"The vital signs of earth are not good," Dr. Billy Bauman tells George Vukelich for his Listening In column. "A new report just yesterday said China was predicting that possibly 20 million of its people could starve next year because of massive desertification," notes Bauman, a professor of pathology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine. Bauman observes that Brazilian deforestation and African overpopulation give additional cause for concern. "The experts are predicting that at our present rate, by the year 2025 earth will have a population of over 8 billion people!" Bauman dies July 14, 2008, but his prediction proves prescient: Current world population is estimated to be 6.7 billion. Various world population clocks project global population will surpass the 8 billion threshold sometime between 2020 and 2030.
Too many people
From the Isthmus archives, Dec. 16, 1988