CHAPTER 4: HUMAN POPULATION, ENVIRONMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT
-human population growth may be the environmental issue
-THOMAS MALTHUS – argued in 1798 that the human ability to multiply far exceeded our ability
to increase food production – unless people found a more humane solution to stabilizing their
population, famine/disease/war would be inevitable because they would act to curb population
growth
-KARL MARX – argued that Malthus didn’t consider the socioeconomic conditions that placed
people (especially poor people who placed themselves farther away from economic production);
argued that distribution of economic resources (particularly access to property and other forms
of capital) is at least as important in explaining the resource – population equation as overall
population numbers
FACTORS AFFECTING HUMAN POPULATION CHANGE
-historical growth of the human population is described in term of four major periods or stages:
Stage 1: Hunters/Gatherers – total world population, population density, and average rate
of growth were very low
Stage 2: Early, Preindustrial Agriculture - beginning at the time of agricultural settlement;
first major increase in the total world population; much greater density of people
Stage 3: The Machine Age (Industrial Revolution) – rapid increase in the human
population resulting from improvements in health care and food supplies
Stage 4: The Modern Era - represents today’s increasingly urbanized world, rate of
population growth has declined in wealthy, industrialized nations but has continued to
rise rapidly in poorer developing countries
POPULATION DYNAMICS
-DEMOGRAPHY: scientific study of the characteristics and changes in the size and structure of
human populations
-changes in population sizes occur through births, deaths, immigration (arrivals from elsewhere),
and emigration (individuals leaving to go elsewhere)
-how rapidly a population grows depends on the difference between the crude birth rate and the
crude death rate - the difference is the CRUDE GROWTH RATE
-CRUDE GROWTH RATE = CBR – CDR
-CRUDE BIRTH RATE: the annual number of live births per 1000 population – the crude measure
because it relates births to the total population without regard to the age or sex composition of
the population
-we can not make predictions about the future dynamics of our population by just using the
crude growth rate
-a measure of the rate of population increase (the ANNUAL GROWTH RATE): population
change/population x 100
-the crude death rate is also called the mortality or death rate: the annual number of deaths per
1000 population
-the crude growth rate of a population is the net change, or simply the difference between the
crude birth rate and the crude death rate
-INFANT MORTALITY RATE: the ratio of deaths of infants under 12 months of age per 1000 live
births
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
-DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION: key to understanding how human populations stabilize (four-five
stages) -Pre-Industrial Stage 1: harsh living conditions gave ride to a high birth rate, to compensate for
high infant mortality and a high death rate – which made very little population growth
-Early Industrial (Transitioning) Stage 2: as a result of more reliable food and water supplies as
well as improved health care – characterized as a decline in the death rate – birth rates remained
high, so population growth was rapid
-DEMOGRAPHIC TRAP: unable to break out of the second stage ^
-Industrial Stage 3: characterized by a declining birth rate that eventually approaches the newer,
lower death rate – as it declines, population growth fluctuates based on economic conditions –
the relatively low death rate, combined with the lower birth rate slows population growth in the
third stage – reasons for the decline births include better birth control, job opportunities for
women, declines in infant mortality, high cost of raising children, and better education
-Post-Industrial Stage 4: birth rates decline even further to equal the low death rates – this stage
th
is subdivided into a 5 stage to represent those countries that have moved beyond
manufacturing-based industries into service and information based industries in a process called
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION – zero populati
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