Sustainability, Essay Example

According to Daily and Ehrlich (1992), the current population of 5.5 billion, growing at an annual rate of 1.7%, will add approximately 93 million people this year, which is literally greater than the entire population of Mexico.  Although many people have differing opinions on how to obtain sustainability for the world’s population, it is clear that the goal of sustainability is to control the size of the world’s population in relation to the number of resources the world has to provide.  At this current rate, it is doubtful that our world would be able to properly provide adequate resources for the billions of human population, let alone the rest of the species that inhabit the Earth.  I think that the solution lies within political efforts to help control the growth rate of the world’s population.

One of the most interesting views on the subject comes from Amartya Sen in which she spoke at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.  Her ideas suggested that the governments of this world should no longer use coercive methods to force people to change their behaviors, but to introduce a decision-making and learning experience for women to become knowledgeable of the impact of hteir decisions.  This approach suggests that women are educated on reproduction by emphasizing such points as contraceptives, pre-natal and post-natal care, professional birth attendants, nutritional and child-care counseling, as well as H.I.V./AIDS prevention (Overpopulation.org, 2009).  While the theories of economists and academics are interesting, the world’s population much become more educated and taught the impacts of their decisions to have children and how to properly avoid making poor decisions and reducing the dangers of not achieving sustainability.  As the population continues to grow, the consumer-driven lifestyles and insatiable appetites for objects and wasteful resources, forces the solution of sustainability to drift further and further away.  We must educate first, and then act second.  Education is the key to enabling sustainability as a legitimate solution to the problems the world’s population will face in the coming years.

References

Daily, G.C., & Ehrlich, P.R. (1992). Population, sustainability, and earth’s carrying capacity: a framework for estimating population sizes and lifestyles that could be sustained without undermining future generations. BioScience. Retrieved on November 1, 2009, from Web site: http://dieoff.org/page112.htm

Overpopulation.org. (2009). How to Attain population sustainability. Retrieved on October 31, 2009, from Web site: http://www.overpopulation.org/pop-sustainability.html