Unit 2: Population

Key Terms for this unit• Systems: all organisms including humans are part of natural and

social systems that are made up of many interdependent and interacting components.

• Control: complex systems of various types (technical, biological and social) require a system of control to make decisions about maintaining the system’s internal processes about how it should interact with the outside environment.

• Feedback Control: complex systems are self-correcting processes which rely on internal systems to gather information and other systems to do things in order to maintain equilibrium within the system by recognizing complex patterns and responding with appropriate action. An example would be the eye and hand of the human body.

• Industrialization: is a social system where society reward s individualization, reorganized itself to allow for specialization and relies on the abstractions of science and reason as criteria for making judgments and decisions

• Specialization: an industrial social system divides society into specialized organization each with specific tasks to do a part of a complex division of labour.

• Growth: economic growth is seen as the central defining assumption of an industrial society,

• The goal of progress is used to justify modern society’s emphasis on growth and change

• Industrial systems tend to believe that if the system stops growung, it will rapidly degenerate.

World View: a people’s word view is their common sense reality about the organization and purpose of society.

Paradigm: a set or pattern of ideas, beliefs and values selected from the world view which is used to make judgments and decisions about the meaning and purpose of reality

Change: is part of all natural and social systems and that at certain time in history the dominate paradigms are replaced with other paradigms

Industrialism• Is a social system demands profound economic, social, political,

and cultural changed in and society

• Core components: ▫ Promoting technological change where the objective is

increasingly to have work done by machines so that human and animal power is replaced by inanimate sources of energy

▫ Having labour complete on open labour markets▫ Concentrating workers in large enterprises such as factories

created and managed by entrepreneurs▫ Shifting workers from the agriculture sector other economic

sectors

Industrial systems vs. Human population• The industrial systems highly affect the human population

• Some effects are:▫ Changes in birth & death rate▫ Changed in the way people make a living▫ Rapid urbanization

• Two main phases▫ 1st phase is a period of growth and optimism where change is

perceived as being good and progress is possible to achieve▫ 2nd phase begins when discontent rises within society generally

because the expectations created in the first phase are not being met for various groups within society

Saskatchewan and Industrialization• Saskatchewan has been affected by industrialization

and the stresses and strains on the population▫Large migration of people into Western Canada

displacing the Aboriginal people who had held the territory for millennia

▫A rural social system made up of small independent farmers and small towns;

▫Industrialization of agriculture forcing farms to grow resulting in migration of people from rural to urban areas

▫A significant decline in rural communities and rapid growth of cities.

Conflicting Social Systems• Industrial systems use a set of assumptions that are central to their

world view

• Industrial societies tend to believe that the main solution to their problems is to make everyone economically successful

• Traditional world view and steady-state society work against this.

▫ Traditional view is the Aboriginal world view that considers the earth as the centre of their identity. They believe that the earth connects them to the past, the home of the ancestors, the present as it provides their daily needs and the future to be held in trust for the children

▫ Steady-state view is the earth is a closed and finite system which has its limits. There is only so much resources that can be take before they run out and humans need to find a balance.

• Human populations are independent of each other and the natural systems on earth

• They way one population acts and uses resources has a major effect on other natural and social systems

• Having said that humans depend on the natural environment so much that changed to the natural and social systems has major impact on the human population

• Ministry of Education, 1994. Social Studies 20.

Human Population Lets look at the numbers

The Human population• The estimated of the world

population1 million year ago: 125 000 people25 000 years 3 340 00010 000y years 10 million0 A.D. 250 million1650 500 million1830 1 billion1930 2 billion1960 3 billion1975 4 billion1985 5 billion1990 5.3 billion2011 7 billion

• The world population goes at 1.7% per year. This is a steady increase since 1975

• The world averages about 93 million new people each year

Key Terms• Population estimates: historical population are very conjectural with the

estimated are based on assumptions about capacity of land and distribution of population at the time.

• Natural Increase: natural increase is the difference between the number of births and deaths rate in a population

• Birth rate: annual number of live births per 1000 population per year

• Death rate: number of people dying per 1000 population per year.

• Rate of natural increase: the difference between the birth and death rate( expressed as a %)

• Population Growth Rate: the rate of natural increase plus the effects of immigration

Projections: is an inference about what might happen in the future if a certain set of assumption about human behaviour remain consistent

Predictions: a statement about what will happen in the future

Double time: the number of years necessary for a population to double equals 72 divided by the annual percentage rate of population increase

Demographic transitions: in industrialized countries with high standard of living, both mortality and fertility rates decline sharply so that population growth rate fell to around one percent.

Drawing Inferences from Population Data• Making projections of population growth in the future based on current

polices

• Looking at what the trends in birth and death rate to infer the future trends of the populations

• It is hard to make these predictions as the rates if increase and decrease do change a lot over time

• Keep in mind that the world population has reached a size that small changes in the percentage of growth can result in large population growth

• Keep in mind that they population historically had stayed small because humans did not know how to mass produce food to sustain large population or how to control disease.

Population and human behaviour•They way human behave impact the

population

•Technology, social and cultural changed affect human reproductive behaviour

•Changes in food and medicine change mortality rates.

Fertility Rates• The response to changes in culture and society

changes how a population grows

▫The age of marriage changes the age in which woman will start giving birth and for how long

▫Cultural values determining the extent of use of contraception

▫Standards of living which affect economic expectations, attitudes about the need for children, educating children

▫Attitudes to the statues of women, they power they have and the rights they have

• Ministry of Education, 1994. Social Studies 20.