4069.0: Tuesday, November 14, 2000: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM | ||||
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| Session Abstract Organizer: Warren M. Hern Some time during the past year or two, the world population reached six billion. Those who are forty years old have experienced a doubling of the world population in their lifetime. Those who are seventy years old have seen the human population nearly triple. Those who were born near the turn of the century have seen it nearly quadruple. There is no period in human history that is comparable, and nothing in human history prepares us for what we are now experiencing and will face in the future. Demographers project a declining growth rate globally, but the absolute numbers are staggering, and some populations continue to grow at exceedingly high rates of 4% per year or more. At the same time, we face rapid global climate change, at least some of which is induced by human activity, mass extinction of species, pervasive environmental contamination with toxic materials, declining food reserves, exhaustion of fisheries, soil depletion, regional pandemics, civil disorder, violent conflict accompanied by mass savagery of historic proportions, and regional famine. To go beyond the list of calamities, what is happening, and how do we integrate our knowledge of these phenomena? What are the policy implications? This symposium provides an opportunity for those who have focused on either particular implications of this unprecedented growth or the global impact of human activities to summarize their observations and views | ||||
| See individual abstracts for presenting author's disclosure statement. | ||||
| Learning Objectives: Refer to the individual abstracts for learning objectives | ||||
| Warren Hern, MD, MPH, PhD | ||||
| How many times has the human population doubled? Comparisons with cancer Warren M. Hern, MD, MPH, PhD | ||||
| Population Growth: The Force Driving Social and Environmental Stress Jay Forrester, PhD | ||||
| Six Billion: We're all in this together Daniel E. Pellegrom | ||||
| Sponsor: | Population, Family Planning, and Reproductive Health | |||
| Cosponsors: | Environment; International Health | |||