"I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought with thirty years of good science we could address those problems but I was wrong.
The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy – and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that." ~Gus Speth
Last week I had the thought cross my mind that we actually need a pandemic to wipe out a huge portion of our global population in a fair and (mostly) genetically random manner. That doing so would solve a good number of our problems (deforestation, wars over dwindling resources, less people using carbon and worsening climate change, etc) but then I found this article
and study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
and it hit me: even if we reduce our population by half (the estimated death toll during the Black Death
bubonic plague of the 1300s), we'd still have OVER 3 BILLION PEOPLE left and that's not enough - we'll build our population right back up in less than 50 years. (see link below)
Until we have a profound cultural shift in how we live, our consumerism, materialism, our disposable, capitalism-driven economy, our species is headed toward untold miserable conditions. Our children will not have a better way of life. We must evolve.
World Population Growth
by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
First published in 2013; updated April, 2017
200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth. Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity—an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
I read and re-read this post trying to determine what parts were sarcasm and which were reality. With regard to your comment about wishing for a pandemic to wipe out a huge portion of the population, I took this to be sarcasm/comical. You can choose to end your own life today; that is ultimate fairness. Perhaps a drop in the bucket but it is a start.
"
Until we have a profound cultural shift in how we live, our consumerism, materialism, our disposable, capitalism-driven economy, our species is headed toward untold miserable conditions. Our children will not have a better way of life. We must evolve."
Well, Mao began a profound cultural shift, i.e. forced abortions, one child families forced labor. How did that work out?
What are the untold miserable conditions that our species is headed toward? Living under the Cherry Creek bridge, oops, we are already there.
Evolve to what? I have always been interested in evolution. If man evolved from the apes why are the apes still here?
Rampage--I will be happy to loan you my copy of "The Origin of Species" if you would care to research your own question. Basically it says that species can branch off, not all become something else. If you study man's evolution, different levels of that evolution existed at the same time. Kind of like why, to use the Bible as an example, different colors, languages and religions came from the same original couple. Follow me so far?
What "untold miserable conditions"???!!! How about your great grand children cursing your name when they can't breathe because of short-sited pollution? How about those innocents suffering and dying because they couldn't afford health care or medicine because you sold your soul giving tax breaks and no scrutiny or accountability to the rich and powerful? How about millions dying in the future because we annihilated so many of our resources, animal and plant, that there is mass starvation? Evolve to what? Try being what humans SHOULD be--less greedy, less egotistical, less short-sighted, less--well, you should get the picture. Let me just say that animals kill for defense or food. They do not kill for no reason. Maybe man could strive to evolve to that?
ramage, not one sentence of my post was sarcasm or meant as a joke. I have no desire to perish but I think it only fair that I be equally susceptible as everyone else in a population-reducing pandemic. If you read the article I linked, you would see that the authors even stated that trying to limit reproduction to 1 child per couple wouldn't be effective; this is again another of those huge problems we as a species face that will not be solved easily, simply, or quickly but it's still worth a discussion, is it not?
To add to what Carrie shared, humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. We did not evolve from apes, our two lineages diverged about 6-8 million years ago. Introduction to Human Evolution
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
We have more people than we have ever had. Malthus would be shocked to how many people eat despite the population doubling and tripling. Less subsistence poverty than ever before in real numbers and we have had so many nations achieve zero population growth. Imagine Japan in twenty more years. It will be a garden because of less people.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
No worries. The world ended decades ago. You are all a figment of my imagination.
..."Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”.
Obviously we need one world government to monitor and control population growth since individual countries would never make those kinds of decisions for it's people (except for places like China I guess). Give all the power to a handful of "geniuses" in Brussels since the left in this country thinks Europe is so righteous and wise.
Or just let the earth cleanse itself and start over like it's done in the past. I'm good with that.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy
