3-3: Human Population Trends and Controlling Factors

Pre-Class Preparation

Objectives

• To review data on past global and regional population trends and demographic patterns.
• To understand the relationship between economic development and demographic factors.

Procedure

1. Read the learning unit.

   Class images

2. Take the learning unit quiz. Quizzes are available from your portfolio. You may access your portfolio via the list of students participating in this year's course, as represented by the icon below.
   
   
3. Additional Required Reading. Although you are not ultimately responsible for content listed in this section, we encourage you to fully explore the links in order to provide a better scope on the upcoming class discussion.

   	Current planet population: Updated every 30 seconds.
   	Fertility, mortality, and population growth rates.
   	Haub, Carl, Global and US National Population Trends.
   	Will there be growing numbers of environmental migrants? (From UNEP.)

Class Discussion

• Problem to ponder...
  Look at the number on your ISU card. If every possible number were used by an ISU student, what would be the population of the student body?

• Class Discussion Summary:

Post-Class Activities

• Participate in the electronic dialog. Use this forum for:
  • continuing class discussion;
  • posing new questions to students or the instructor;
  • responding to issues/questions raised by students in class/electronic dialog.

  Visitor Access (Visitors are welcome to participate in the dialog. Just click on the icon below)	Student Access (Students must post all dialog from their portfolio. Click on the icon below to access the student list.)

• Recommended Reading Materials

  	Bongaarts, John, 1994: Population Policy Options in the Developing World. Science, 263, 771-776. (Includes references.)
  	Essay on Being Unique
  	Population Policy: Consensus and Challenges.
  	Cohen, Joel E., 1995: Population Growth and Earth's Human Carrying Capacity. Science 269, 341-346.
  	Dietz, Thomas, and Eugene A. Rosa., 1994: Rethinking the Environmental Impacts of Population, Affluence and Technology. Human Ecology Review 1, Summer/Autumn, 277-300.

• References

  	The Demographic and Population Studies - WWW Virtual Library. Provided by the Australian National University.
  	Fourth World Women's Conference, Beijing, April 1995.
  	List of other servers providing information on global change.
  	Population Growth, technical atlas, WFS. (To download Adobe Acrobat Reader, go to http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html).
  	Population, rate of increase, birth and death rates, surface area and density for the world, macro regions and regions.
  	Refugees, technical atlas, WFS.
  	Rural and urban populations, technical atlas, WFS.
  	World Population Growth from year 0 to Stabilization.
  	World Population Growth Simulation.
  	1994 UN Population and Development Conference (Cairo).