THE RAGING MONSTER UPON THE LAND: HYPER-POPULATION GROWTH
By Frosty Wooldridge
While Colorado and other western states stumble into the early years of the 21st century without a clue or plan—many futurists understand our greatest dilemma: hyper-population growth.
Nonetheless, it remains the most avoided, ducked, evaded and shunned topic by the media and national leaders. Yet, no matter how much we ignore it, overpopulation grows as the ‘raging monster across the American landscape.”
E.O. Wilson, famed Harvard researcher, wrote a book, The Diversity of Life, published in 1992 by W.W. Norton and Company. When you read it, you realize we’re a full 17 years past 1992. In that time, the USA added 51 million people. At the same time, water, energy, land and resources remained static. They will remain fixed for the foreseeable future.
While we add population, nature won’t add more water, energy, land or resources. For some esoteric reason, millions of Americans think nothing about that sobering reality while current demographic projections show 100 million people added to the USA in 30 years.
What am I attempting? I expect, with your help, to drive this nation toward a “U.S. Sustainable Population Policy” that brings our population into balance with our water, land and resources. In other words, living within our carrying capacity! We must avoid India and China’s mistakes!
Wilson said, “The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology or land-use management is sophistic.”
Yet, this week, a reader of my columns wrote me that overpopulation is not a problem. He said that I was a ‘globalist’ and flat-out wrong! “God will feed everyone born,” he stated.
I returned with the sobering fact that 18 million human beings die of starvation annually and of that number, 10 million children suffer starvation deaths annually. (Source: World Health Organization)
“Nope!” he said. “You’re wrong.”
Finally, in total exasperation I wrote back Einstein’s words: "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
I cannot educate illiteracy, so I work with those that think critically.
“If Bangladesh had 10 million inhabitants, instead of 144 million (in a land mass the size of Iowa), its impoverished people could live on prosperous farms away from the dangerous flood plains in the midst of a natural and stable upland environment,” Wilson said. “It is also sophistic to point to the Netherlands and Japan, as many commentators do, as models of densely populated, but prosperous societies. Both are highly specialized industrial nations dependent upon massive imports of natural resources from the rest of the world.
“If all nations held the same number of people per square kilometer, they would converge in quality of life to Bangladesh rather than to the Netherlands and Japan, and their irreplaceable natural resources would soon join the Seven Wonders of the World as scattered vestiges of an ancient history.”
Wilson promotes the most rational plan for humanity:
“Every nation has an economic policy and a foreign policy,” Wilson said. “By this, I mean not just the capping of growth when the population hits the wall, as in China and India, but a policy based on a rational solution of this problem: What, in the judgment of its informed citizenry, is the optimal population, taken for each country in turn, placed against the backdrop of global demography?”
Wilson, like this writer, understands the clear urgency of a national population policy. It’s not like we can languish indolently while we add 100 million in 30 years as if we remain immune to consequences. Horrific symptoms already ram down our civilization’s throat. Has anyone heard of a state called California where their water crisis now demands water from the “toilet to the tap?”
“The goal of an optimal population will require addressing, for the first time, the full range of processes that lock together the economy and environment, the national interest and the global commons, the welfare of the present generation and with that of future generations,” Wilson said. “The matter should be aired not only in think tanks but in public debate. If humanity then chooses to breed itself and the rest of life into impoverishment, at least it will have done so with open eyes.”
I make this unequivocal statement: “Over population will become THE single greatest crisis facing humanity in the 21st century. Either we take action to change course or Mother Nature cannot help but respond with a whirlwind of consequences we shall not escape.”
What can you do? Plenty! You can drive this issue to the front burner. I offer a dozen ideas for you to educate yourself and websites where you can take action. Let’s get busy. Forward this column to all your friends.
Start with: www.nationaloptimumpopulationcommission.com
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