GLOBAL PROBLEMS:

We Can End World Hunger, Poverty And Pollution- All At Once.

It all starts with (over)population

Aaryan Harshith
10 min readJun 16, 2021

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Image by Mauro Mora from Unsplash

If you had to give every single person on the planet a handshake — assuming each handshake takes you about a second — it would take you about 240 years to get through everyone.

That’s well over three lifetimes of shaking hands, from the second you’re born to the day you die. Our world has a lot of people. More than the human mind could ever hope to comprehend.

Except, while we underestimate our population, we have a knack for overestimating just how much Earth can do for us. And that mistake could cost us big-time.

Throughout virtually all of human history, there wasn’t a lot of us. Nature came and went in the form of bears and tigers and ice ages, taking millions of lives with it. And yet, after just a few decades of growth and consumption, we’ve warmed the planet by 1.5°C, deforested 1/3 of our forests since the ice age, and bleached the majority of our oceans with carbon dioxide.

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