Chapter 5



"There will not be an environment left to worry about unless we get the population crisis under control."

-John Adams (Natural Resources Defense Council)


The World Population Explosion


Today, there are more people living on our planet than at any other time in all of human history. World population has quadrupled in the 20th century from 1.6 billion in 1900 to more than 7 billion people in 2010. We are enveloped in a literal explosion of human endeavor, consumption and development as never experienced before.

One half of the world's population- 3 billion- live in a state of total, absolute abject poverty, surviving on an unimaginable US$2.00/day. Our once plentiful air, land and water resources are being systematically stretched to the maximum to meet the growing demands of an urban and rural sprawl that has become human civilization at the dawn of the 21st century.

Every year more than 40 million innocent men, women and children (that's more than 6 jewish holocausts annually) needlessly and ruthlessly perish on our planet from hunger, starvation, disease and malnutrition. Yet to meet a projected global population of 8.5 billion by 2025, it is expected that the world will have to double its annual food production capacity to meet the growing demands for more food, despite the fact that current levels of production and distribution have been fatally disasterous for the world's destitute to date.

The world's richest countries with roughly 20 percent of the world's population account for roughly 85 percent of the total consumption of global resources, whereas the poorest 20 percent account for just 1.3 percent. More than half of the 4- 5 billion people in the developing nations of the Global South lack basic sanitation, almost a third do not have access to clean water, one quarter lack adequate housing, and one fifth do not have access to health services at all.

The cumulative effect of the global population and poverty explosions have wreaked havoc on the global environment as well. Global carbon dioxide emissions have increased 12 fold from 534 million metric tons in 1900 to 35 billion metric tons per year in the year 2010. Half of the world's forests have disappeared since the Industrial Revolution. In the last 40 years, per capita forest area worldwide has fallen by more than 50 percent, from a global average of 1.2 hectares to 0.6 hectares per person.

Massive land degradation, widespread water resource depletion, growing desertification, elevated and expanding global air pollution levels, unprecedented biodiversity loss and sprawling urbanization pressures are all the result of a planetary civilization that is by all accounts and definitions is completely out of control.

Humanity now stands at the crossroads of its own future and survival as a species. Its time for the human race to evolve, transform itself into an advanced civilization and radically move beyond the ineptness, ignorance and stupidity that have been responsible for the level and extent of global poverty and overpopulation we now experience on our planet.

It is time NOW for a massive re-distribution of wealth to the world's poor. Efforts must begin immediately to educate the world's citizens as to our common global predicament. We must take command and seize control of our own destiny, no one else will do it. The promotion of organic, sustainable international agriculture and development as well as the introduction and use of decentralized, non-polluting, free alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and anti-gravity must become paramount.

Reduction of the global population rate worldwide must similiarly become one of our highest priorities, since it is the root cause of all the global poverty and environmental destruction we witness on our planet today.

Overall, as it stands today, global society is in imminent danger in failing to come to grips with the absolute urgency of the world population explosion. The vast majority of the total world population expansion has taken place in less than one tenth of one percent in the short history of homo-sapiens. However, it is only at this late stage of human evolution that we are beginning to see the need to contain our 'out of control' growth. Physical, finite limits of the Earth's ability to sustain human civilization is at the breaking point. Many believe we are already in overshoot and have exceeded the Earth's 'carrying capacity' as a species. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund came out with a report a few years back that stated, in essence, that ww would need another 3-4 Earth size planets just to be able to sustain present lifestyles many of us in the developed world now enjoy. In other words, many of us are living beyond our means.

A good way to visualize and comprehend the threat that global population represents is contained in the weed and pond analogy. A pond weed grows and doubles every day in area lets suppose. In just 29 days (to pick a month duration period for this analogy), that pond weed will cover one-half of the pond. The weed will then double the next day and cover the entire pond. This is what is commonly referred to as exponential growth. This is a good illustration of something that begins slowly and can suddenly overtake us in a flash. The biggest jump, that final day in the weed/pond analogy, is occuring right now. In just under one century, if present trends continue, we will be doubling from 5 to 10 billion people, in effect, covering the entire pond.

If humanity fails to act and take serious steps to reign in the rate of population growth very, very soon, it is essentially guaranteed that nature will end the population explosion for us in very unpleasant ways. Those very unpleasant ways are now starting to come to the fore in the areas of global environmental degradation, depletion and scarcity of natural resources, increased conflict between between people sand nations and, ultimately, with the overall loss of our health, well-being and mortality from hunger, starvation, disease and famine. This is, in effect, what is actually transpiring today, to a degree. The prospect for further damage will continue to grow to the degree that we continue to fail in our collective ability as a species to halt and sharply reverse global population growth.

Crop failures due to the effects of global climate change and the diminution of access to water resources, both have the potential together to cause the premature deaths of more than a billion people in the next few decades. The global AIDS pandemic, centered primarily in the sub-saharan region of Africa, will continue to take the lives of millions more. Hunger, starvation, disease and malnutrition, as mentioned previously, is natures way of removing surplus people as the human enterprise systematically fails to institute and enforce birth control measures, family planning laws and regional 'carrying capacity' policies designed to drastically limit and scale back demographic world population rates.

At the same time, I would interject that a very devious global eugenics agenda is also being played out by the global elite on the world stage to purposely depopulate a large portion of the world's masses. This is being done primarily through unsustainable international economic development practices and strategies, the harmful inoculation of large numbers of people both in the developed and developing world, and through the deliberate poisoning of our food and water supplies. Genetically engineered food has been introduced and is being consumed both as a sterilant and as a cancerous carcinogen designed to eventually 'soft-kill' the consumer from the ingestion of this type of product. Most drinking water in the Third World is, and remains, polluted and contaminated to some degree, giving many millions of the poor water-borne diseases that have and will continue to kill them. In rich countries, highly toxic chemicals such as chlorine and fluoride, both known carcinogens, are routinely dumped in municipal water supplies along with other mind-altering toxins and poisons, such as lithium, prozac and uranium. Over time, these toxins and poisons will ultimately 'soft-kill' their hosts as well.

As horrid and as insidious as these practices are, I believe that there is another path to tread, one that preserves and protects the overabundance of life that is already here and one that does not work to destroy it. All life is precious. Another world is possible.

Its high time to seize the initiative and declare an enforcable one child per family policy throughout every single nation on Earth until this planetary emergency can be brought under control. As an analogy, when one walks into a house that has been flooded, the very first priority to take is to stop the source of the incoming water, not attempt to salvage household goods.

Recognizing that overpopulation and rapid population growth are intimately connected to the depletion of non-renewable energy resources, the general deterioration of the global environment and increased levels of international tension and conflict, we must come to learn that this issue is also the root source and chief contributor of our prospective catastrophe and discontinuity as a species.

About a third of the world grain harvest today is used to feed livestock to produce eggs, milk and animal protein for American style diets. If everyone on Earth switched to an essentially vegetarian diet, we could feed a billion or more starving people. 10 to 100 times the amount of water goes into producing 1 pound of beef as opposed to producing 1 pound of grain. This is why shifting to a diet for a new world is so critical. Not only will starving people be fed, but natural resources will be conserved as we tread more lightly and soften our ecological footprint upon the Earth. As well, the gulf between the world's stuffed and starved will stand a good chance of drawing to a close, bringing more health, stability, well-being, higher consciousness and intelligence into a world grossly out of balance with its priorities and prospects for survival.

Our aversion to limiting the size of the planet's population are as deep and pervasive as the roots of our sexual behaviors and needs as sentient beings to live meaningful, fulfilling lives during our short sojourn while here on Earth. Billions of years of evolution have literally ingrained our DNA with the virtues of self-preservation and replication. However, in our current predicament, there is no more time to waste. Wasting time and deferring the population crisis has already condemned the lives of hundreds of millions to premature deaths due to hunger, starvation, disease and malnutrition.

Truely, action to end the human population explosion must become a top priority on the human world survival agenda. The number of human births and birth rates must be lowered immediately. Time is of the essence, otherwise we will continue down a downward spiral that is quickly, swiftly and efficiently moving us beyond the point of no return.

Already, increased human numbers and activity are responsible for urban sprawl, the spread of epidemics, an increase in crime, more trash and sewage, more cars, more smog, more traffic, more droughts, floods and extreme weather events caused by global climate change, more failed and damaged crop yields, increases in hunger, starvation and famine, water shortages, more dying and deforestation of forests, more desertification, more regional and international conflict etc... This trajectory will continue and worsen until humanity learns to come to grips with the world population crisis and begins to take charge of its own destiny as intelligent, advanced and compassionate life-forms on this spectacular planet of ours.

With enough foresight, we can evolve our hearts and minds to take measures immediately and benignly to lower and reverse global birth rates worldwide. As part of an integrated, synergistically oriented and multidimensional strategy to Save Our Planet, people must also learn to treat unlimited growth as a cancerous disease. The transition to a green/sustainable world order and an emerging Age of Ecology mandates that the world's rich and well-off make helping the poor and needy an urgent priority and goal. Its time for the rich to help the poor, its that simple.

It has been estimated that the maximum human carrying capacity for the Earth is between 2-3 billion, living sustainably. Sustainable living practices and goals can be achieved within a functioning global green economy. Birth rates can be reduced worldwide with a one child per family policy. Funds can be redirected from the world's military and invested in preventing and ending the incredible level of human suffering that is unfortunately occuring on Earth today.

Along with the threat of nuclear, chemical and/or biological war and an array of threats to the global environment, the threat of overpopulation ranks as one of the very top threats to human survival in the 21st century. Rather than an orchestrated 'die-off' of the world's masses currently being carried out and executed by the global elite, let us instead work to protect the inherent dignity and right to life for all people who are priviledged to be alive at this very hour in our collective planetary evolution. As we consciously learn to honor and protect all life on Earth, we will, in turn, learn to secure our own future as a species- one where the world population explosion is brought under control and the threat of overpopulation is a mere relic of the past...




SOURCES:

1. Paul and Anne Ehrlich/The Population Bomb

2. World Scientists Warning to Humanity

3. United Nations Population Division





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