Global Environmental Issues: Ocean Resources/Global Population

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First, you should review your options for the essay, and then choose the one that seems the most interesting to you. As the EPA director, you will want to focus your talk on US policy. As a UN delegate, your focus will be global.

To make your position especially realistic, you can consider the UN current position on population growth. It is available here: http://www.un.org/popin/icpd/recommendations/other/43.html.

There is a great deal of controversy about the real carrying capacity for humans on the earth. Some argue that the advent of new technologies, and the reduced birthrate the accompanies industrialization, will permit sustainable human populations to reach 10 million. Bjorn Lomborg argues in his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World"
that because of new technologies and declining birthrates in the developed world. On the other hand books such as "Limits to Growth" indicate that human populations will increase exponentially, resulting in disastrous results, unless measures are taken. Criticism of this point of view stems from its treatment of some factors as exponential, while "technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are permitted to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments."(Newsweek, March 13, 1972, page 103)

(Limits to Growth was a 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jargen Randers, and William W. Behrens III.)

The Union of Concerned Scientists, Scientific American, and Nature find problems with Lomborg's work as well. For example even though the earth is not currently at carrying capacity, food distribution problems leave 850 million people currently malnourished ...