How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth?

The earth is already stretched far beyond its carrying capacity to sustain the existing human population. Its finite resources are being consumed at an ever increasing rate beyond our ability to survive in the face of exhausting those fundamentals necessary for survival. At 7 billion people, it exceeds even the planet’s capacity to assimilate the waste produced under current conditions. Despite predictions the global population will reach 9 billion by mid-century, optimal standards of living would require a world population of no more than around 1 billion–a number not exceeded for many centuries until the advent of modern energy consumption, medical technology advances, and the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture. Yet our atmosphere grows stale with pollution, we’re running out of clean fresh water at the same time we pollute what little we have left, and the most arable land capable of food production has peaked in what it can provide. The following film explores this question, our future or lack thereof, and whether we can alter through rational self determination the course of it before falling into the abyss upon whose edge we now stand.