Exactly 37 years ago, in response to wide spread environmental degradation, the first Earth Day was celebrated by 20 million people in the Unites States. Today is observed by more than 500 million people and national governments in 175 countries. Many things have changed since then, many laws to protect the environment have been implemented at national an international level and the media have started to draw more and more attention to what is now generally recognised as one of the biggest threat to humanity, Climate Change. I believe the threat is real and need to be addressed immediately before it is too late but I believe we are threatened by something even bigger. Ourselves, the main cause of climate change, pollution, resources depletion, starvation, wars etc.

Since 1970 the world population has increased by 2.9 billions and there are nearly 6.6 billion people on earth at the time I am writing this lines. These figures are increasing by 10 every 5 seconds and there are no signs of its slowing down.

Now, no one can argue that every person is a consumer and as such, contributes to the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of biodiversity, we all need food and water after all. Basic needs that are tightly linked to most of the issues humanity is facing today and will have to face in the near future.

On farmlands, an ever increasing demand for food has lead to the use of yield-raising technologies such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers (both major contributors to the pollution of ground and surface waters) and the use of genetically modified crops. To add more damaging effect, as more and more land is needed for growing crops or rearing cattle and sheep, entire forests are cleared out each day decreasing the earth capacity to sequestrate CO2 from the atmosphere contributing to fuel climate change. As cities get bigger to accommodate more people, less farmland becomes available and food travels on ships, trucks and planes often thousand of kilometers before reaching our dining tables. Each kilometer contributing to air pollution, oil depletion and global warming.

As population more than doubled since 1950, global freshwater demand has tripled. As a result we are pumping water at unsustainable speed, water tables are dropping and rivers and lakes are running dry. A good example is lake Chad. With an area of more than 26,000 km² it was the fourth largest lake in Africa in the 1960s. By 2000, due to reduced rainfall combined with greatly increased amounts of irrigation water being drawn from the lake and the rivers which feed it, its extent had fallen to less than 1,500 km².

Current wars are fought for oil, gas and other fossil fuels we have to burn to quench our soaring thirst for electricity, heating and petrol. Future wars are likely to be fought over water and land.

Many more pages could be filled with words if we were to examine all aspects of our daily life and the their unbalancing effects on the equilibrium of our planet. The truth is that an increasing population needs an increasing supply of food, water and energy and already

"Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, pushing our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse. In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the earth's resources.

A century ago, annual growth in the world economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions. As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate."

From Plan B 2.0 by Lester Brown.

We often read about climate change or the annual increase of natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and droughts but rarely about population increase.

I believe we are going to read more and more about those events unless we find a way to stop what I like to call this

" Big Population Tsunami".