From Bernard Sunderland:
Re: Over a fifth of plant species may face extinction threat (Sept. 28): It has long been my opinion that global population control is the only solution to all ecological and sociological problems. Conversely, I believe it can be taken for granted that lack of control of the human population guarantees doom for this planet as we know it.
2 Comments:
Overpopulation is a sin. The world's leaders either promote overpopulation or refuse to acknowledge it. Our world leadership in general is poor.
Just look at Haiti as a microcosm of what the world is going to become if nothing is done about population.
The Chinese leaders did not win a popularity contest when they demanded population control but they were right.
I believe in quality of life for all, not quantity of life with no quality.
Unfortunately it seems that humans are no smarter than bacteria which will multiply until there is no food remaining and then they all die.
If we did not have technology, population would have maxed out years ago.
When will man become smarter than bacteria?
Fossil fuels have enabled both population growth and particular technologies.
When organisms or invasive species come across apparently free sources of energy, they experience population blooms which eventually crash when the supposedly free sources of energy are exhausted. That is the lesson of bacteria, but the great amount of energy stored in fossil fuels have allowed us the conceit that it is irrelevant to us.
Because we have converted ourselves into a fossil fuel-based organism (thus within two hundred years putting aside the trophic level we evolved within over the last 5 million years for one based on living off of accumulated dead energy), so-called "developed" or modern humans have become ambivalent to the complex and various living pathways of energy and resource cycles characterized by the immense biodiversity of the planet and which gave birth to the great variety of cultures.
We despise as "backwards" the myriad of solar-based cultures that once characterized humanity, and which survive only in impoverished remnants, despite their immensely complex, intimate and subtle relationships to the many different locales across the planet and the particular resource and energy cycles making up each locale. As a result of dismantling all these different solar pathways, biological and cultural, we will face the end of the fossil-fuel age not only with an unsupportable population but much more impoverished than we entered it, setting ourselves up for a population crash in the manner of any other species on this planet.
Then perhaps we may learn the lesson bacteria.
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