartphone, tablet…or any other digital device, the natural environment has had a huge part to play in this experience.
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