Rompendo Barreiras: Nosso Planeta

Johan says that the actions of humans alone in the past 50 years are responsible for pushing humanity and the planet out of the 10,000-year Holocene and into the Anthropocene. So it seems astounding to me that the global human population was not included as a critical boundary to the destabilization of the planet.

The global human population was just 3 billion in 1960 and it now sits at 7.9 billion, a 160 % increase in less than a lifetime. Just as any farmland has a maximum capacity for the number of livestock, the planet must also have a maximum capacity for the number of humans that demands all of its resources.

Countries like Brazil have seen their populations tripled since 1960; there were 70 million Brazilians then and there are 210 million now. As draconian and inhumane as China's one-child policy was, their population would be 2 billion without it, instead of 1.5 billion, if they had the same population growth as Brazil. Human culture has to change because there is no evolutionary need for any family to have more than two children since most children will survive into adulthood.