First, a compelling biological case can be made that earth’s long-term carrying capacity for an industrialized humanity may be two billion or less. Secondly, a straight-forward graph of human population growth is QUITE un-nuanced (an image is accessible here:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4141/4823979787_29c4df9afd_b.jpg

(In reality, a graph of our numbers, which include five additional billions added just since 1930, with still more billions (numbers eight and nine) on-track to arrive by mid-century has a distinctly LATE-PHASE exponential look to it so that the article’s author, and his sources, might do well to compare our own graph with a physicist’s graph of the fission events in a detonating nuclear weapon.)

In short, there are real possibilities or even likelihoods of humanitarian, civilizational, and biospheric calamities embedded in the numbers that we have already reached. For readers of Conservation magazine who would like a more biological assessment of our numbers and their implications, several easy resources are available here:

http://www.scribd.com/people/documents/15397192-rocky-xviii

If 1.0 is the perfect balance, lets work towards acheiving this through education. Life is life, but quality of life is more important. We can do it, we need self discipline and need to start thinking about other people before ourselves.