October 20, 1999
World population tops
6 billion during meeting
___WACO--It's not every day a conference speaker gets to talk about the challenges of population growth on the day the planet marks the milestone of a new billion mark being surpassed.
___But, statistically speaking, such opportunities could come more frequently with each passing year.
___The organizers couldn't have predicted it when they began planning last week's conference on Christianity and the environment at Baylor University, but the conferencewas held on the very day the United Nations said world population surpassed 6 billion for the first time.
___That milestone should give Christians and others concerned about the environment reason to be concerned, said Phil Strickland, director of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.
___Even though population growth has slowed in the United States, that's no reason for Americans to think all is well, Strickland said.
___"It is wrong to have a kind of enclave mindset ... that what is happening in the rest of the world will not affect us," he said. "This is not the kind of issue you can isolate country to country. What happens in Calcutta is going to affect us."
___And for Christians, "that's not even the issue," Strickland said, pointing to God's concern for all people as a larger issue.
___More people are more poor today than ever before, he said. And the population is growing fastest in countries where people are the poorest.
___While abortion is not the answer, Strickland said, Christians ought to work toward advancing biblical solutions to ease problems such as poverty, malnutrition and pollution that come with an expanding population.
___World population is projected to reach 9.5 billion to 11 billion by 2050.
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