From John Davnall
In reply to Adrian Ellis’s letter, you comment that the development of an industrial civilisation might be predicated on a “critical mass of people” (15 November, p 30).This reminded me of a New Scientist interview with David Suzuki in which he was asked how many people our planet could support (15 October 2008, p 44).
He relayed the estimate by an unnamed Harvard scholar of “200 million if you want to live like North Americans”. I wondered then whether 200 million would be enough people to produce for themselves all the features of life they would wish to retain.
Our species may be a long way from worrying about having too few members, but has anybody addressed population questions from this point of view?
Manchester, UK
