Can we live with 7 billion people?

If current projections hold we better be able to.  National Geographic has an interesting special series that explorers the various implications of a world with 7 billion people (the current estimate for world population by the end of 2011)  Read the story here.

A fundamental (but rarely explicitly discussed) element of resource management is the number of people on the planet scrambling to use the earth's resources.  World population has been growing at a spectacular rate over the last few hundred years, (check out this video associated with the NGS story) and this has put an inevitable strain on resources.  Are these strains manageable or are they the harbingers of global doom?  Check out this vision of an overpopulated world from a classic Star Trek.  But, like most of the things we will discuss in this class, the topic is complex and there are no simple answers (like Captain Kirk's belief in the power of contraception).  For instance, the vast majority of the earth's resources are currently consumed by a small minority of it's human population.  Perhaps the inequitable intensity of resource use (by a privileged few) is more of  a problem than the fact that there will be 7 billion of us?