Where are all of our bazillions of people?

The world is shifting, populations are clumping together. When I was a kid, we marveled at the idea that there could be 5 million people in the greater New York area. When Mexico City reached 6 million, it made newspaper headlines across the world. But all that is lost in the last 50 years, people have stopped counting, really.Take Mexico City for example. Online estimates are that it is past 8 million now, and yet the official Mexican estimate is that the Distrito Federal of Mexico City is 8,880,000, but if you count the surrounding urban areas (all of which are considered part of Mexico City) the population is over 20 million. Looked at that way, the population of New York is past 19 million and Tokyo leads the world at 32 million. In China there are 12 cities with populations over 2 million.Across the globe, this is getting worse. Half the people on the planet now live in cities. Yes, half. And one million more are taking up urban residence every week. That’s 52 million more city dwellers every year. City budgets simply cannot cope. Whether you have urban sprawl like Los Angeles (15 million) or high rise density like New York, Hong Kong (6 million) and Shanghai (16 million), the resources it takes to deal with humans adversely affected by population density and stress far outweighs the per capita cost of dealing with country or rural folks’ lives. Cities may provide some benefits of economy for commerce and travel to work, but they cost more to provide for police, cater social services, fund fire departments, teachers and transport, in the end, than rural environments. On the other hand, if you have to concrete over Nature and put up steel buildings, perhaps it is better to use up a limited space like a city and allow the trees a solitary or less-populated existence in the other space left on earth. If all those people ever decide to spread out, there will be no room for trees.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.