Growing The Population

" "The planet's head count reached seven billion in Ottawa Monday when Angela McCrindle gave birth to this seven-pound four-ounce boy, Caiden Lewis McCrindle at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital."

Photograph by: JULIE OLIVER

The Earth is bulging with people. For fifty years and more we've been concerned about the conundrum; how many people can this globe hold, house, feed, nurture? A few years before I was married there were two-billion, seven hundred-million people alive. Now, suddenly, another sixty years have gone by and there are seven-billion people on Earth.

It's just too precious that Canada has declared Caiden Lewis McCrindle to represent that very seventh-billion human being. And, of course, every other country on Earth must have its representative seventh-billion to fete and to be proud of. Imagine India, with its 1.2-billion population, and how many babies came into the world at the stroke of midnight?

It is rather precious, come to think of it, that the second largest land mass in the world with a mere 34-million population audaciously steps forward to claim for itself the prized record. All the more so when ours, like the rest of North America and Europe, is an aging society, one that barely reproduces itself, reliant on migration from more populous countries to grow our population.

India is set to overtake China's 1.3-billion population within approximately fifteen years. And this, despite both countries having stringent 'rules' about how many children may be born in a single family; in China by lawful decree one child per family, in India by winnowing out girls in particular to be aborted, abandoned, lost to infanticide.

It is estimated that at present two babies are born every second. No one knows, of course, how many people actually do inhabit this globe; many agencies hazard intelligent guesses. Seven billion achieved by midnight, October 31, on the eve of All Saints Day, as good as any.