Earth Day status report: World population

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, world population has almost doubled, from 3.7 billion to 6.7 billion. IMHO that's mostly bad news, but one piece of good news is that mass starvation has not happened, as was predicted, e..g, by Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968):

"[I]n the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

Another piece of good news is that world population growth is slowing, and in fact the end of human population growth is likely to come towards the end of this century, with a peak of perhaps 8-10 billion people. That's a lot of people, but many fewer than Garrett Hardin feared when he wrote---in "The Tragedy of the Commons", also published in 1968---that "freedom to breed is intolerable."