Those who are alive when Jesus comes down from heaven will be elevated to “the clouds to meet the Lord,” predicts Saint Paul in this Sunday’s reading from the First Letter to the Thessalonians. In Paul’s time such an event might have involved up to 200 million people, the estimated world population at the time. This week that total passed the 7 billion mark and many are asking how everyone’s basic needs will be met.

Countries around the world marked the United Nations projection that the world's population would reach 7 billion Monday with lavish ceremonies for newborn infants symbolizing the milestone. At the same time, concerns were voiced that there may be too many humans for the planet's resources.

The Global Footprint Network warned that humanity is already living beyond the Earth’s capacity to regenerate resources, and that by 2050 we will need two planets to keep pace with population and rising consumption.

The debate on population growth is a contentious one, with advocates on one side calling for increased availability and promotion of contraceptives, while others, including the Catholic Church, argue the problem isn’t population size but responsible consumption and adequate distribution of resources.

Demographer Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University warned that rapid population growth "makes almost every other problem more difficult to solve. If we could slow our growth rate, we have an easier job in dealing with all the other things like education, health, employment, housing, food, the environment, and so on," said Cohen.

Others point out that while total world population continues to increase, the rate of increase has slowed dramatically over the past 40 years to the point where many industrialized nations are beginning to face a new set of problems brought about by declining birth rates and increasing populations of the aged.

In “Make Room for People,” a position paper for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Stephen W. Mosher argues that while a growing population “can naturally create temporary shortages of certain raw materials, goods, and services, innovators and entrepreneurs can be drawn [on] to extract resources and to produce and distribute more goods in ways that sustain the natural environment and contribute to human development.

“At the end of this creative process you will have more goods available at lower prices--precisely because of population growth. People need to be understood as the answer to problems, and not the cause of all problems,” said Mosher.

Sources: Articles by Robert J. Walker and Robert Engelman for the Christian Science Monitor, Stephen W. Mosher
for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Jim Forsyth for Reuters, CBS News, and the Associated Press