Book review: Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

 

Part 6:  The great backtrack, Dave Foreman, Man Swarm

 

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.  What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but the universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.”

 

King stated that self-evident reality in 1966 when the planet held 3.5 billion,  but today, you cannot help but appreciate the gravity of his words as we gallop from 7.1 billion to 10.1 billion in 37 year—by 2050.

 

What we lack: “universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem.”

At 1.2 billion, India suffers endless misery and population growth by adding 11 million, net gain, annually on their way to 1.6 billion by mid century.  Their misery, starvation and wildlife extinction rates gallop off the charts. The Bengal tigers don’t stand a chance.

 

By reading Crist’s and Cafaro’s book, you will gain gravity of the problem.  In Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation by Professor Philip Cafaro of Colorado State University and Professor Eileen Crist of Virginia Tech, we find the top authors and scientists in the world attempting to alert humanity to its impending future viability on this planet. 

 

In the chapter by Dave Foreman, author of Man Swarm: and the killing of wildlife, we see the destruction of the natural world in the wake of human encroachment.  What other chance does wildlife possess when the human swarm expands by 80 million more people annually? 

Wildlife doesn’t stand a chance for existence with the onslaught of humanity as creatures die off at 80 to 100 species daily.  It’s called: The Sixth Extinction Session and human overpopulation causes it.

 

Foreman said, “Unlooked-for but swift, we have come on like a swarm of locusts: a wide, thick, darkling cloud settling down like living snowflakes, smothering every stalk, every leaf, eating away every scrap of green down to raw, bare, wasting earth.  It’s painfully straightforward.   At 7.1 billion of us, we have overshot Earth’s carrying capacity.  The crippling of Earth’s life support systems by such a flood of upright apes is bad news for us.”

 

I met Foreman a year ago in Washington, DC.  Smart, really smart!  Highly intelligent, worldly intelligent!  He understands as deeply as the first environmentalist John Muir who said, “When you pick up a rock or anything, you realize that it’s attached to the rest of the universe.”

The more humans, the more poverty, the less wild things.

 

As an Outlier, Foreman understands that every time you kill off a species by your own expansion as a species, you kill off a connection to your own future and the future of the planet.  Humanity, that’s us folks, now engages our planet in the “Sixth Extinction Session” progressing at a rate of 80 to 100 creatures vanishing every 24 hours every day of the week. (Source: Norman Myers, Oxford University, UK)

 

Foreman asks you if you want to live in a world without wild things. Can you live without the great animals, without the great birds, the great whales, without all the other creatures that make up this living mass of beasts on this biosphere?

 

He ponders why we pursued the logical population question in the 60s and 70s, but abandoned it from the 80s to the present.  “A spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund said in a New York Times interview in 2006 that population growth itself , “Wasn’t what was wrong, that it was where people chose to live.”  I shook my head in disbelief.  No, that’s not true.  I yelled at the paper, balled it up in my hands, and threw it against the wall, cussing up a blue streak all the while.”

 

How did that EDF person come to the point of such ignorance or stupidity or idiocy or all three combined?  How could his “pretend environmentalist)” brain make such a ridiculous statement?  

More of human compaction means less and less of wild things.

 

Such statements erupt from the mouths of people in world leadership positions that simply don’t know what they are talking about.  They perpetuate the eternal myth that the human race can continue growing without consequences.   Special note: even in the face of mass extinctions, climate destabilization, polluted oceans, squalid cities exploding all over the planet, droughts, mass starvation of 18 million humans per year and more predicaments too numerous to list.

 

While Western countries drop their fertility rates to live within their carrying capacity, third world countries dominated by the old religions, continue to produce that excess of 80 million people instead of using birth control.  Thanks to the Catholic, Islam, Hindu and other churches, their members gallop onward to ever greater numbers.

 

Once they outrun their own countries’ ability to feed, house and water those newcomers, they escape to First World countries where they arrive “for a better life.”  Unfortunately, that migration ensures more baby production in the country they left behind and multiplies their “ecological footprint” not only in their new country, but more so in their old country with more human babies.  The vicious cycle repeats, but who loses habitat?  Answer: wildlife.

 

“The Catholic Church sneered at worry about population growth owing to their gruesome belief that contraception is a sin,” said Foreman.  “The ugliness of the Catholic nobility’s damnation of birth control was laid out by the head of the Catholics for Free Choice, Frances Kissling, in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.  A Ugandan cardinal, Emmanuel Wamala, told Catholics in Africa that it would be better for women to get AIDS from their husbands than to use condoms.  Kissling said, “It was worse to lose your soul and go to hell because you used a condom to prevent AIDS than to die of Aids.”

 

 

That shows you the utter stupidity and disregard for all life the Catholic Church supports.  Notice those 1st century old men thinking in 1st century terms that cannot comprehend the fact that we live in an overpopulated 21st century. If they had their way, we would still be forced to believe that the sun rotates around the Earth.

When you multiply more human beings, you multiply more human misery and you create higher extinction rates for all wild things via habitat encroachment, pollution and climate change.

 

To think that we have the right to have as many children as possible equals to saying we have a right to buying as many gas-guzzling, resource destroying SUVs as possible.  If we all followed the Duggar Family with 19 kids and counting, this planet and all its wildlife wouldn’t stand a chance. (www.duggarfamily.com )  That wife would birth another 19 if her birth canal would withstand the onslaught.  It makes you wonder if her husband and she possess any intelligence beyond that of a pair of rabbits or gerbils or mice.

 

That’s the problem.  Most societies, in the face of reality, don’t give population growth a blink.

 

They get away with, “Optimism is necessary for those who are attempting the impossible; were they to face the dark pit of overpopulation before them, they would lose their will to live.  They would have to come nose to nose with their madness.”

 

Foreman concluded, “The best beacons for the harm done by population growth are right before our noses: wholesale extinction, wrecked and plowed wild lands, and climate change…for the sake of the wild things we must bring down the human population to less than two billion.”    Dr. Jack Alpert states the numbers should be less than 100 million. (www.skil.org)

 

In either case, we must move the human race toward population and consumption levels that will allow the wild things to remain with us.

 

Part 7: How a plethora of people produces a paucity of wildlife

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Part 6:  Dave Foreman ,  the Great Backtrack, Man Swarm

Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

Authors: Philip Cafaro, Eileen Crist

Publisher: The University of Georgia Press, www.ugapress.org

ISBN: 978-0-8203-4385-3

Price: $24.95  www.amazon.com

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Alexandra Paul talks about human overpopulation and saving our world by all women having 1 child only: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNxctzyNxC0

This film will rock you:  MOTHER: CARING FOR 7 BILLION  

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director of www.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE&feature=player_embedded

 

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a few words, “Mind boggling!”  www.NumbersUSA.org

 

This is the best website to start:  www.numbersusa.org ; watch Roy Beck’s “Immigration by the Numbers” at 14 minutes. Bi-partisan and very effective. Become a faxer of pre-written letters to your reps to make positive  change.

 

Visit www.TheSocialContract.com for the best information on what we face as a civilization as to overpopulation, energy, immigration and much more.

 

Must see DVD: "Blind Spot" www.snagfilms.com/films/title/blind_spot/ , This movie illustrates America's future without oil, water and other resources to keep this civilization functioning. It's a brilliant educational movie! www.blindspotdoc.com

Must see: Rapid Population Decline, seven minute video by Dr. Jack Alpert-

Dave Gardner, President, Citizen-Powered Media ; Producing the Documentary, GROWTH BUSTERS; presents Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity, Join the cause at www.growthbusters.org ;760 Wycliffe Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80906 USA; +1 719-576-5565

Trailer to his latest movie on overpopulation:  http://youtu.be/KLWxWOcUrVc

Check out this link with Wooldridge on bicycle and Lester Brown and panel discussion:

Tomorrow's Americaproject on www.youtube.com/contemporarylearning.

DC: 202-258-4887

Email: gac@starbrightmc.com

Link to www.tomorrowsamerica.com for more discussions on America's predicament.

Dr. Jack Alpert, Stanford University

 

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