Can the Earth sustain 10 billion people? -

Demographers estimate that the human population will eclipse 7 billion by the end of October -- only 12 years since we crossed the 6 billion-person threshold. And while experts long predicted that the global population would level out at 9 billion by mid-century, the United Nations has now adjusted those projections upward. According to a new report, we can expect 10.1 billion people on Earth by 2100.

British journalist Fred Pearce argues in his recent "The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future" that the world's population is peaking -- and that the "population bomb" has been defused.

Pearce says there are three elements in our impact on the planet. The first is our numbers. The second is what those people consume. The third, and one we need to think about as well, is how we produce what we consume. I don't believe in simple technical fixes, but we do know how to do things very much better than we are. And, however many billion people there are -- whether its 7 or 10 or even 12 billion people -- we are going to have to adopt, as fast as we sensibly can, those different ways of doing things. My own gut feeling is that if we can do those things -- and it's a hell of an if -- is that we can sustain 10 billion people on this planet. But saying we can do it is a long way from being sure that we will do it.

Note EU-Digest: Fred Pearce certainly has a point. The phobia created by populist right-wing politicians like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who are arguing that immigrants, and specifically those from Muslim countries must be barred from Europe because they will outnumber the indigenous population given their high birth-rate, is not correct. According to several reports many Muslim countries are seeing a definite decline of the birth-rate. Istanbul now has a lower birth-rate than New York and in Iran the average birth-rate as a result of planned parenthood programs in that country, now only has an average birth-rate of two children per family.

For more: Can the Earth sustain 10 billion people? - Environment - Salon.com