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Living within a living, loving planet
Overpopulation
Time to Speak out
Apr 23rd
Time to Speak Out
“During those same 50 years, populations of vertebrates (animals with backbones) declined by 60 percent on average. It’s been estimated that humans—along with our cattle, pigs, and other domesticates—now make up 96 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass. The other four percent include all the songbirds, deer, foxes, elephants and on and on—all the world’s remaining wild land animals. We inherited a planet of astounding beauty, which we share with millions of amazing creatures—and, one by one, we’re crowding them out.” Richard Heinberg Post Carbon Institute
<newsletter@postcarbon.org> 22 April, 2020
We don’t actually have a resource shortage. We have a population problem. With other living things, when they eat out their environment, many die until balance is achieved. But no, not homo sapiens sapiens. We have become the most voracious and dangerous predator Earth has ever encountered. We maintain our over population by enslaving other animals, penning them up in miserable conditions and chopping them up for Sunday lunch.
Who gave us the right to breed in such an out-of-control manner? I cannot imagine a deity that would condone our actions. Certainly not a God of love such as many of us have been taught.
For those of us who don’t do sky Gods, we realize that we don’t have the wisdom to manage a planet so must watch, study and learn to work in cooperation with Nature. Why?
Because the Earth is not out there; we ARE the Earth. We live in an Earth provided body. It is not OUR body to do as we choose with which goes for every other living body large or small.
Our hubris has dropped us presently into a cultural and economic decline, albiet one of many in our short history on the planet.
Now, every day must be an Earth day for our days are numbered.
We must “ring the bell that still can ring” and look for the “crack in everything.”
The scouring of the planet has only just begun
May 31st
It’s simple. If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up
It’s the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity’s undoing
George Monbiot
“The UK oil firm Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo; one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east, the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people. These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.”
George has dug up a point that has bothered me for ages. Seldom do you read about the social impact of global warming. A good summation is: wetter places will get wetter, dryer places will get dryer and “hundred year” weather events will become commonplace. With a globalised food system, it seems inevitable to me that with the present anthropocentric attitude, most uncultivated open space will be co-opted to feed humans who cannot feed themselves on the land where they now live. National Parks, regional nature preserves on down to local green space will be put to the plough as hundreds of thousands of humans migrate to liveable environments. Pessimistic? No, just realistic.
Population Increase
May 9th
Population
How long has it been since we’ve read a comment about population? Why is it so unpopular for someone, me for instance, to suggest that fewer people mean fewer energy requirements? I read recently that there are virtually no places on Earth that do not carry the footprint of humans and not many more places where you will not hear human made noise. Mid and southern California skies on a clear day are a spiders web of vapour trails destroying any hope of beauty in clouds. We study and publish statistics about sustainability and species extinction or diminishing from eating out their habitat. Are humans not doing that? Must all sparsely settled places, quiet woods and meadows be destroyed to feed and shelter more and more people? Lastly, where do you expect those millions who will soon be starving from drought and flooding from rising sea levels will demand to live? Let’s face it, they will occupy our last remaining open spaces driving out most wildlife except rats, seagulls and cockroaches.
Sky McCain
18 January, 2014
Human Population and Energy requirements
Jan 18th
How long has it been since we’ve read a comment about population? Why is it so unpopular for someone, me for instance, to suggest that fewer people mean fewer energy requirements? I read recently that there are virtually no places on Earth that do not carry the footprint of humans and not many more places where you will not hear human made noise. Mid and southern California skies on a clear day are a spiders web of vapour trails destroying any hope of beauty in clouds. We study and publish statistics about sustainability and species extinction or diminishing from eating out their habitat. Are humans not doing that? Must all sparsely settled places, quiet woods and meadows be destroyed to feed and shelter more and more people? Lastly, where do you expect those millions who will soon be starving from drought and flooding from rising sea levels will demand to live? Let’s face it, they will occupy our last remaining open spaces driving out most wildlife except rats, seagulls and cockroaches.
This says it all
Dec 20th
Population Facts from COUNTDOWN by Alan Weisman
http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html
This says it all.
“The human population has quadrupled over the past hundred years, while our consumption of resources (as measured by combined gross domestic products worldwide) has increased by a factor of seventeen.”
Population Explosion
Dec 18th
“Over the course of the past one hundred years, we humans have grown in population at a rate rarely seen outside of a petri dish.”
I have wondered for some time why there is so little support in our western culture for cutting population growth. I think I have finally figured it out.
It is not in the interest of business that their market decreases. An expanding market is good for business in so many ways. Think of them. Housing starts are diminished, pressure for food diminishes so prices will fall, in fact pressures that drive prices up will all fall and the excuse for raising prices disappears. Well, actually, there is no excuse right now for prices to keep rising as they are. My guess is that prices rise because they can. People have gotten used to rising prices and will not protest. I would advise my grandchildren to go into business so they can maintain their standard of living by pushing the cost of production down onto the consumer. This is happening all up and down the supply chain until it stops with the consumer. My pension has gone up this year just over 1% whilst the food I buy has risen around 30% over the last three years.
Crowded Planet 2nd Intervue page 11
A CONVERSATION WITH ALAN WEISMAN
Published in the September/October 2013 issue of Orionmagazine
http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7694
Are we not out of control?
Jul 14th
27 October 2011 Last updated at 00:18
The world at seven billion
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515
United Kingdom
POPULATION7128754808
Every hour, there are:
15,347Births6,418Deaths
Average yearly growth
+1.162%
In a few days there will be 7 billion humans on the Earth. Please take a look at the growth graph and note the rate of increase. Surely it is facetious to blame lack of resources as our problem. This graph shows us glaringly what the problem is and we appear to be completely helpless to solve it.
We seem to be caught in the grip of a concept that we have a sacred right to have as many children as we wish and then expect the government and the world economy to provide them with jobs and “the good life.”
And now, of course, our efforts to feed ourselves has and is still ripping out the life support structures that our dear planet has taken millions of years to build. Although our awareness and experience of global warming portend extreme misery and sadness; what is even more saddening if not maddening is that multinationals are paying businesses and bogus think tanks to claim that humans are NOT responsible for the global warming results of the destruction of the soil, destruction of the rain forests and pollution of our air, soil and water. And our media gives this ranting equal air and print time as if these opinions reflected anything other than madness and represented equal weight as the thousands of scientists who have accumulated valid statistics to the contrary.
Perhaps we need to cease blaming the actions of “business” for doing what business does best- making money- and blame ourselves for supporting the disaster so obviously surrounding us.
We must remember that companies sell only what people will buy. Governments can only survive when they provide what people will tolerate. I’ll only mention one example and let the reader consider the implications.
There were years of publications by the Russian intelligentsia pointing out the corruption and exploitation by the Monarchy. However, the exploited did very little until the wives of the dockworkers in St. Petersburg [Petrograd at that time] took to the streets when they could no longer buy bread. Men with rifles followed and:
“An estimated 90,000 women marched through the streets, shouting “Bread” and “Down With the Autocracy!” and “Stop the War!” These women were tired, hungry, and angry. They worked long hours in miserable conditions in order to feed their families because their husbands and fathers were at the front, fighting in World War I. They wanted change. They weren’t the only ones.
The following day, more than 150,000 men and women took to the streets to protest. Soon more people joined them and by Saturday, February 25, the city of Petrograd was basically shut down — no one was working.”
Don’t increase chemicals, decrease people
Mar 30th
“Food security focus fuels new worries over crop chemicals
Scientists, environmentalists and farm advocates are pressing the question about whether rewards of the trend toward using more and more crop chemicals are worth the risks, as the agricultural industry strives to ramp up production to feed the world’s growing population.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/27/us-food-chemicals-idUSBRE82P16J20120327
“More than 88,0000 tons of glyphosate were used in the United Statesin 2007, up from 11,000 tons in 1992, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Critics of 2,4-D fear a similar rise in the use of that herbicide.”
This is not only ecocide but suicide as well. Who wants to plough up every available meadow and hillside to feed a human population that is out of control? What makes us here in developed countries where population increase has levelled off or decreased, responsible to feed people from abroad who will not cut back on population growth? Think about this.
Yes, of course, there is economic inequality and lack of land to feed people locally, but that is a political problem – an economic activity – a human rights problem.
Will ploughing up marginal land here solve that? Of course not.
Remember, food is now a commodity on a global market. People get rich manipulating prices. Vast power structures encourage over-population because it is just a wider and deeper market for the exploitation of food exchange.
How about asking ourselves the following question. What happens to all other beings who eat out their environment? You know the answer as well as I do.
Gaia, our dear higher self is not a market basket for humans.
We don’t have too little food, we have too many people. Remember, to multinationals, economic growth means people growth to fuel it, in addition to the rampant and shameless ecocide.
Is this a rant? Perhaps, I am just a still small voice crying in the wilderness – caught in a whirlpool of forces with problems placed in the “too hard” box.