7 Billion and Counting

This year in geography class we study the population of various countries and their use of resources. Wise people who study global population have estimated that sometime today the total world population will hit 7,000,000,000 and continue to climb. One of the questions we will discuss in class is how many people can comfortably live on our planet. I attended a fantastic keynote talk given by Sir Ken Robinson this morning at the AIMS conference and he talked about the use of resources by various countries. If everyone in the world used resources at the same rate as people in Rwanda the globe could support more than 8 billion people, but if everyone consumed resources at the rate of people in North America the world could only support a population of 1.2 billion. That is a very sobering statistic especially given the rising standard of living in so many developing countries. What is the solution? I'll let you know when we've come up with it in class.