The world is overpopulated.

I agree that Earth is finite and has finite resources. However, in his rebuttal, Pro disappointed me by focusing on my quote from The Skeptical Environmentalist where Bjorn Lomborg makes an analogy, rather than the information he provides from US Geological Surveys about differences between “known resources” and actual resources. My point is this: The only reason we think we're near the end of our resources is because it's not economically feasible or technically possible to find all of our resources at one time, and the trend during this population explosion of the last 150 years or so is to discover that there are continually more resources when we actually look for them. I refer to my previous argument to show that despite higher use rates through time of many mineral resources, we have a consistent trend of ending up with more years left of the mineral than we did before. I know this does not mean unending resources, but rather, we have plenty left for a long time from current known reserves, and every year, there are more years left of use of those minerals, and when there is a downward trend in availability, we have always successfully found more when it becomes economically feasible. We have 2 entire continents, and much of the ocean floor mostly unexplored for resources. All trends indicate we're just scratching the surface. “In order to support human life, a number of things are necessary. The fundamental needs for each human being are a house, healthy food, clean water and proper health care. ” I find this assertion to be historically inaccurate. Generations of people lived and had children, with shelter, yes, but not very healthy food (and not much of it), dirty water from muddy wells, creeks, and cisterns, and what we would consider very poor healthcare. Anyone who's reading this who has European ancestors has had ancestors who were brought up with the dominant thought among the learned that all ailments are caused by Humors. Look up medieval medicine if you think “proper heath care” is necessary “in order to SUPPORT human life. .” The fundamentals for each human being are adequate; shelter, food, water, immune system, and something to live for. “Access to food does not only include the ability for the planet to grow food, but also the ability of the world’s population to obtain food. ” No disagreement there. Nor do I see any problem with your statistics about where the poor are located, or their hardships. I do wish to refute the supposed cause. Pro is correct in saying access to food includes the ability to grow AND obtain it. Is there enough food produced on Earth to support 7 billion people? Let's use one of Pro's sources to answer this. If you go to round one, you'll see this link as source 3 . http://www.wfp.org... Click on the tab to the immediate right of that, “What causes hunger? ” “Food has never before existed in such abundance, so why are 925 million people in the world going hungry? ” If you check the UN's FAO website they'll back them up . http://www.fao.org... Observe the number of poor people on earth has been flat, despite the number of total people doubling: . http://www.nationmaster.com... If we're using up all of our resources from overpopulation, how can this be? Observe the concentration of hungry people, as a percentage of their national populations, is highest in Africa, so let's take a look at them. . http://en.wikipedia.org... I knew my assumptions of Africa's problems probably weren't accurate, so I decided to call my brother-in-law to get a first-hand account. He was born and raised in Africa, spending much of his childhood in Kenya, and living in several other nations: Tanzania, South Africa, and Malawi. Why are there so many hungry people in Africa? It's a two-fold issue. People move to the cities because that's where the good paying jobs are, but a lot of them can't pay for an education to get a good enough job to pay for the higher prices in town. Food has to be imported or driven in from the country but people in the country don't grow more than they need, and they don't grow much variety. They eat a lot of field corn, like what we feed cattle here. Why don't they grow anything besides corn? Well, lack of education. Many of them don't know they should have a variety in their diet. They eat field corn. .. and that's it. After we educate them, they start mixing things into the corn, like sorghum. Fruit is scarce, too. We had an orchard at our place and after watching us, the other people wanted to try it, too. Why don't they have any fruit? They have a survival/nomadic mentality that doesn't let them invest in a tree that takes 3 years to grow it's first fruit. Westerners don't understand that. They go in there with good intentions and teach them all these new techniques to care for the land, but it's too much at once. They have the mentality that if the land isn't productive, you move. You don't become attached to the land and make it work. So the Westerners leave, and when the system breaks down, they revert to their old ways. The wells aren't maintained, the land becomes infertile, they get hungry and slaughter a goat, then when they're down to their last goat, they eat it and. .. well, they're left with nothing. It's a completely foreign concept for them to say 'This is my land, it isn't working, so I'll have to do something to make it work. ' Another problem is they'll give a kid underprocessed food. They won't crack the corn, so it will just pass through them; they do that because they're not educated. So when Westerners go in there to help, do things just revert to like they were before, or do they get worse? I've seen it get worse sometimes. They see Europeans and Americans they want to emulate, and they feel they need a cell phone, so you'll see Africans all over with cell phones, but it will cost them most of a year's wage to buy. Kind of like a new car for us? Exactly. But I see the same thing when I'm working with people in trailer parks in the US. They'll have a huge 56” screen that you or I wouldn't buy unless we had a ton of money saved up. Poor people all over have a survival mentality to use what you can today, but they always have one luxury they hang onto, even if they can't afford it. It's a foreign concept to think of the future. So people aren't hungry in Africa because of overpopulation? Definitely not. “The ecological footprint of humanity is a measure of the amount of land that is required to mitigate the actions of one human being” You can see from this chart that world food production has only increased over time, all the while less total land is used with more yield resulting. More food from less land does not show that we are running out of land to farm. . http://pop.org... Your comparison of people to wolves is flawed. Wolves are consumers. Humans don't have chlorophyll in our skin, but we're smart enough to act as producers. When people raise livestock, we try to INCREASE the herd size, not eat what we want and decimate the population. Overall, yield increase is the goal. We DO recycle, we DO increase efficiencies. Metal recycling is as old as metal use. The people of Rhodes used scrap from the Heliopolis to build the Colossus of Rhodes. “It is estimated that the equivalent of 1.5 earths is necessary to sustain the actions of human beings indefinitely at this present time[5]” Yeah, I dug for a while through footprintnetwork. org's methodology paper. . http://www.footprintnetwork.org... One of the common verbs in that paper is “assume,” and it is often used in conjunction with how data that cannot be practically attained will be input into key parts of their equations. I am not impressed with this site.