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In Daniel Quinn's novel, The Story Of B, one of the main characters teachings involve out population growth. He claims that man has lived on Earth for almost three million years, and until recently was not the majority. This change came with the start of the agricultural revolution. By making an abundance of food readily available the human population jumped from ten million to fifty million. The next doubling of our population took only sixteen hundred years as agriculturalist spread and the people forced their lifestyle onto other people. The next doubling, leaving 200 million humans, would take only 14 hundred years. Bringing us up to date the last doubling of our population took only 36 years leaving over 6 billion humans. This is not a new concept I have heard bands such as Bad Religion, NoFX, and Leftover Crack all bring this up. So what exactly is going on? How do we reverse this before it is too late? In My Ishmael, Quinn makes the claim that with our population doubling every 35 years, in just 70 years we have will be able to fill four entire planets.

I began by going on the internet and exploring the problem further. The first site I came to was, "We Have Passes Our Sustainability" by Mark Elsis. Elsis claims our population reached 6 billion in 1999. He goes on to say that this population is coming to a stop and will not happen again. According to Elsis the growth of human population peaked in 1987. Since this time, our growth has been declining by 2.1 million each year. Elsis claims that in 2029 there will be zero population growth. At the United Nations meeting in 1998, the U.N. decreased their "projected population for 2050 from 9.4 billion to 8.9 billion" (Elsis 1). The problem , as Elsis puts it, is that our population at 6,013,880,000 has reached its "sustainability level for major food energy sources, grains and fish, as well as very quickly reaching our fresh water limits" (Elsis 2).
Why is our population going down exactly? According to Elsis's article, the world's grain output has been falling by .6 percent every year since 1984. In 1998, grain output fell to 695 pounds: An eight percent decline since 1984. This is due to a lack of producing new places to grow grain. Where do you grow anything when your population is growing and people need places to live? We could see this just on the field trip around Butte County. The forest areas and wilderness will continue to disappear as Earth's population reaches

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