19.20.21. is a planned five-year project to understand the effects of the rising global population of humanity becoming increasingly urbanized: 19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century. The Flash-based introduction includes historical trends and geographic factors.
posted by jjray
on Apr 13, 2010 -
10 comments
Due to population decline, Detroit
plans on bulldozing roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city into semi-rural farmland. It is a worst case scenario in America, but pales to the problem of Eastern Germany, where demographic collapse in some towns is so severe,
urban-
wolves and
neo-Nazis are the new order of the day. The mayor of one town says: "You can't go into the forest without a knife anymore."
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 19, 2010 -
114 comments
New Kiribati "...will future climate change refugees become a new caste of service sector workers inhabiting a sort of Floating Hotel & Duty Free Mall ... ?"
Small island states are on the front line.
posted by nthdegx
on Jun 19, 2008 -
3 comments
Baby Bust! After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria. The governments of the developed world have always maintained an interest in birthrates and procreation, but the reasons why are changing, and the ensuing demographic debates about gender, race and culture are "ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable."
posted by amyms
on Jun 16, 2008 -
120 comments
TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data
posted by Gyan
on Dec 26, 2007 -
10 comments
This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income.
[via]
posted by tellurian
on Aug 16, 2007 -
19 comments
According to this site - More than 700 Trillion BEEDIES or BIRI are smoked annually
- Indians smoke more than one trillion bidis every year.
- An experienced worker can roll 2,000 a day.
Step inside and learn more about these unrealistic stats!
posted by joelf
on Nov 24, 2006 -
63 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions:
science,
invention,
space travel,
colonisation,
immortality,
water
shortage,
flooding,
nanotech,
techno-apocalypse,
extinction,
mental health,
smart machines,
robots, mind uploading,
AI,
Asia,
economics,
demographics,
goverance,
cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
Who'll be living where. Researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University have developed
map that projects where people will be living in the year 2025.
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 21, 2006 -
36 comments
The Global Baby Bust Summary: Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it's too late.
posted by Postroad
on Dec 28, 2004 -
108 comments
The Empty Cradle. Our everyday personal experiences with traffic, sprawl and other irritants of modern life tell us there are too many people in the world and the problem is getting worse. However in truth world population growth
peaked 40 years ago in 1963 and has been trending downward since. Demographers predict that absolute human population will peak at
9 billion by 2070 and then contract. Long before then, many
nations will shrink in absolute size and the
average age of the world's citizens will
shoot up dramatically, including the fastest aging part of the world:
developing countries, where for example Iraq is aging 2.5 times faster than the USA and Mexico 5 times as fast. Having averted the danger of overpopulation, the world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population.
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 6, 2004 -
28 comments
Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and
exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book
Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this
famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including
Jane Jacobs and
James Howard Knunstler plus
many others including some who are predicting the
immenent demise of suburbs because of
oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that
"we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the
super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted by thedailygrowl
on Apr 30, 2004 -
28 comments
Garret Hardin and his wife Jane were found dead last Thursday in their house of Santa Barbara (California), presumably a double suicide. His 1968 essay
Tragedy of the Commons (a critique of both communism and
laissez-faire capitalism in the light of natural resources constrains) was one of the most widely known works of this expert in population and ecology. Garret was 88 and Jane was 81 and both were in poor health. Last week celebrated their 62nd anniversary.
They were members of the Hemlock Society (now know as
End-of-Life Choices).
posted by samelborp
on Sep 20, 2003 -
11 comments
An undeclared war on latex is apparently being waged by the Bush administration, which is taking all sorts of steps to avoid condoning their use. This is a patently ridiculous stance to take in the face of a global AIDS epidemic, but this interesting essay also raised my eyebrows:
According to figures in a report on condoms by Population Action International, the average man in Botswana gets less than one condom per year from international donors.
Uhhh...doesn't the idea of condoms as a staple of international relief seem a bit strange? Haven't governments around the world devoted any resources to their own public health? Surely donor-nations can't keep everyon else's penises safely sheathed forever.
posted by subpixel
on Jan 10, 2003 -
12 comments
Since this is the first day of the new year, I thought it would be interesting to check current
US and
global population numbers, and then compare those numbers on January 1st 2004, to see how much the world's population has grown or shrunk. Currently the clock shows 292,277,976 for the US, and 6,625,786,982 for the World. Metafilter readers from outside the US are welcome to post their countries current population level, as well.
posted by Beholder
on Jan 1, 2003 -
31 comments
Miniature Earth ... Sure, you may have already seen something like this before... but as we're about to turn the calendar over for another year, it's as good a time as any to thoughtfully reconsider the world we live in. Miniature Earth is a flash presentation that compresses the world's population down to a community of 100 people, and gives statistical proportions.
Work with passion; Love without needing to be loved; appreciate what you have; and do your best to make a better world.
posted by crunchland
on Dec 23, 2002 -
22 comments
Half a billion Americans? The Economist crunches census data from both sides of the Atlantic and figures that the US will hit the 500 million mark sometime in the next few decades, surpassing the combined population of even the expanded EU. In typical style, the Economist looks at the economic and political reprecussions of this, but skips another interesting question: how will a doubling of the population change America itself? will it make the US more environmentally friendly? reduce urban sprawl? will the shifting population balance change the culture itself?
posted by costas
on Aug 23, 2002 -
48 comments
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement "Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense." More inside...
posted by Irontom
on May 30, 2002 -
21 comments
American Depop? From America to Europe to Russia, birthrates are declining -- and eventually, so will population. What are the implications? Guess who has some answers.
posted by dhartung
on Jan 10, 2002 -
28 comments
I'm just one in a billion! With the birth of a baby girl named Asha - 'Faith' in Hindi - India's population officially hit 1 billion today, an event marked with fanfare and concern over the nation's too-rapid growth. Astha was born to Anjana and Ashok Arora at 5:05 a.m. this morning, putting India in an exclusive club with China as the only nations with populations exceeding 1 billion.
Now if any country messes with us, all we have to do is jump at the same time to wipe out the enemy. :)
Source:
yahoo
posted by riffola
on May 11, 2000 -
3 comments
