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Period 2. Population Growth

 This week's topic is population growth. For me the subject is pretty familiar and I actually kept a lesson about population growth in Finland to a class of 9th graders a couple weeks ago. I still learned a lot from the listed videos and websites. Especially the video explaining population growth with toilet paper rolls was very clever and is something I could copy into a classroom from Hans Rosling. It clearly shows why the population growth won't stop in a long time even though the fertility rate is getting smaller and smaller: because there will be a lot more adults in the future than now and they will have children of their own. 

Population: the numbers | Population Matters

 I personally find the subject pretty fascinating since the population has grown so much even in my lifetime but also a bit controversial, since the world can't take anymore people and it would be necessary for the population to stop growing but at the same time Finland is having huge problems because the fertility rate is too low and there are too many elders compared to younger generations, which is not economically sustainable. 

These are all problems that need to be solved in my lifetime. I don't think the wizards nor the prophets are right but the answer is somewhere in between, in the balance of ecological and economical sustainability. 

We need to focus both on increased consumption and population growth

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