Stories told by GOPAL KRISHNA
community organizer, environmental spokesperson
Hydrabad, India

POPULATION

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BALANCING OUR EARTH’S CARRYING CAPACITY

Humans have lived on Earth for thousands of years and for the most part, they have kept their own populations in balance with the carrying capacity of nature around them. They understood that a healthy planet means that no one species can be dominant over the others. They recognized that all species have a reason for existing and that in a balanced environment, each species has its own place in a vast and thriving ecosystem.

In the past 200 years, our human population has reached unsustainable mega-levels. Nature is being systematically destroyed through our own indifference and the sheer tyranny of numbers. 

We have not understood how population can and does reach a saturation point quickly and the huge impact that this can have on our environment. 

UNDERSTANDING EXPONENTIAL GROWTH :

Exponentials are doubling growth patterns found in natural systems.

Let’s have a look at how exponentials work through a number of stories, as told by Gopal Krisha.

BEYOND THE POWER OF KINGS

Chess was invented in ancient India and there is an amazing story about the ingenuity of the person who invented the game. 

In India, it is believed that the King who ruled at that time was so pleased with the new game that he offered to gift Sessa, the inventor, with anything he asked for. Sessa, a humble but shrewd mathematician, asked that he be gifted food grains.  The king was surprised, but asked him, " How much do you want? "

The mathematician placed a grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and said, " Your Honor, since you like this chess board so much, I ask that you give me one grain for the first square, two for the second, and double that for each of the subsequent 64 squares.” 

 “As you wish,” the King said. The ruler laughed it off as a meager prize for a brilliant invention and asked his treasurers to calculate and gift the grain to the inventor.  

When the treasurer started calculating however, he was soon aghast. When he reached the 30th square, it amounted to more grain than they had in the entire kingdom. 

By the time, he reached the 40th square, it amounted to more grain than there was in the whole world. Just to give a perspective, the number was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. That's 18 billion billion.

The mathematician's request, which sounded so simple, was something that even the king didn’t have the means to fulfill.  The story goes that the king was so impressed by the mathematician that he made Sessa a minister in his court. 

In our planetary context, we can learn from this ancient mathematician and see how population exponential growth patterns can actually work against a balanced and harmonious environment and can threaten our very existence.

Let’s look at other examples : 

SHIFTING BASELINES : THE WEED IN THE POND

A fast-growing weed was introduced into a pond's water surface.  The weed grew quickly. It doubled itself every day. By the 40th day, half the surface of the pond was covered by this weed. 

Now for the big question. How many more days did it take for this weed to completely cover the surface of the pond? 

The correct answer is 41 days. The weed that had covered half the pond doubled in just one day to make a grand total of 41 days in all. Again, this is the way exponentials work.

A culture of certain BACTERIA 

A culture of bacteria grows in a sealed bottle. The bacteria increase exponentially, doubling their population every day. At a certain point the bacteria reach a stage where they occupy half the bottle. Laboratory technicians get worried about the exploding population outgrowing the bottle, but they figured they had it under control. They put the original population into a larger sealed bottle twice the space of the first bottle. Now there’s plenty of room, the technicians thought. As they looked into the new and bigger sealed bottle, they saw that the bacteria continued to multiply.

The very next day, the bacteria doubled once again to fill the equivalent of the first bottle, and the day after, the bacteria maxed out in the new space, as well. On the third day, the bacteria ceased to exist as there was no more remaining space for them to grow and expand. All of this because of a doubling factor in growth patterns. (2x2 =4, 4x4=16, 16x16 =256, and so forth.)

This is why it is so important to limit population growth and to respect the Earth’s carrying capacity. Our ancestors knew this and knew the importance of a light footprint on our planet.

Now it’s up to us to limit poverty and have smaller families and share our children in our communities. Then we will protect other species from extinction and have a more regenerative Earth.