The environmental movement has skyrocketed in the past three decades. At the same time, the world has entered into the information age. As a result of these nearly simultaneous events, there are volumes of literature available on the ecological threats humankind must face. There are a myriad of problems that plague the earth=s environment, and as many approaches in proposing solutions. One thing is clear in any ecological assessment of the planet though. Human beings have had the greatest, most damaging impact (on an exponential level) to the planet of any species on the planet.
Much of the knowledge regarding environmental issues has necessarily been based in the scientific arena. In this paper, two articles discussing the negative impact of population growth are summarized, compared, and contrasted. The first, published by the World Resources Institute (WRI), is titled AMillions of Children in the World=s Largest Cities Are Exposed to Life Threatening Air Pollution.@ The other, AThe New Suburbanites: How America=s Plants and Animals Are Threatened by Sprawl@ appears in The Amicus, a magazine put out by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). This paper concludes with a look at how population growth is consistently pointed to as the biggest threat to ecological sustainability, no matter what aspect of environmental damage one looks at.
The study AUrban Air Pollution Risks to Children: A Global Environmental Health Indicator@, performed by the World Health Organization (WHO), is presented In the WRI article. This report Adescribes how the effects of gross air pollution levels that greatly exceed recommended limits from WHO especially plague the developing worls=s 18 mega-cities (cities with populations greater than 9 million)@ (Brown et. al. 1999, September 23. Online).
Additionally this article explains the development of an Environmental Health Indicator (EHI) as a means of measuring and comparing differen...