Shaun Tan Section E

The reflection paper will talk about my learnings from the lecture “BBC
Horizon: How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth”

The lecture talked about the two things we were very successful at that
enabled the rapid growth of our human population. Those are the ability to control
diseases and the reduction of death rates. By controlling and reducing the cases of
death causing diseases, humans get to live longer thus a higher population growth.
The law of conservation of mass was also illustrated in the video by showing how
water, though changes in distribution, has always been the same amount all the
same time. We also consume water indirectly by the products that we consume. As
mentioned in the video, a cup of coffee requires around 120 liters of water to make, a
can of beer around 150 liters of water, a hamburger around 8000 liters of water, and
around 3000 liters of water to produce the cotton in a shirt.

The lecture also discussed Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The
lectures then talk about how he developed high-yielding, disease resistant crops. He
then helped mexican and indian farmers with the help them grow these with modern
farming techniques. This helped five yield the agricultural produce. This also may
have helped minimize global conflict because countries can become self-sufficient
now and thus they do not need to deal or fight with other countries for food.
Population growth is also a problem because the resources we have on this earth
are very limited. That is why governments tried to control population growth. China
introduced the one child policy in 1979 to encourage the citizens to only have one
child and be fined if there were more. In the 1970s, India did festivals that had
people undergo vasectomies for incentives. On the other hand, Kerala was able to
have lower birth rates because the children there are well educated so they usually
decide to have smaller families. Contraceptives are also something that the
government of Gwanda has been trying to give free access to these technologies.

Overall, the lecture on how much humans can earth handle and addressed
how the growth rates of humans have increased rapidly over the past century.