Environmental Science Movie Review Example

Lately, the world population has grown considerably as the science developed and produced medicines and technologies capable of reducing the mortality. Humans act like humans, and reproduce as they have been doing since always, but nowadays the pests and global diseases can be managed professionally, hence saving people’s lives. This positive outcome of the scientific developments presents a concerning aspect: as the population keeps on growing (and it is predicted to reach 9 billion inhabitants at the middle of the current century), the natural resources are limited. This situation implies that many people around the globe, including us and our families, will suffer from resources shortages, mostly from water shortages.
David Attetnborough’s movie, “How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth” introduces startling facts and figures: the world’s population increases with 2 people per second, with 200.000 people per day and there are 8 million people brought to life each year. In the same time, the total amount of water is the same since ever. Indeed, water covers 70% of the total surface of the Earth, but most of it represents sea water, not potable. Only 2,5% is fresh water, but only 1% is available to human use, as the rest is stocked in the mountains or the icebergs.
This indicates that anyone of us can be soon affected by the water shortages and not only. Discourage the consumerism is the first thing we can do to reduce the irrational water spending. Water is in our food, in our clothes, in the products we use for our toiletries, and so on. If each of us would buy less textile products, or les cosmetics, the production would be discouraged, and the water consumption limited.
Because of the massive consumption and consumerism, the natural resources are consumed irrationally. The underdeveloped regions do not have enough land to cultivate crops for sustaining their food supplies, which generates famine. In the same time, other regions of the world, in the developed countries, are utilizing more natural resources than it would be needed. What we all can do at this stage is to balance our resources consumption, balance our energy and water spending, in order to transfer them to the less developed regions, in need of more resources and more water.
Because the population increases mostly in the underdeveloped regions of the world, and it is forecasted to double or triple in regions such as South Sahara, Afghanistan or India (predicted to outcome China), there must be applied several strategies to reduce this growth of the population density in these regions, which are also very affected by the lack of resources, including cultivable land and water. The best solution to solve this would be by education. Not only that through education people would understand the advantages of freely choosing how many children can one care for in order to assure good life conditions, but they can also contribute to their own wellbeing, finding solutions to develop their regions.
Contraception is another solution to avoid the population to increase at high speed. Nevertheless, as giving birth is a natural right, government should not control the birth rates, although there have been implemented such programs in China, which were efficient. Instead, people need access to information, they need to be made accountable for their actions and we all need to work together for a sustainable and productive world.
This movie was created and arranged by David Attetnborough, a British broadcaster, naturalist and researcher, preoccupied with discovering and presenting the wild life on our planet. His interest extended to studying the effects of global warming, seasonal changes or of the population growth on the environment, creating documentary movies or TV series for each of these topics. His career merits have been awarded throughout time, receiving BAFTA for black and white reportages, color, HD or 3D materials.