Primarily due to population growth, not climate change, the planet is dying. From Straight Line Logic contributor Bill Gudal:
Ecosystems are crashing everywhere. Mass death of species is occurring in astounding numbers, but is unreported. Both plants and animals are succumbing at blinding speed due to a vortex of interconnected causes. The resulting impact on human existence is incalculable. Climate change is not the cause but is merely a symptom of the collapse of the complex web of life itself. The planet is very rapidly become sterile. The mistaken obsession with climate change, and with fossil fuels, has set the environmental movement back fifty years.
The cause of this calamity is due almost entirely to one factor: habitat destruction. The earth’s key biological lifegiving zones are being paved and obliterated with impervious surfaces including the monster of all ecological nightmares, concrete. Habitat destruction has not paused or reversed but rather has accelerated. Endless examples abound everywhere in the world from Ethiopia to Brazil to your local US neighborhood. It is relentless. Millions of acres of development are in planning stages in virtually every country of the world. The end result is endless destruction of the very earth itself, the very soil, and the millions of unseen but life giving microorganisms dwelling within, on and above.
And the driving force behind habitat destruction is the massive growth of the human population and the need to feed it, house it and entertain it. When Joe Biden was born in 1942 the world population was 1.8 billion. Today it is 8 billion. Let that growth factor sink in. I ask you to do this: think of a current much discussed environmental issue. Then ask, would this issue exist, or exist anywhere near its current extent, if the world population was 1.8 billion or 3 billion or 4 billion. The answer in almost all cases is negative.
Promotion of population growth is the policy of most national governments. It is not only counterproductive but deadly. People in many places in the world are fortunately defying their governments and their capitalist controllers and voting with their feet to severely curtail their own reproduction. Korea and Japan are among the dozens of examples, with fertility rates of 0.8 and 1.2. So far, this has not dented habitat destruction. Exploding populations elsewhere are overwhelming this counter trend.
The key drivers of the population explosion include a variety of factors including health care and agricultural advancements. (The safety and longevity of current agricultural practices are a separate disturbing issue). But supercharging all of this is capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for “growth”. And by far the easiest no-brainer way to achieve this growth is to grow the population. Whenever you hear the word “growth” as currently understood, equate it with continuing habitat destruction.
Achieving resolution of the current plant and animal collapse will not be achieved by eating bugs, limiting cars to one per every three families, eliminating bovine flatulence, and banning gas ranges. All of these ridiculous proposals are useless both separately and in combination. Rather, reduction of the world population to 4 billion people will create the opportunity for decent, healthy, and meaningful lives for your children and grandchildren.
Reducing world population to 4 billion is to be accomplished gradually and humanely over a considerable period of time. It must avoid unethical mechanisms such as war, induced pandemics, poison vaccines, eugenics and genocide. It is to be accomplished by one simple elegant solution: attrition via reduced worldwide fertility rates. Without question this will cause economic disruption unparalleled in modern history. But it is the only way to return the Earth to the paradise that it was, the beautiful blue-green planet. It is the only hope of providing meaning and dignity to human life.
A recent quote from a famous Hollywood actress adroitly places all of this in context and identifies what we are missing: “I have memories of Los Angeles in the 1940s. I feel grateful that I remember this. I remember the world when there were only 2 billion people. There’s 8 billion now, and that’s a huge difference. Life was very different. There was room for a girl to play and run and more birds and wilderness and no traffic, crowds, congestion, smog and freeways”. This old way is our new goal. It is achievable. I apply the butterfly test to everyone: rank your quality of life by the percentage chance of seeing a butterfly in your neighborhood this summer.
