A World In Crisis
Lately, for a variety of reasons, my thoughts have returned more and more to two subjects that have long concerned me: the continued devastation inflicted on our environment and the Earth's runaway overpopulation problem. Both of these areas touch on many different facets of life, so any number of things can make me return to these subjects: an offhand comment from an acquaintance about child-rearing or family planning, stories in the news about bear attacks, and even my reading Dan Brown's latest novel, Inferno, in which Mr. Brown draws comparisons between Dante's writings about hell and our current environmental problems.
Overpopulation seems to be a problem that most of the world is in denial about. In addition to the control of so large a share of the world's resources by a parasitic top one percent, there is also the problem of there simply being too many teeming masses. It is nothing short of a lethal combination. It also happens to be an incredibly uncomfortable subject during the course of most people's daily lives. We take it for granted that we're supposed to be overjoyed when someone is expecting a child and raising children has long since taken its place among white picket fences, houses in the suburbs, and small yippy dogs as cornerstones of the "American dream".
Consider the appalling pace of destruction of habitats and the number of species that have either been driven to extinction or are on the brink of it. We are, after all, even killing the bees that we depend on for pollinating crops with poisons and pesticides. Consider the increasing vulnerability of millions of people to natural disasters such as hurricanes because overcrowding has forced more people into areas where humans should not really live, thus destroying the system of natural checks and balances. Consider the wildfires in the western US, where every fire season seems to get more and more brutal.
And now comes the widespread use of hydraulic fracking to pro-long our oil based economy. In addition to the environmental damage that fracking does in itself, there is the added cost of a reduced sense of urgency to move away from a fossil fuel economy -- which, of course, will only deepen the pain that we'll have to endure once the moment of reckoning finally arrives. As if a coming energy crisis wasn't enough, there are inevitable food crises and water crises in our near future if we don't start changing course; indeed, many of the world's militaries have already been working on contingency plans for coming "water wars".
Nature has proven that, even if the Earth is not in itself a living organism, the inter-connectedness of all its various systems make it useful to think of it as an organism. Like any organism, nature has its mechanisms to restore balance when things get out of whack. The problem is that nature's mechanisms -- such as rampaging plagues to knock back the world's population -- are not easy for any sane person (including myself) to stomach. So I would argue that we really need to act before it gets to such a point.
Reducing the human birth rate is an obvious and logical first step. Of course, there are many powerful organizations standing in the way of such a notion, including some of the world's largest religions. While it may have made perfect sense to "be fruitful and multiply" in the days when the human population was low and the species was in danger of dying out, such thinking is completely maladaptive to modern realities. The sad part is that we largely know what to do and what works: increasing opportunities and raising living standards for women, greater access to birth control options, and so forth. And yet, just as with most other problems, humans put off taking the necessary actions.
Over the past four decades, there have been repeated warnings phrased in the starkest possible terms from some of the world's best and brightest scientists and intellectuals. These warnings have painted a picture of nothing short of an ecological disaster and have begged and pleaded with the world's leaders to act. And yet, action never seems to happen. Politicians put things off until after the next election so they'll be out of office by the time the moment comes to pay the piper. Industry lobbying groups spend obscene amounts of money to convince the public that we can't act to mitigate our problems because humanity's time is better spent studying the problems to death. And so it goes.
On so many fronts, we know what to do, both as a species and as individuals, to confront the problems that we face. Had we begun to act 20 or 40 years ago, an environmental catastrophe may have been averted entirely. As it stands now, we can still mitigate much of the damage if we would begin to act now. And yet, we continue to do the same things while all the while expecting different results -- which is, according to some, the very definition of insanity.
Overpopulation seems to be a problem that most of the world is in denial about. In addition to the control of so large a share of the world's resources by a parasitic top one percent, there is also the problem of there simply being too many teeming masses. It is nothing short of a lethal combination. It also happens to be an incredibly uncomfortable subject during the course of most people's daily lives. We take it for granted that we're supposed to be overjoyed when someone is expecting a child and raising children has long since taken its place among white picket fences, houses in the suburbs, and small yippy dogs as cornerstones of the "American dream".
Consider the appalling pace of destruction of habitats and the number of species that have either been driven to extinction or are on the brink of it. We are, after all, even killing the bees that we depend on for pollinating crops with poisons and pesticides. Consider the increasing vulnerability of millions of people to natural disasters such as hurricanes because overcrowding has forced more people into areas where humans should not really live, thus destroying the system of natural checks and balances. Consider the wildfires in the western US, where every fire season seems to get more and more brutal.
And now comes the widespread use of hydraulic fracking to pro-long our oil based economy. In addition to the environmental damage that fracking does in itself, there is the added cost of a reduced sense of urgency to move away from a fossil fuel economy -- which, of course, will only deepen the pain that we'll have to endure once the moment of reckoning finally arrives. As if a coming energy crisis wasn't enough, there are inevitable food crises and water crises in our near future if we don't start changing course; indeed, many of the world's militaries have already been working on contingency plans for coming "water wars".
Nature has proven that, even if the Earth is not in itself a living organism, the inter-connectedness of all its various systems make it useful to think of it as an organism. Like any organism, nature has its mechanisms to restore balance when things get out of whack. The problem is that nature's mechanisms -- such as rampaging plagues to knock back the world's population -- are not easy for any sane person (including myself) to stomach. So I would argue that we really need to act before it gets to such a point.
Reducing the human birth rate is an obvious and logical first step. Of course, there are many powerful organizations standing in the way of such a notion, including some of the world's largest religions. While it may have made perfect sense to "be fruitful and multiply" in the days when the human population was low and the species was in danger of dying out, such thinking is completely maladaptive to modern realities. The sad part is that we largely know what to do and what works: increasing opportunities and raising living standards for women, greater access to birth control options, and so forth. And yet, just as with most other problems, humans put off taking the necessary actions.
Over the past four decades, there have been repeated warnings phrased in the starkest possible terms from some of the world's best and brightest scientists and intellectuals. These warnings have painted a picture of nothing short of an ecological disaster and have begged and pleaded with the world's leaders to act. And yet, action never seems to happen. Politicians put things off until after the next election so they'll be out of office by the time the moment comes to pay the piper. Industry lobbying groups spend obscene amounts of money to convince the public that we can't act to mitigate our problems because humanity's time is better spent studying the problems to death. And so it goes.
On so many fronts, we know what to do, both as a species and as individuals, to confront the problems that we face. Had we begun to act 20 or 40 years ago, an environmental catastrophe may have been averted entirely. As it stands now, we can still mitigate much of the damage if we would begin to act now. And yet, we continue to do the same things while all the while expecting different results -- which is, according to some, the very definition of insanity.