Loving ourselves to death
The middle school science experiment was simple: Mix dried grass and water in a jar, and look at a drop of the water under a microscope once a week.
Week 1: Grassy water.
Week 2: Occasional micro-organisms swimming around (amoebae, paramecium, etc.).
Week 3: Teeming with life (hundreds of micro-organisms packed into a single droplet).
Week 4: Water smells sour, looks murky, and carries only a few surviving micro-organisms.
Week 5: Water has become foul-smelling sludge, devoid of life. Micro-organisms have died from living in high concentrations of their own waste in a closed system.
Reality check: We're living in a closed system, increasingly swimming in our own waste. Global human population, which was 2.5 billion in 1950, is now 6.5 billion. If I live to normal life expectancy, I'll survive to see the population exceed 10 billion, unless something dramatic changes.
I hope something dramatic changes. We're so attached to our own importance, that the very subject of limiting our population growth is a taboo subject.
This year CNN produced "Planet in Peril," an exquisite series about threats to nature worldwide. Like virtually every nature show that exposes the effects of deforestation, poaching, habitat loss, suburban sprawl, unsustainable farming, industrial pollution, or other man-made threats to wildlife, it couched admonitions about the threats in terms of a lack of education or poverty.
It was because people were poor that they poached endangered species for bush meat or sold the parts on the black market. It was because people were ignorant that they fished species to the brink of extinction. It was never because the ever-growing human population simply was an insatiable juggernaut.
Population overload is the elephant in the room in the environmental debate, because so many religions, nationalities, and ethnic mores encourage their adherents to procreate. China's once-child policy is considered an abridgement of human rights, which is roundly criticized in the West.
Water shortages, food shortages, squabbles over natural resources, are attributed to poverty again and again, because the word "overpopulated" is too politically hot to touch. Only a handful of organizations dare to address the subject, most notably the nonprofits Population Connection and Negative Population Growth.
I support greater use of organic farming to reduce fossil fuel dependence and cut into agricultural chemical pollution that's wiping out birds, marine life, and other living things. But I also know that the single biggest threat to wildlife survival is habitat loss. And organic agriculture requires more land to compensate for lower yields than conventional (chemically fertilized, pesticide-sprayed) crops. There isn't enough farmland on earth to grow organic food for our 6.5 billion brethren (especially with our growing taste for meat, which requires way more land than plant-based food does).
To all those couples thinking for having that second child, I recommend adoption. For concerned citizens of the world looking or a way to address pollution, shortages, global warming, and most other global environmental issues, I recommend focusing on initiatives to slow population growth. It's the one common thread between all of those issues and many more.
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Past Blog Entries
- How fresh is your air freshener?
- Loving ourselves to death
- The free market doesn't account for sustainability
- Dell declares war on excess packaging
- Greenwash of the year?
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