Quotes About Population

More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants

The Pilgrims' descendants have proven to be, if nothing else, fruitful. In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.

Philip's local squabble with Plymouth Colony had mutated into a regionwide war that, on a percentage basis, had done nearly as much as the plagues of 1616–19 to decimate New England's Native population.

In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket... but enough drops can make any bucket overflow

The illusion of purpose is critical to a well-adjusted population.

mas a ilusão de propósito é fundamental para uma população bem ajustada.

Why, wondered Citra, would there ever be a need for 400,000 scythes?

Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the "modest" Indian population "modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs." Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire.

Trying to build up the colonial population, the monarchy ordered that female African slaves be awarded to every new male European arrival, along with exhortations to breed.

Without any apparent volition by Cortés, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including Cuitlahuac.

The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—"a beehive of people," as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people "that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for "the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world's population." Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.

Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune.

Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more.

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.

Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change.

More than nine out of ten Native Americans—and almost all South American Indians—have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.

way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.