Population Growth, Energy Use, and Pollution:
Understanding the Driving Forces of Global Change

The scale at which human activity alters the natural environment has increased dramatically in the last three centuries. The Scientific Revolution that began in the 1700s was more than just an Industrial Revolution: it transformed medicine, agriculture, settlement, and sanitation. Taken together these changes enabled people to live longer and wealthier lives. As a consequence total population and per capita resource use began to grow exponentially, though not at the same rate everywhere. Total material flow from the resource base, through the human economy and back into the environment as waste, has multiplied many times over and is threatening the environmental systems upon which life on Earth depends. Opinions among scientists, politicians, and citizens are deeply divided as to what the future holds.

This module introduces students to some of the fundamental questions about the connections among population, resource and energy use, and environmental impacts.

• What factors have caused the enormous growth of population and energy use in the past?
• To what extent is population growth responsible for the environmental problems we see today?
• What opportunities are there for slowing population growth, per capita energy use, or the environmental harm caused by each unit of energy use?

The module highlights the complexities, non-linearities, and delays that complicate the relationships among population, wealth, and environmental impacts. Unit 1 introduces the concept of human-induced global change and provides an overview of the different approaches to framing the population-environment relationship. The next two units focus on population and energy use, respectively, in the context of global change. The unit on population introduces basic population geography concepts and skills (demographic transition theory, exponential growth, etc.) and explores the relationship between population and energy use. The unit on energy focuses on supply vs. demand issues and trends in energy consumption. Unit 4 returns to the various ways that the relationship between population and environmental change has been framed and provides students an opportunity to synthesize the knowledge gained in previous units about the relationships among population growth, consumption and technology, and environmental degradation.

The module provides students with the concepts and tools needed to make sense of the often contradictory and contested information on population, energy, and environment and to provoke them to draw their own conclusions based on a comprehensive understanding of the linkages among demographic, economic, environmental, and resource systems. The activities are designed to develop students' (1) appreciation of the global linkages among population, energy usage, and environmental impacts; (2) understanding of the basic concepts and dynamics of population growth; (3) understanding of energy usage and links to economic activity and growth; and (4) assessment of the enormous and value-charged complexity of the population-environment relationship. Throughout, students are challenged to think critically and practically about the own habits and lifestyles.