The article that Schreer gave me this week taught me three things about human population and how it relates to the natural environment. This includes freshwater availability, food security, and carbon dioxide emissions. As a population within a country grows, it is shown that over time freshwater availability drops dramatically. This is most likely due to a combination of human consumption and also water pollution. This is also the main reason why developing countries, the ones with rapid population growth, experience an extreme shortage of food and declining population sizes for many animals. These kind of things occur because of a lack of means to obtain food at a sustainable level. Eventually people will resort to hunting and eventually hurt animals they aren't supposed to. And as expected, the CO2 levels of countries rise along with population, who need to drive and stuff.
These issues relate to APES when considering the effect of human interaction with aquaculture and the carbon cycle. As people continue to dumb crap into freshwater reserves, we ultimately screw ourselves over. Increased waste leads to less drinkable water and less food when you consider that the animals who drink from those sources will also die. Extra carbon emissions mess up our atmosphere and create too much carbon waste in the atmosphere. This throws the carbon cycle way out of balance and according to Dr. Seuss also chokes the birds flying by. Now that's a shame.
A question I have is about countries with smaller populations. I know places like Switzerland on Norway are all super eco-friendly, but is that naturally or because of conservation efforts? They have it easier than places like India I'd imagine.
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