China: the epicenter of overpopulationIn 1999, the world population reached six billion. Since then, about 200,000 lives have been added per day, about a small town per week. This population boom, however, is not evenly distributed across the world. Indeed, many European countries have experienced negative population growth over the past decade. It is the developing nations of our world that are most responsible for the exponential increase that the world has begun to experience. The busy human mind has raced to find “technological solutions” to support our ever-growing population. The population should have reached a glass ceiling a few billion people ago, many argue that this explains the fact that 1-2 billion people are starving right now. We have reached a point where we are uncontrollably increasing our size, exploiting our resources in an attempt to survive before we can begin to outline ways to protect them, increasing the total production they could provide. As Edward O. Wilson says, “The epicenter of environmental change, the paradigm of demographic stress, is the People's Republic of China.” China is home to a fifth of the world's population, around 1.3 billion people. This population is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2030. Most of this population is crammed into the Yangzi River basin, the southernmost region of China. The population surge occurred in the late 1950s, when the world experienced a baby boom after the world wars. This period of time is referred to as the "Golden Age" in Chinese history. The country had suffered for nearly 40 years of warring states and corruption by many different political parties, so when the Communist Party finally came to power, a united nation or... middle of paper... distribution of water, massive public works projects have been developed and initiated to combat this problem. The success of these projects could alleviate looming water shortages in more than 300 major cities. China is under great pressure to find all possible technological solutions to support its large-scale nursery. Meanwhile, the world's eyes will be on China to see how it manages its mass population. Hopefully they're successful, hopefully they find an answer and that the genius of humanity is able to continue to stretch the glass ceiling that bacteria, that human population, are up against. Bibliography: Aird, John S. "China's terror of family planning" The Human Life Review, summer 1994Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life (excerpt, the bottleneck theory) UK, Random House Inc. 2002www.gdrc. org/icm/grameen-info.htmlwww.worldbank.org