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Living within a living, loving planet
Posts tagged overpopulation
Ten percent Sahara expansion
Jul 29th
Ten percent Sahara expansion
“The desert (Sahara) has expanded southward during summer by about ten percent, so it’s a fairly significant increase in the desert expanse over this 93-year period that we analyzed. Most people in the region depend on the food they grow on small family farms. So losing farmland could have grave consequences, especially as populations continue to grow.”
“Nigam is a professor at the University of Maryland. He says decreasing rainfall is likely a result of both natural cycles and human-caused global warming.”
So there we have the kernel of the problem. Decreasing small farmland and increasing population.
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.”
An Interview with Jorie Graham III
Nov 2nd
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012)
Earthlines Magazine
“People were clearly not meant to live as they
wished to live on the planet, as I could see it. The mismatch
between this species – with its needs and desires – and this
place was evident everywhere … Native Americans, in their
early history, knew how to live on land. But we took care
of that. Oh it made me and makes me half-crazed at times
with grief, then with rage, then with just total bafflement.
Most of my poetry has spent its time trying to figure out what
‘being’ is – human ‘being’ and non-human ‘being’. How do
they go together. Can they. What on earth is human desire. I
knew even then desire was our illness, as well as our stunning
spark. It has turned out to be more our illness. Our terminal
illness. What can I say. That is what I write from and about.”
An Interview with Jorie Graham
Nov 1st
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012) Earthlines Magazine
“SB: Your poetry has grown more ecological in subject matter over
time. What factors have contributed to that – has it followed the
pattern of your own personal transformations?
JG: To answer this question: once I woke up,
once I read-up, once I lived outside of the US where the green
movements arise out of a very wide swathe of the population
– once I lived on agricultural land in France where any farmer
was also a committed, informed and active environmentalist
– because he saw the bees disappearing and he knew what it
meant – because he saw the seasons coming unravelled and he
knew why – because he saw birds lose their way in migration
and knew why – because he saw his growing season alter, his
water disappear, his family come down with environmentally
induced cancers – once I watched so many people who live
on the land – in Iowa, in Wyoming, in Normandy – tell me
‘It is sick, it is sick, we are killing it’ – I began to read deeply
in the field. And I grew very afraid. And what scared me
most was the narrowing window of opportunity – the tools
at hand, but kept just out of reach by corporate interests and
greed, and a population as much lulled into their sleep by
(heavily financed) denial as by the very technology that could
have awakened them and handed them tools. I saw the failure
of courage as a failure of imagination. And that is where art
comes in. Or so McKibben thinks, and I agree.”
We were told by the best scientists that Sandy was coming and
would visit more and more often as long as the CO2 continued to
build. But we were NOT afraid.
It will take more than fear now
to seriously begin the recovery the burden of which will fall on
our children and grandchildren and perhaps many generations
to come. We desperately need to decrease our footprint and I am
afraid that it will be messy.
Who Cares?
Apr 2nd
Drought fears for Midlands and south-west England
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17571709
“Farmers in East Anglia are unlikely to be allowed to draw water from the ground or rivers to irrigate crops. Some are reporting crop reductions of between 20-50%, in vegetables like onions and carrots.
Extra capacity is being found in other areas of the country.
Environment Agency water resources head Trevor Bishop told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the situation was becoming more serious.
‘If we see a continuation of dry weather, which is now very likely, these conditions will probably extend further westward over the next couple of months.’”
I suggest we reconsider taking on the responsibility of “feeding the world.” I repeat, we do not have the problem of lack of food or lack of growing areas where food is needed. The problem is largely twofold. [1] Too many people live where they have “eaten out their environment” [2] Exploitation by the wealthy who own large tracts of land and grow food for export to enable the well to do to gobble out of season fruit and vegetables. Surely if we plough up marginal land here to feed them there, then they will continue to make more and more children until we all be in the same boat.
A few questions. Where will the water come to increase global food? Where will the water come from to water the millions of trees needed to reduce CO2 to stabilize the climate so droughts can be reduced? Now that food has become a global commodity in a global market, can we expect the food sector to favour reducing demand by backing efforts to restrain population growth? Of course not. Except for China, when have you read about a government encouraging the limitation of population growth? I suggest that most governments are now driven by the business attitudes that favour more people. They would wouldn’t they?
Regulators are interesting devices. Voltage regulators, for instance keep a constant voltage level to a voltage output. Regulators are vital to the function of a diesel engine driving a generator because when the regulation fails, the engine “runs away” and explodes.
Perhaps a corporate structure lacks a “regulator.” Is there a corporate concept of “enough profit?” Do corporate executives ever make “enough”?
Can you imagine this statement being made by a corporate executive to the board? “Well, we need to decrease our output and consider that we have made enough profit this year. Our procurement policy is overdriving supply to the detriment of both the organisations and dependent environment.” Sound familiar? Of course not.
I’m just rereading a letter sent to the government of Slovenia from James Hansen, one of my heroes. Read it here if you will.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120330_SlovenianPresident.pdf
“The most basic matter is not one of economics, however. It is a matter of morality – a matter of intergenerational justice. As with the earlier great moral issue of slavery, an injustice done by one race of humans to another, so the injustice of one generation to all those to come must stir the public’s conscience to the point of action.”
Intergenerational justice. I often consider starting my memoirs so that my grandchildren might know who I was and what I thought. Why? Well, I know very little about my Grandfather McCain and I often wonder now what he thought about things. Who was he really?
However, will my grandchildren ask, “Was our welfare important enough to you that you cared enough to speak out during your life against the wanton destruction of our way of life?
You could see clearly what was happening and how things would turn out when we were too young to either realise it or speak out. Did you lift a finger on our behalf?”
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.