HowMany.org, Neighbor

It took 250,000 years for civilization to reach a population of 1 billion.  Today, we add 250,000 people to the planet each day.  It took a century to add the second billion of us on Earth.  Today, we add 1 billion more every 12 years.

Amid this unstable growth scenario, more than 1 billion human beings do not have enough food and safe drinking water; global warming is disrupting our ecosystems and threatening billions of people with dislocation and conflict; energy resources are becoming scarce, dangerous and expensive; and sprawl destroys 2.2 million acres of forest habitat and farmland every year.

While there are many numbers and arguments for the Earth’s maximum sustainable human population, they all hinge on the question: In what manner shall the Earth’s species live?

Our Mission

To help solve environmental and social problems by including population size in discussions of those problems. We work to remove the obstacles that keep population from being seriously and rationally discussed in public discourse, and empower people to determine, reach and maintain the best population size for their families, regions and the planet.

HowMany.org is a project of the Institute for Population Studies (IPS), a Berkeley-based environmental non-profit.  IPS recognizes that human population growth is not an inexorable force of nature, but a choice and a responsibility of all people. The organization understands that all people around the world fundamentally seek to preserve or improve their quality of life and that of their families and communities.