These are some interesting charts and statistics I thought I would share.
I think they speak for themselves.
Here is a link to the sight:
http://www.people.eku.edu/ritchisong/317notes3.html-According to the U.S. Census Bureau as of Oct 2011 the world population hit 7,000,000,000 12 years again from 6 billion.
-2,000 years ago the estimated human population was 150 million
-By 1850, the human population was one billion. By 1930, it was 2 billion.
-It took 10,000 generations to reach 2 billion.
-The human population is now growing at a rate of about 3 people/second or 260 thousand/day or 1.8 million per week or 93 million/year
-Nearly half the earth's land mass already has been changed by human activity - wetlands filled in, forests cut down, prairies plowed under.
-Runoff from farms, industries, and urban areas has resulted in some 50 "dead zones" in coastal waters, including one in the Gulf of Mexico.
-Desertification is the conversion of productive rangeland or cropland into desertlike land. It is usually caused by a combination of overgrazing, soil erosion, prolonged drought and climate change.
While grain yields per acre have been increasing steadily until 1990, the rate of increase has fallen off in the last 10 years. Most of the benefits of irrigation, machinery, fertilizer and plant breeding have already been realized. The production of grain per acre is close to the maximum obtainable through photosynthesis. Geneticists are working on improving the efficiency of photosynthesis, and that may turn out to be possible, but given that nature has been working on the problem for several hundred million years, there is no guarantee that we can improve on the process in the next 10 to 20 years.
Conservation of Wildlife Resources
Instructor: Gary Ritchison