Why Are We Doing This To The Children of The World?

27,000 Starvation Deaths Daily!

In this modern era, we fly jet planes around the planet in a matter of hours. We create Smart Phones that take pictures and post them on our Facebook pages in a matter of seconds.  We pay billions of dollars to watch gridiron behemoths race toward the end zone.  We buy high-powered cars to hurl our obese bodies to the local grocery store to buy more food to stuff into our mouths.

Meanwhile, our politicians speak with soaring oratory to make the world better for all human beings.  At the same time, our leaders create wars all over the world that devour trillions of dollars in bombs, soldiers, rockets, planes and armaments.

But through all our riches, our words, our human nobility in 180 plus countries around the world, we cannot figure out how to stop the starvation deaths of 27,000 children every 24 hours.  How did we advance this far as the human race only to watch that many children die needlessly and endlessly around the world?  (Source: World Health Organization)

At the end of 2012, let’s encourage our church leaders and government leaders, and people of the world to address the fundamental need to feed the children of the planet instead of preparing for or making wars around the world. While we in the United States mourn the mayhem against the children of Newtown, Connecticut, we need to understand and solve the fact that the world suffers 27,000 “Newtown’s” every single day of the year.

With that in mind, let’s propose solutions to world hunger for 2013.  Let’s solve the great scourges of mankind: poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, disease, unemployment, homelessness, inadequate sanitation, low social mobility, and exclusion.

For example, in India, 1,000 children die every day of diarrhea, dysentery and other water borne diseases.  (Source: www.populationmedia.org) Yet, India does absolutely nothing to solve that problem while it adds another 11 million net gain to its already bloviated population of 1.2 billion impoverished people.  Not to mention its destroyed environment!

27,000 children die each day from needless poverty

Dr. Webster Tarpley, author of man books, said, “The tragic condition of humanity is perhaps most dramatically reflected in the fact that between 22,000 and 27,000 children die each day due to poverty, largely in the form of starvation, malnutrition, and diseases like diarrhea which can be cured for a few pennies. The upper end of this range corresponds to one needless childhood death caused by poverty every three seconds. Total needless childhood deaths from poverty, these data suggest, must be approaching at least 10 million per year – a yearly total which by itself rivals any of the great genocides of world history. Of the 2.2 billion children who live in today’s world, one billion live in poverty. This is the estimate from the most recent United Nations Human Development Report.”

Not only that, but Time Magazine reported that 8.1 million adults die annually from starvation. Total humans dying of starvation: 18 million annually.

 

While the United States spends trillions of dollars annually on war, 3.1 billion human beings live on less than $2.00 per day.  That same 3.1 billion lack a toilet or sanitation facilities of any kind. It’s beyond sickening that we see this kind of condition of humanity in 2012 with all our talents as a species.

“About 2.6 billion people or 40% of the world’s population are struggling to subsist on less than two dollars a day,” said Tarpley. “It is a world in which a total of 3 billion people or 50% of the world total must try to get along on less than $2.50 per day. For all the talk of a growing middle class made possible by globalization, 80% of humanity receives less than $10 per day.”

Almost a billion malnourished worldwide

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome, “There are in 2012 some 925 million persons experiencing hunger and malnutrition. Some 578 million of the hungry live in the Asian and Pacific countries, followed by 239 million malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa.”

At the same time, Americans spend $50 million per jet plane and several billions of dollars to build aircraft carriers annually that they don’t need to fight non-existent adversaries.

Ironically, the Catholic Church spends all its money worldwide to stop any form of birth control or family planning. In his brilliant book, Underdevelopment is a State of Mind by Lawrence E. Harrison, he shows where Catholic-dominated countries suffer massive child birth rates, grinding poverty and hopelessness beyond imagination.  The Catholic Church dominates in Haiti, Mexico and most of Latin America. Result: accelerating poverty to match accelerating birth rates.

Much the same holds true in Islamic countries like Pakistan, Egypt and Bangladesh.  Those ancient religions refuse to embrace birth control or abortion—thus, women die and children starve into that 10 million children death factor annually.  Additionally, they suffer horrific misery up to the point of death.

1.1 billion humans lack clean water

“Fully 1.1 billion people in developing countries today lack adequate access to clean water,” said Tarpley. “One third of all children, or 640 million kids, exist without adequate shelter. One fifth of all children, or a total of 400 million, do not have access to safe water. One seventh of all children, or 270 million, are denied access to adequate health services.”

Political instability in Egypt and much of Africa

Africa closes in on 1 billion human beings inhabiting that vast continent.  However, demographers state that the current rate of human growth will create 3.1 billion Africans by the end of the century.

In Egypt at 82 million people and headed for 150 million within decades, their form of birth control equals digging another canal off the Nile River to create more shanty tents and human misery.  No one takes responsibility for reality.

At some point, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, the Catholic Church and all other religions must join minds or hands or whatever it takes—to come to terms with human overpopulation that creates the 18 million starvation deaths annually.  They must advocate and endorse birth control and family planning.  They must un-stick themselves from the 1^st century or 6^th century and even B.C. eras in humanity’s march into the 21^st century.

Otherwise, all those civilizations will see horrific human die-off, unspeakable misery and continued degradation of our planet home.  We cannot get around it with faith, hope or prayers.  Mother Nature, aka, God, Allah, the Great Spirit, or whatever you call the Creator will unmercifully respond to our overwhelming numbers.  It won’t be pretty.

We can change course by changing our actions for a plausible future for all of humanity.

Human Overpopulation In America: Mother Nature Will Solve It Rather Brutally

Today, we humans overrun and overwhelm this planet at 7.1 billion of us.  America, at a bloviated 315 million could not exist without importing 7 out of 10 barrels of oil daily from other parts of the world.  That oil will not last forever, but we will be left with a horrific population overload.  In other words, we cannot sustain our civilization in 2012 without raping some other countries around the world.  Just imagine what we face by adding 138 million people by 2050—a scant 38 years from now.

“The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime….so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population…that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty.  We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age.  It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it.”  James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency 

Not only that, we overrun our water supplies to such an extent that “water” will be our next sustainability predicament.  The greater our numbers, the greater our dilemma for water, irrigation and food.

Susan J. Marks’ book, Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America, will give you a sobering reality check. The book presents facts, statistics, quotes, and data from sources such as the National Weather Service, United Nations, U.S. Geological Survey, and NOAA, among many other.  Marks makes a well documented case for the acute water crisis facing the world.  From Florida to Alaska, North to South Poles, South America to Africa, Iceland to Australia, and not leaving out the oceans, the author tells of the lost of drinking water and changes in precipitation patterns. Shortage and source depletion is already a major cause of border fights and legal disputes as countries, big cites, and farmland spar over water rights.

Because the USA expects to add 138 million people within 38 years, our water, energy, resources and arable land cannot keep up with our exploding numbers.  On top of our energy, water and resources depletion, Mother Nature continues warning us that we arrogantly explode our numbers to our own peril, i.e., Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, droughts, species extinction, climate change and acidified oceans.

In the end, Mother Nature speaks with a bigger stick than anyone can imagine.  My Canadian friend Tim Murray speaks about the “Nature of Mankind” and our inability to listen to the signs being given us in 2012.

Mother Nature and Mankind: A Communication Breakdown

THE RELATIONSHIP THAT COUNTS

Tim Murray said about Mother Nature, “Perhaps you forgot about me. No wonder. Your history books seem to dwell on tyrants and dictators and megalomaniacs and the terrible things they do. Yet I can do terrible things too. Especially when I am taken for granted or abused. I know. I never commanded an army or ruled a nation.

“I never firebombed Hamburg, Dresden or Tokyo, nor dropped two atomic bombs. I never raped Nanking or slaughtered a third of Cambodia’s population. I never conducted a war of ethnic cleansing nor destroyed a culture and enslaved the survivors. I never committed any of these atrocities. Yet I am the most merciless and indifferent mass murderer in history.”

I am Mother Nature. And I really think we need to talk about our relationship.

“Not the relationship you have with other people,” said Mother Nature. “Not about whether people treat each other with enough respect or fairness or empathy. Not about whether they distribute the wealth equitably. No, this is about our relationship, the relationship between you and me, nature and humankind.

“You speak of coercion. Of “coercive” birth control measures, forced abortions, punitive laws, of mass imprisonment and the violation of reproductive freedom. Of force, compulsion, duress, oppression, harassment, intimidation, threats, arm-twisting and pressure by people against people.

“But none of this matches my power of persuasion. I am talking about environmental coercion.

“You can be constrained by many things in life.  You can be constrained by arthritic pain, and prevented from training for a marathon. Or constrained by your budget from doing a lot of travelling or eating out.  Or constrained by your girth from fitting into the suit you wore to the prom.”

Environmental coercion: the most brutal of all

“But environmental constraints brought on by overpopulation can be more confining than anything else,” said Mother Nature. “They can confine you to a small urban apartment because overpopulation has driven up the cost of shelter. They can force you remain indoors because of smog alerts. They can restrict your movement and your options because overpopulation has created a labor glut and your wages have been driven down by competition. . They can reduce your per capita share of vital resources like clean water and affordable food. Environmental coercion can make your life miserable. More miserable than the most autocratic and unjust of governments.

“You may think that “austerity” is a hoax. A conspiracy of bankers and CEOs and neo-liberals to rob of us our rightful entitlements. But you obviously haven’t heard the news. This is not the 1930s. This austerity is not contrived. This austerity is for real. This austerity is geologically, not ideologically rooted. There is not enough real wealth to go around.

“Go ahead and change the tax code, reform the monetary system and let the big banks fail. Make the rich pay their share. But do you think your Occupy movement can persuade me to yield more how-hanging fruit? Do you think that “justice”, “fairness”, and “equity” will suffice to make up for our non-renewable resource short falls?

“In just 13 years, Canadian governments will have to find $93 billion just to fund their unfunded liabilities—the promises they have made to Canadian citizens to pay out their pensions and satisfy their health care needs. All of this in addition to running other government programs and finding money to repair the infrastructure that is crumbling all around us. Newsflash: the money can’t be found by “taxing the rich”. Corporate taxes would need to double and even then, even if there was no capital flight to kinder tax climates, even if total tax revenue increased, it would be a temporary fix. In the United States, for example, if the income of every citizen making over $200,000 per year was confiscated, it would provide only enough revenue to run the federal government for just 193 days.”

CONTINUING ECONOMIC GROWTH—NECESSARY, BUT NOT POSSIBLE

“The only way out is continued economic growth,” said Mother Nature. “Growth at robust rates. It is only through continued economic growth that your social safety net can be maintained and your cities and bridges and physical assets can be replaced or repaired. One problem. I haven’t got enough affordably accessible natural non-renewable resources to fuel this growth. Especially when emerging economies like China and India are demanding more and more from me. Something must give. Commodity prices will skyrocket. Economic recoveries will be killed in their tracks. Conflict will ensue. Please don’t unleash a nuclear, chemical and/or biological war upon me. I have taken enough abuse already.

“Surely you can see this all coming. Surely you can see that the numbers don’t add up. I can’t continue to meet your growing demands. More efficient technology will not bail you out. Just ask Mr. Jevons. And be honest— renewable energy alternatives cannot be scaled up anywhere near the level you require. All you need is a calculator and an enema for your delusional optimism.

“But you won’t do the math. And you think your agenda trumps mine. Sorry, but didn’t you know, I own you. You are on a leash. You and your short-lived economic infidelities. Do you think I didn’t know? Do you think I didn’t notice that your mind was not on me and my needs?

I GAVE YOU SPACE AND NOW YOU NEED MORE?

“You tell me you need “space”. But I gave you a world of space, and what did you do with it? You filled it up with 7 billion people—- 5 billion of whom are determined to live like the other two billion do!

‘You tell me that universal and free access to health care, a decent pension and education is your right.

“But as Isaac Asimov observed, if you have 20 people sharing an apartment with two bathrooms, your “right” to guaranteed and timely access to a bathroom is necessarily limited. You can make all the speeches you want. You can run for the Democrats and make it a campaign platform if you like, or make “Freedom of the Bathroom” a Constitutional right, but without more bathrooms or fewer people in the apartment, that right is meaningless. As meaningless as the promise of sustainable Obamacare.

“I suggest that you seek counseling. Since I won’t provide you with the means to add more bathrooms, I suggest that you try reducing the number of people who share the apartment. Things can’t go on like this. I am calling a taxi and packing my bags. You just won’t listen, and never have. I am tired of your roving eye, your insatiable appetite and lust for more, and your lack of attentiveness. I deserve better than this—and I know that I can go it alone. You need me, but I don’t need you.

“I think you fundamentally misunderstand our relationship. You have the roles reversed. I am not your servant. I have only so much to give, and you’ve already blown half the dowry. So don’t come crying to me for more. And frankly dear, I really don’t give a damn about your “rights.”

Sincerely, Mother Nature

To The Winner: Incoming Financial Katrina/Sandy—Good Luck, You’ll Need It

To the next president of the United States, you face a living nightmare of a financial Katrina combined with Sandy. Our country stands $16 trillion in debt while we wade further into deeper waters at $1 trillion more annually. It’s a debt so deep and so wide, it can only be solved with a miracle if we expect to avoid collapse.

Our second president, John Adams said, “There are two ways to defeat a country: by the sword or by debt.”

While Obama inherited Bush’s incompetence, he passes the same debt and unemployment on to either himself or Romney. As Einstein said, “Our problems are so great that they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

On December 31, 2012, the U.S. government races toward a fiscal cliff. It must tax the rapidly vanishing Middle Class while it rages further into a majority welfare state.

Congress must raise the debt ceiling past the moon or the next president will be the first in history to default on Treasury bonds. Either way, we all face a Faustian Bargain.

Secondly, today one in seven American workers suffers unemployment. A mind numbing 47 million Americans subsist on food stamps. A full 23 percent of prime working-age men or 14 million lack full time jobs. Another 7 million work at 20 hour per week low paying jobs.

For 20 years, Congress outsourced, insourced and offshored jobs to third world countries. China, India and Bangladesh gladly employed their billions at slave wages and sold us goods that none of our factories could make as such prices. Every product we buy from China kills an American job.

While countless million of Americans lost their jobs for the past 20 years, our Congress imported 20 million green card holding immigrants and continues this practice (1 million immigrants imported annually) in 2012. No one connects the dots. No one points it out. The Main Stream Media censors any discussion of this predicament.

Thirdly, we must look at 80 million baby boomers retiring. Medicare and Social security cannot survive those numbers. Most of the boomers did not prepare themselves for retirement. The next president inherits a growing old age poverty class.

At some point, the Congress must raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits. At some juncture, Americans must take care of their health better throughout their lives, i.e., over 60 percent of them suffer obesity, which they pay a severe price in old age.

Fourth, the debt transcends anyone’s imagination. Consumer debt runs into the billions. Credit card debt runs at over $9,600.00 per credit card. Our Congress keeps borrowing $1 trillion annually. If lenders raise their interest rates, we cannot survive the consequences. We find ourselves limited to Hobson’s Choice. Not pretty on any level.

Fifth, and again, our Congress fails to deal with the China equation. Their 1.3 billion workers make mince-meat out of our measly 300 million citizens. They own $1.3 trillion of our Treasure bills. We cannot compete in “Free Trade” so we hobble toward our destiny like the “Old Woman in the Shoe.”

While we may continue our military exploits around the world, we cannot pay for endless military expenses. We must lean-up our military and must stop participating in foreign wars.

According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s output in 2017 will exceed $20 trillion. They will bury us unless we demand “Fair Trade” instead of debt-laden “Free Trade.”

Finally, while journalists and politicians eschew in-depth discussion about this subject, but it commands our attention. Christopher O. Clugston, author of Scarcity: Humanity’s Final Chapter, addresses the fact that humanity depletes the non-renewable resources on this finite planet at an ever accelerating rate of speed. We add 1 billion humans every 12 years. The USA races on course to add 100 million by 2035 and 138 million by 2050. So much so, the costs of energy, water, food and resources will continue to climb. He says, “Because the natural resource utilization behavior that enables our current “success”—our industrialized way of life—and that is essential to perpetuating our success—is simultaneously undermining our very existence. Neither our natural resource utilization behavior nor our industrial lifestyle paradigm is sustainable. This is our predicament.”

One last thought: Hurricane Katrina wrought catastrophic mayhem. Hurricane Sandy ripped up the East Coast. If we, as a species, continue cooking up the planet with our fossil fuel burning, along with accelerating overpopulation—we face Mother Nature’s growing wrath as to climate destabilization. She always bats last and could care less who cheers or who lives in her path.

Good luck to the next president. You’re going to need it if our civilization is to survive what’s coming.

Drought And Rising Temperatures Cause Rising Food Prices

When it comes to proactive action as to feeding, watering and housing America’s burgeoning population, most of America’s leaders fell asleep at the wheel and continue their slumber into 2012. Not one single, solitary senator, House member or the United States of America’s president will connect carbon footprint, overpopulation or our enormous burning of 22 million barrels of oil daily—with global climate destabilization. Globally, humans burn 84 million barrels of oil and billions of tons of coal daily.

Our carbon footprint grows beyond comprehension. It heats up the atmosphere. It acidifies our oceans. It creates an imbalance for all living creatures on Earth.

No matter how much drought, heat waves and tornadoes scorch and destroy areas around the United States; everyone stands like deer in the headlights in denial of the oncoming train. It’s fascinating to watch mass denial, collective myopic behavior and vacant leadership.

The United States is horrifically overpopulated and unsustainable

Publisher Marilyn Hempel of the Population Press, www.populationpress.org , encourages top leaders to educate Americans to what we all face in the future if we continue down our endless growth path.

In this piece, imminent environmental leader and author of Plan B, 4.0, Saving Civilization, Lester Brown speaks about our rising temperatures.

“Over the last two months, the price of corn has been climbing,” said Brown. “On July 19th, it exceeded $8 per bushel for the first time, taking the world into a new food price terrain. With heat and drought still smothering the Corn Belt, we may well see more all-time highs in coming weeks as the extent of crop damage becomes clearer. This is not the way it was supposed to be. This spring farmers planted a record 96 million acres of corn. An early spring got the crop off to a great start, leading the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to project the largest corn harvest in history.

“On June 12th, the USDA projected the U.S. harvest would hit a record 376 million tons. But the drought conditions that had initially been confined to the country’s southwest began to spread and intensify. In its next monthly report on July 11th, the USDA reduced its projection to 329 million tons of corn, down by 12 percent or 47 million tons. This was a huge drop in only one month. Yet in the end the actual decline may be closer to 30 percent, or roughly 100 million tons—double the USDA estimated drop.”

Why is this happening? Answer: the crops are being cooked in the soil via heat and no rain. Has that prompted humans to lower their fossil fuel burning? On the contrary, humans burn more and more each day as they add a 250,000 more members to the human heard and 80 million net gain annually.

“There are several reasons for the large reduction in the harvest estimate. One is record high temperatures,” said Brown. “Nationwide, the first half of this year was the hottest on record. Thousands of record daily temperature highs were set locally. In St. Louis, Missouri, which is in the southern part of the U.S. Corn Belt, in late June and early July there were 10 consecutive days with temperatures of 100–108 degrees.

“Intense heat also disrupts pollination. Corn is particularly vulnerable because of its complex pollination system. The tassel at the top of a corn plant releases pollen, which must fall on each strand of silk coming out of the ear of corn and travel to the kernel site, where fertilization occurs. If it is too hot, the silk will turn brown and dry out, leaving the pollen with no chance of reaching its destination.”

Brown continued, “What happens to the U.S. corn crop, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the global harvest, concerns the entire world. Of the big three grains—corn, wheat, and rice—the corn harvest is now by far the largest, totaling near 900 million tons compared with less than 700 million tons for wheat and 460 million tons for rice. Wheat and rice are the world’s food staples, while corn is the feedgrain for livestock and poultry.

“We are looking at a future of rising food prices driven by rising temperatures. Heat waves and droughts like that of 2012 in the United States are projected to become more frequent as the planet heats up. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a heat-trapping gas, have increased 20 percent since 1970 and are continuing to rise.”

Humanity faces growing food shortages as its numbers grow by 80 million annually and 1 billion added every 12 years

“A report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that if atmospheric CO2 climbs from the current level of 391 parts per million (ppm) to above 450 ppm, the world will face irreversible rainfall reductions in several regions,” said Brown. “The study likened the conditions that will develop to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Already the world’s drought-afflicted area has expanded from below 20 percent of total land area a half century ago to closer to 25 percent in recent years. Future food security may depend more on new energy and population policies than on any agricultural policy we can conceive.”

Brown says that we don’t know the unchartered territory that we blindly and at our own folly continue speeding toward. The human race expects to add three billion more people to the planet within 38 years, but doesn’t have a clue as to how to feed that enormous human herd. Americans need to rethink immigration, population, water, food and resources before they find themselves in the same boat as current day India, Mexico, China and Indochina. The United States needs to boldly, methodically and intelligently move toward a mandated “national stabilized population policy” in order to give future generations a chance at a reasonable life of food, resources, water and energy.

How will the United States feed, water, warm and house its own additions of 138 million people in the face of prolonged droughts? Answer: we won’t. That’s why we need to change course.

Big Mistakes Paul Ehrlich Made On Human Overpopulation

While some of the great minds in history wrestled with humanity’s ability to feed itself, the general populace doesn’t understand nor does it possess a clue as to what we face in the 21^st century.  Humans race toward adding another three billion to the current seven billion to reach 10 billion in less than 40 years.  Malthus, Darwin, Ehrlich, Heinberg, Bartlett, Alpert and other giants understood/understand humans’ ability to overpopulate their ability to feed themselves.

Even the green revolution man stated it concisely.  Norman Borlaug, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

Yet, I receive incredibly chastising letters from religious, emotional, clueless and scientifically out of touch individuals weekly about how humanity will find new energy through technology, etc.  Much of it is as mythical as the second coming of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and other great teachers of the path that have been anointed as “gods” themselves instead of what they were—simple men of the spirit.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich suffered much criticism with his Population Bomb in 1968.  He made predictions that have manifested as 18 million humans starve to death annually. Nonetheless, his detractors love to fault him. But they can’t!   Borlaug nailed it and we must deal with it.

Weekly, I participate in a very special discussion with over 100 of the top minds in the country on environment and overpopulation.  My friend, David Paxson, director of www.worldpopulationbalance.org spoke recently and he enjoyed some feedback.

David, I listened to the radio interview. I thought you did an excellent job; however I think you have some rough spots that can be improved upon.  The critic is John Taves:

1) One example is where you pointed out the mistake that Paul Ehrlich made when he predicted dire consequences in a certain time frame. I totally agree with you that that was a mistake. Ehrlich should not have made predictions. My point is that you subsequently made the exact same mistake when you said that Ehrlich’s predictions are NOW coming true. There is no need to state that they are now coming true.

2) When she said “some people say that the planet will take care of the population numbers”, I thought your answer was weak. I prefer something along these lines.

Of course the planet will limit our numbers, but that is NOT a solution, that is the problem. If we continue to create babies faster than people die of old age, nature will be forced to stop the population growth by killing people faster, and at least fast enough to keep up with how fast we create new babies. But it is worse than that. We must consume oil, for example, in order to feed our current 7 billion. If we do not burn oil, we cannot produce food fast enough to feed ourselves. You can imagine the oil reserves are stock piles of food. As that stock pile of food runs out, our numbers must decrease because we have no ability to keep 7 billion alive without digging into that pile of food.

In addition, your answer was technically wrong when you said that the planet is not limiting the growth today. This is not terribly important for the audience you were speaking to in that interview, but it is a huge problem with experts. Nature IS limiting the growth and generally always has been limiting our numbers. Populations grow exponentially, and humans have been around for a long time, thus our numbers have always been throttled by nature. There are temporary exceptions to this.

For example, when humans discovered farming techniques, we raised the limit of what can be provided for and our numbers grew to the new limits. A more recent example is what has happened in North America for the past 500 years. European diseases decimated the native population numbers and for the next 500 years improved techniques for providing for our numbers have ensured that the limits of what can be provided for have expanded faster than the population has grown. The population numbers in NA have not yet caught up to what can be provided for (notice “provided for” is not the same as “can be sustained”, which means I totally agree that we are overpopulated).

However, Ethiopia and many other countries that are suffering a replacement rate above 2, are indeed experiencing the horror of nature limiting their numbers. The limit has not been a hard cap. The numbers are increasing, but the numbers are not increasing as fast as they would if the area was well below what could be provided for. In short, deaths are occurring today because of the fact that too many births are happening today. That last sentence is the key point. We have to recognize that births above a certain rate, cause deaths, and we have to recognize that we have always been above that rate. As part of the “overpopulation education” that you are advocating, I am trying to insert the fact that we must recognize that births cause deaths.

You seemed to acknowledge this later when you spoke about the horrible conditions in many poor countries, but then you seemed to disagree with it when you cited the fact that the recent huge population growth was caused by the decrease in the death rate. There is a subtle error when demographers tell us that for much of human history the birth rate and the death rate matched each other and thus our numbers did not grow.

This statement is true, but it suggests that this was good and that somehow the birth rate magically matched the death rate. It makes much more sense to say that whenever you see a stable population and an uncontrolled birth rate, the death rate was forced to rise to match the birth rate. It is true that nature also lowers the birth rate, but it does this by totally unpleasant means. The point I am making is that we humans did not throttle our birth rate, thus nature throttled our population numbers by raising the death rate. The subtle rephrasing that I just did is very important to get the message across that we have a moral responsibility to limit our births.

3) Your answer to the man that suggested that we should all become vegetarians was too long and inefficient. You should have said something like the following: Yes, we can all become vegetarians, and drive Priuses and use CFLs, but none of that will solve the problem if we continue to create babies faster than people die of old age. So consuming less per capita is not a solution. If we recognize that we must not create babies faster than old age, it should be possible to limit our birth rate even lower such that our numbers decrease. If we can do that, there’s no reason that our population numbers should level off at some number where we are just able to sustain ourselves as long as we eat no meat. Why not maintain that lower birth rate for more time such that our numbers drop well below that level, so that there is no problem eating meat?

You sort of comprehended this when you made it clear that by going vegetarian, and Prius, and CFLs, we simply enable a larger population. But you were not terribly crisp in making the point that ultimately the birth rate is the only possible solution.

The Oregon study you quoted is a fine example of a muddy point. Ultimately that study makes no sense. You stated that the study concludes that the birth of another child is 20 times more costly than other options. That study is attempting to tell us the cost of adding another human to the world. To do that they have to make an assumption about the birth rate, which is the exact thing that the study’s information will affect. I am going to use a better definition of “birth rate” to explain this. Ask each adult right before they die how many children they created. Each person will be counted twice. Once by the mother and once by the father. This number is what I call “the average number of children”.

If the study assumes that the average number of children is above 2, the additional birth is meaningless. The population is attempting to grow to infinity, thus the cost of the additional human is infinite. It is not 20x. If the average number of children is below 2, then the additional birth is also meaningless, it won’t change the fact that the population will go to zero. In short, you cannot put a finite cost to the existence of another human. If that human’s descendants average more than 2, then the cost is infinite.

You talked about how we all need to have an overpopulation education and I totally agree. Part of that education will be new definitions. For example, the definition of birth rate that demographers use is pathetic. Births per 1000 is the demographer’s unit of measure. It does not matter what “births per X” you use. The “per x” shifts the concept to the wrong units. The concept we must get to is found in the definition I created. The definition of “average number of children” allows us to “go up stream” as you put it. The “upstream source” of all of this is how many children we average. If we average more than two, we cause our numbers to attempt to grow to infinity. Thus we have a moral obligation to NOT average more than two.

In the end, Dr. Paul Ehrlich is dead on the money and so is Malthus, Bartlett, Heinberg, Catton, Darwin and more.

Can America Survive The Cassandra Syndrome As To Population Growth?

America added 115 million people from 1965 to 2012.  Demographic experts showed 315 million people living in America in January 2012.  They expect an added 85 million by 2035 to reach 400 million.   The consequences grow irreversible and unsolvable.

As population rises, carrying capacity drops.  What is “carrying capacity?”  For a quick rendition, it means, “The amount resources on a given piece of land to allow long term sustainable human, plant and animal life.”

If animals or humans exceed ‘carrying capacity’ of any given land mass, they crash in numbers by various means, i.e., famine, war and disease.  Garrett Hardin, noted biologist called it, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”  (Source:www.GarrettHardinSociety.org)

For the 7.1 billion humans in the 21^st century and headed for 10.2 billion in 40 years, oil resources will define that capacity quotient.  Noted Geologist Walter Youngquist said, “This is going to be an interesting decade, for the perfect storm is brewing—energy, immigration and oil imports.  China grows in direct confrontation for remaining oil.  I think the USA is on a big, slippery downhill slope.  Will the thin veneer of civilization survive?” To see how fast we grow, visitwww.populationmedia.com

“Cassandra Syndrome”: The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.  The origin of the name is derived from Cassandra, who, using her prescience, foresaw the demise of Troy. No one believed her.

Youngquist continued, “Beyond oil, population is the number one problem of the 21^st century, for when oil is gone as we know and use it today—and it WILL be gone—population will still be here.”

The world uses 84 million barrels daily.  That’s 42 gallons to a drum.  By mid century, China, now placing 27,000 new cars on its highways every seven days, expects to burn 98 million barrels of oil daily—all by itself!  Oil will run out because of limited reserves in the ground. (Source: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunsteler)

Dr. Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado said, “Present population growth rate is putting our children at risk.  They will experience holes in the ozone causing serious biological effects on plants and humans.  World ocean fisheries are collapsing from endless plundering.  Two thirds of the world’s people will suffer from water shortages by 2025.  It is not possible to sustain population growth or growth in rates of consumption of resources.”

Where is the worst overpopulation problem on the planet according to Dr. Bartlett?  “It’s right here in the United States!”

Dr. Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced, by having continued population growth—at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

How many people in the United States are enough?  How far down the gopher hole do we want to dig ourselves?  At what point is enough—too much?  If we shut down the borders today with zero immigration, while enjoying our sustainable 2.03 fertility level of American women on average, we would still grow via “population momentum” by an added 40 million.

In other words, we’re painting ourselves into a perilous corner. Once the numbers manifest, our society will suffer irreversible consequences with unsolvable problems.  One visit to Los Angeles will show you they suffer toxic air, dwindling safe drinking water, gridlock to the point of insanity, water shortages, endless highways and housing development.  Consider San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Denver and all other large cities grow beyond the bounds of reason!

Sustainable growth, slow growth, managed growth, smart growth and all other kinds of growth are oxymoronic.  There is no such thing as sustainable growth.  Why? All growth exceeds carrying capacity at some point.  In other words, the bubble bursts, the dam breaks, the glass spills, the balloon pops and the red-lined engine blows up.

“Population growth is given as a cause of the problems identified, but eliminating the cause is not mentioned as a solution,” Bartlett said. “We are prescribing aspirin for cancer.”

At the current rate of growth driven by immigration, America will double its population just past mid century—from 300,000,000 to 600,000,000.  As long as the underlying cause of a problem is not dealt with, we, and our leaders, as a nation, perpetuate a falsehood which Mark Twain called ‘silent-assertion’:  “Almost all lies are acts,” he said.  “I am speaking of the lie of ‘silent-assertion’.  It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of emancipation in the North, agitators got small help from anyone.  They could not break the universal stillness that reigned from the pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society–the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent-assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which intelligent people were interested.

“The conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity (unlimited growth) or sham (unlimited immigration), never in the interest of the respectable (average citizens).  It is the most timid and shabby of all lies.  The silent-assertion is that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

Silent-assertion worked until it brought China, India and Bangladesh to their knees with sheer misery of numbers.  How do I know?  I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia and other overpopulated regions.  China, even with enforced one child per family, grows by 8 million annually. India, with 1.2 billion, adds 12 million yearly.  Bangladesh suffers 157 million people in a landmass the size of Iowa.  Do you see anyone racing to immigrate to those havens of human overload?

What I ask is, do we as a nation, want millions upon millions of added people from countries already exceeding their carrying capacity?  Legal immigration proves as dangerous as illegal.  To think otherwise will allow that silent-assertion to create another China or India in America.  Just imagine Iowa with 157 million people and all the rest of the United States with THAT kind of population density!

Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

We are no longer living in the 20^th century America with only 75 million people riding horses or trains.  We’re in the 21^stcentury with cars and jets and 315 million people added to the 7.1 billion on the planet–creating horrific environmental consequences.  Again, we had to change our ‘silent-assertion’ about slavery and we MUST change our ‘silent-assertion’ about population growth and economic growth.  If we continue steaming full speed ahead like the captain of the Titanic, our children will be on board when we hit the peak oil, global warming, ozone holes, collapsing species, air pollution and other commensurate problems related to the overpopulation “iceberg.”  Most died on the Titanic because there weren’t enough life boats.

Maybe some of us choose to maintain our ‘silent-assertion’ in the face of growing consequences, but how can any parent or grandparent be that callous to their children?

Ecology and the Pathology of Capitalism

Contrary to everything we have been taught, there is no actual United States of America. The U.S. is an occupied territory that could more accurately be described as the Corporate States of America. If the geopolitical states are united, the people are not. We are a nation divided by ideology and by social and economic class. The U.S. is not a democracy and it never was. The systems of power do not allow the voice of working people to be heard or their collective will to be acted upon.

Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies, ostensibly created to protect the public welfare, are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits, the Holy Grail of American capitalism, are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers—a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy, including voting in the absence of meaningful choice, is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multi-national corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically-trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums—among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers—not a board of directors—make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Healthcare and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community—and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

The Left – “Useful Idiots” of the Rich

The Left, including the communists have generally served as the useful idiots of international capital … The Left, whether in its Fabian, communist or New Left  varieties has been appropriated by the system it is supposedly exposing.

A self-appointed elite that Huxley called the ‘World Controllers’ and Caroll Quiqley described as ‘an international network’ has for generations been intent on establishing a ‘World State’ (Huxley) or what David Rockefeller calls a ‘World Order’ and and what President George W. Bush and others …call the ‘New World Order.’

In more common parlance it is called ‘globalization’ but it is seldom understood in its wider ramifications, as set forth here, especially by the Left, whose activists support  aspects of the same globalization process: multiculturalism, feminism, marijuana liberalization, abortion rights, open borders, and feel-good causes in the name of democracy and ‘human rights,’  the results of which are further control by the global plutocracy.

The Left, including the communists have generally served as the useful idiots of international capital … The Left, whether in its Fabian, communist or New Left  varieties has been appropriated by the system it is supposedly exposing. A post- New Left has emerged since the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, and takes the form of the so-called ‘color revolutions’ under the patronage of the Soros network, and others.

The strategy  used by the international oligarchy is the same as that more generally recognized as being a major element in Marxist doctrine; namely dialectics, the conflict of opposing forces that generates a synthesis. This dialecto method is something that Sutton realized when he was trying to understand why the oligarchy so often seems to be backing opposing ideologies, governments, and policies.

The Marxist dialecticians stated that history is engaged in a process towards world communism that would arise out of the conflict of capitalism and socialism. The oligarchs, on the other hand, apparently operate on the dialectical premise that what will result from their “controlled conflict” will be a socialist-capitalist synthesis which we might call the “World Collectivist State;”  a world order that will be Communistic in organization but run by oligarchs rather than commissars. Aaron Russo, after talking with Nick Rockefeller, alluded to this as “selling socialism as capitalism.”

Over the past few generations, the “crises scenarios” used by the oligarchs to sell or impose their plan of a World Collectivist State have included the problems of war, famine, overpopulation, disparity between the wealth of the so-called “North” and “South” , and in our present time “the war on terrorism” (perpetual conflict) and the threat of “global warming.”

In general, it can be stated that many of these problems are the direct result of the debt-finance, trade and economic system that is operated by the oligarchs. Now the oligarchs present themselves as the solvers of the problems of their own making. A global “pincer movement” of agitation from “below” (the “Left”)  and manipulation from “above” (the “oligarchs”) dialectically operates to shift the center of mass political gravity towards an acceptance of, if not support for, a World State to end the crises that have been created by our self-appointed “world saviors.”

–
This is the conclusion of “Revolution From Above” by Kerry Bolton published by Arktos.

Source:  Kerry Bolton | (henrymakow.com)

Time’s Fareed Zakaria: An Intellectually Credentialed Innumerate (Illiterate)

Several months ago, Time editor Fareed Zakaria, a transplant who fled India, told Terri Gross of National Public Radio that America will add a healthy 138 million people via immigration in the next 39 years.  He neglected to mention that his own country at 1.2 billion and headed for 1.6 billion—suffers untold human misery, poverty, environmental destruction, carbon footprint, ecological footprint, filthy rivers, toxic drinking water and a litany of problems that are irreversible and unsolvable.  I know because I have traveled through India.  There is no “Indian Dream” for nine-tenths of its population.  The squalor, filth and misery of India takes a sane person’s breath away.  And, there is no hope of conditions improving, ever.

I wrote Terri Gross with facts, figures and graphs to show that we cannot sustain another 138 million at the level of water, energy and resource usage of an average American. I invited her to interview my work and that of 35 other top PH.D. experts in the field of environment and overpopulation.  She declined.

The fact remains:  NPR and the Main Stream Media avoid, evade and suppress any discussion on America’s human overpopulation.  Men like Zakaria, are known as “innumerates” or credentialed individuals that lack the ability to perform simple math.  Dr. Albert Bartlett, www.albartlett.com,  of the University of Colorado, defines “innumeracy” as the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy.

Recently, Zakaria spouted more innumeracy when he said, “US demographics are strikingly healthy. We’ll be the only rich country to increase its population over the next 30 years.”  We are following the miserable population path already tread by India and China as the third fastest growing nation on the planet.  But not by our own hand as American women have averaged 2.03 children since 1970.   As the world adds 1 billion every 12 years on its way to adding 3 billion in 40 years, we will see growing and unending starvation, wars for resources and a line of desperate world citizens knocking on our door to enter.  They are already busting down the door on the Mexican border.  But Zakaria welcomes unlimited growth!

To which one of the most brilliant men in history said, “Unlimited population growth cannot be sustained; you cannot sustain growth in the rates of consumption of resources. No species can overrun the carrying capacity of a finite land mass. This Law cannot be repealed and is not negotiable.” Dr. Albert Bartlett

I wrote Zakaria a similar letter with facts, graphs and figures.  He did not respond, because “innumerates” cannot respond to facts or in most cases, reality.  In fact, such persons gain tremendous audiences because few want to face the facts or the future with any realistic understanding of what will happen.  It’s the proverbial Cassandra Syndrome.

Once again, others like to shoot the messenger.  I am a messenger and a very exceptional one.

One reader from Michigan wrote, “And yet if you try to inform most people of any of those alarming statistics, you are almost guaranteed a “shoot the messenger” reception. Question the growing number of food stamp and/or welfare recipients and you’re called selfish, a bigot and “not willing to share.” Mention the high rate of illiteracy and it quickly becomes a racist thing. And if one dares suggest even a slowing of the influx of immigrants, well . . . you may just get reminded that somewhere in your family history your ancestors came from somewhere else, and that maybe you should just go live in that country!  I know that more than one person has said that to me (as if the conditions were the same in 1900 as they are today — not to mention that in those pre-welfare days someone coming to America either engaged in productive work or they didn’t survive!)   Keep up the good work. There are readers like myself, that are not afraid to pass this on, despite the listener almost always letting us know they’d rather not hear about it.”

One reader told me that he is optimistic as to adding 100 million.  Sorry, optimism won’t cut it when we don’t have the water, energy, food and resources to sustain another 100 million on our ecologically devastated planet.

Therefore, once again, I offer some of the finest minds for you to ponder on what it means to keep wrecking the planet, this civilization and no critical thought as to the impact of human overpopulation.

SERIOUS REALITIES FACING OUR CIVILIZATION IN 21^ST CENTURY

“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 and land-use management is sophistic.”  Harvard scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.0 Saving Civilization said, “The world has set in motion environmental trends that are threatening civilization itself.  We are crossing environmental thresholds and violating deadlines set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock.”

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.”  David Suzuki

“Growth for the sake of yet more growth is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea. CASSE is the David fighting the Goliath of endless expansion, and we know how that one turned out.” ~ David Orr

The green revolution was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

“The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime….so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population…that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty.  We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age.  It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it.”  James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency 

“We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises – exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Over-consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”   Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer

“Upwards of two hundred species.. mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety.. are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth’s carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence.. thanks to technologies that most people, I’m afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.” Daniel Quinn - Nature - Life - People - World - Technology - Peace - Environmental

“We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.”
Daniel Quinn - Nature - World - Insanity - Greed - Problems - Environmental - Responsibility

“As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do this century, will the “civil” part of civilization survive?  As we both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid.”  Walter Youngquist, energy  

“The U.S. will set a record in the rate of rise—and fall of an empire.  Between wide open borders and fall of the dollar and growing population against a declining resource base, the US will be defeated from within. Mobs will rule the streets in the nation that is now the third largest in the world and unable to support its population except by taking resources from other countries.”  Arnold Toynbee, historian

“A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse emissions indicates we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have put to our own head.”  Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilization

“The ship is already starting to spin out of control.  We may soon lose all chance of grabbing the wheel. Humanity faces a genuinely new situation.  It is not an environmental crisis in the accepted sense. It is a crisis for the entire life-support system for our civilization and our species.”  Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will take Her Revenge for Climate Change

“At this point, it’s almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed, which it clearly does not. Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall as so many others have followed before it.  What likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age  from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.”

“We are strong and adaptable animals and can certainly make a new life on the hotter Earth, but there will only be a fraction of inhabitable land left. Soon we face the appalling question of who m can we let aboard the lifeboats?  And who must we reject?  There will be great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food available. We will need a new set of rules for limiting the population in climate oases.”  James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A final Warning

“Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken for granted planet, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. And inhospitable place.  It needs a new name, Eaarth.”  Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a life on a Tough new Planet

“If present growth trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime in the next 100 years.”  The Club of Rome 1972

“The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Thomas Malthus 1798

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or globally.”  Dr. Albert Bartlett www.albartlett.org

“All causes are lost causes without limiting human population,” Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

Utterly Strangling The Population Debate In Canada and America

“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 and land-use management is sophistic.”  Harvard scholar and biologist Dr. E.O. Wilson

For over 30 years, I have written, spoken and stood up to discuss, debate and move the human overpopulation issue forward in America.  I have run into a brick wall constructed by the Catholic Church, the immigration open border lobbies and the Congress of the United States.  It appears that any discussion in America or Canada provides our two countries with the last taboo: no discussion of population for fear of hurting someone else’s feelings.

Whose feelings?  How about the 13.4 million American children living below the poverty line? What about the 100,000 children in Somalia starving to death in the past several months and future months? How about the 18 million humans that starve to death around the planet annually this year and every year?

Why is the population equation the last taboo?  Answer: religion, culture and human denial.  I call upon the Catholic Church, the Protestant Churches, Islam, Buddha, Hindu and all other ancient religions to come to the table to get a handle on relentless human population growth that they all support. Why? Because it’s killing not only millions of human beings; it’s killing millions of fellow creatures and it’s killing our planet.

My long time Canadian friend Tim Murray brings it in this interview. He makes no bones about who is stifling, strangling and suppressing the population equation.

“I am not, by nature, a conspiracy theorist,” said Murray. “As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But when people of my ilk consistently see our interviews, op-eds, and lecture invitations abruptly cancelled with feeble excuses given—if given at all—then random events suddenly take on a pattern. If we examine it, I think only one conclusion emerges as most plausible. We have been witnessing a slow strangulation of debate about overpopulation. It represents a mass die-off of open discussion of arguably the most important topic of our time by those upon whom our society most depends. Our scientists.”

An Excuse That Just Doesn’t Add Up

“CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) was to have a booth set up at the Vancouver Convention Centre for the science fair held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science this winter,” said Murray. “But guess what. After making the arrangements and paying a fee of $2500, CAPS was told that the deal was off. They could not have a booth at the fair after all. Why? It seems that somebody got to them. Of course, alternative explanations can be entertained. AAAS explained that it is “a non-profit, non-partisan, scientific association, and unfortunately, CAPS does not align with AAAS”. Funny how they took the rent and then made the discovery that CAPS didn’t have as legitimate a right to have a booth as did other organizations less focused on education.

“In response to further inquiry, they added that “We do not provide booth space to organizations with as direct a political and lobbying intent as CAPS on issues that go beyond the interests of our multidisciplinary membership and meeting audience.” Keep in mind, this is the same AAAS whose journal “Science” published Dr. Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, an article that attracted more reprint requests than any other paper Science had ever published. Ironically, Dr. Hardin was a founder of CAPS, which AAAS now wants to exclude from its upcoming Vancouver conference.”

Once upon a time overpopulation was considered a legitimate subject for scientific research

“How times have changed,” said Murray. “In 1976, Canada’s then most prestigious and august scientific body, the Science Council of Canada, issued a report (Number 25) that concluded that the country faced a future of severe resource constraints, and that it would be prudent for us to slow the population rate down so as not to exceed 30 million people by century’s end. “Only by keeping population growth low, while at the same time implementing conservation measures on all fronts….”, would it be possible to meet future energy demands. And if we did that, they predicted, our population would “stabilize within a generation”. (p. 10, SC Report #25) They added that “annual net immigration of about 50,000 per annum would achieve that growth.” (p. 61)

“Net immigration is now more than six times that number and according to the 2007 census Canada had the fastest growing population in the G8 group, with all major parties wanting to increase the pace! By the beginning of this year, Canada stood at more than 34 million people—and still growing, as resource shortages loom. No one can say that, as far back as 1976, our top scientists did not try to warn us about the consequences. And the warnings continued.

“In May of 1991 scientists in the “Intelligence Advisory Committee” submitted a report to the Privy Council of Canada that emphasized that “Controlling population growth is crucial to addressing most environmental problems, including global warming.” Six years later, a team of 63 scientists, academics and graduate students led by Dr. Michael Healey of UBC completed a $2.4 million federally-commissioned study of the Fraser Eco-Basin that argued for the development of a Population Plan for the country, as it was apparent that many other farming regions outside Canada’s major urban centers would suffer the same ecological damage that Greater Vancouver’s burgeoning population had inflicted upon the region.”

“Their verdict was that “…population is central to the problem of sustainability. The government cannot pursue sustainability and at the same time ignore population…The federal government should adopt a population policy for Canada that is consistent with the principles of sustainability (of which) immigration is one facet.” (Executive Summary, Prospects for Sustainability, p.6)

“In all three cases then, scientists had identified rampant human population growth as very much a legitimate subject of scientific research and felt compelled to recommend curbs to that growth,” said Murray. “Their reports obviously evidenced “lobbying intent”. But now, in 2011, the zeitgeist has shifted to the point that apparently “science” must stand by in silent witness to a mugging of nature, and pretend that this “non-involvement” is something other than what is it—collusion by default. Scientists have become “silent partners in crime”. Surely Dr. Stuart Hurlbert of SDSU was correct.”

“Suppression of fact and opinion highly relevant to a topic under discussion (eg. Sustainability, population growth , effects of immigration controls) is one of the strongest, most devious , and most irresponsible forms of advocacy possible.” It seems that the editorial gatekeepers of scientific debate are even more reluctant to debate population issues than are politicians. As Professor Fred Meyerson of URI once remarked, “If we were discussing the population and growth and migration of any other species, no one would shy away from it.”

I smell a rat

My long time Canadian friend Tim Murray brings it in this interview. He makes no bones about who is stifling, strangling and suppressing the population equation.

“Here is my suspicion. I smell the odour of two smear organizations in this incident. The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and the Center for New Community (CNC), who have made a habit of vetting upcoming events and notifying the hosts that some of the invited guests are “un-American”. No doubt, the AAAS have been told that CAPs is “anti-immigrant” and “racist”. This is what has been happening all over the continent the past few years, and with increasing frequency. Here goes the pattern. Someone in our movement is invited to a convention, or to an interview or to submit an op-ed piece, and suddenly, it is cancelled—with no reason given.

“It seems that nearly everyone in my circle has had an experience like that—including me. It is like really hitting it off with someone and then, inexplicably, finding her cold upon meeting her the second time. Or being engaged and being inexplicably left at the altar. If it happens once, or even twice, you can find reasons to dismiss it. But when it becomes the norm, you know the fix is in.

“Environmentalist Frosty Wooldridge had an interview slated for the Thom Hartmann show on NPR. Then suddenly it was cancelled. Environmentalist Leah Durant had an interview scheduled on the Lou Dobbs Show, and suddenly it was cancelled. She had a regular column on Huffington Post, and then it too was suddenly cancelled. No explanation given. But guess who took her place? Carl Pope, the former Executive Director of the Sierra Club, the man who called in the SPLC to a launch a smear campaign against Sierrans who attempted to restore its policy of immigration reduction to the policy books. It seems that all media is been sanitized and cleansed of those elements who would challenge the orthodoxy of “progressive growthism”, a perverse hybrid of left-wing social policy and right-wing economics.

“Now I have learned that Madeline Weld, president of the Population Institute of Canada, was invited in late September, 2011, to speak at an event that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was organizing for October 31, to mark the occasion of the world population reaching 7 billion. The event was to last 3 hours and include a roundtable discussion. But, on October 13, Ms. Weld was advised by CIDA that the entire event had been cancelled due to “unforeseeable circumstances.”

“I have an idea what those unforeseeable circumstances might have been. I suspect that the person who invited Ms. Weld had no idea who she was. But others at CIDA did–and when they saw (too late) who had been invited to speak at the 7 billion event, they were no doubt horrified. Ms. Weld has challenged the neglect of family planning by CIDA and their flawed development model which ignores population. The powers that be figured it was best to cancel the event.”

The Tentacles of the Smear Network Have A Continental Reach

“There are Canadian groups plugged into the SPLC “Hatewatch” network too,” said Murray. “The SPLC sends out frequent bulletins advising supporters where ‘racists’ are about to speak. No sooner was the first press conference for the fledging “Canadians for Immigration Policy Reform” convened when it was under attack in a Eco-Marxist online magazine for its ‘racist’ agenda. If you think this is paranoia then perform a test. Set up a phoney lecture date by someone on the SPLC hate-list and schedule it at a local college or auditorium. Advertise it widely and then wait for the rent-a-crowd rag-bag protesters to show up with placards and blow horns to shout the phantom lecturer down. Make it a cold winter night so we can greet them with fire hoses.”

The New McCarthyism

“We talk about the Sixth Extinction, the fact that we are in the midst of human-caused species loss on a massive scale,” said Murray. “But what we don’t seem to fathom is that we are also witnessing the Seventh Extinction event—- a wave of Neo-McCarthyism that is sweeping over the land and causing a mass die-off of discussion about the consequences of runaway immigration-driven population growth in North America. People are being silenced, excluded and dropped. They are losing their columns, their radio shows and their foundation money. And the people who are doing it to them are the same kind of people who wrung their hands when told about how badly treated “the Hollywood Ten” were, or how ‘un-American’ the House on Un-American Activities was in the 50s. And the Civil Liberties Union has nothing to say about it. Hypocrites.”

It’s time to call off our unrequited love affair with the soft green-left

“What can we do about it?” asked Murray. “For starters we can refuse support or cooperation with any who work with the smear network. Stop working with Avaaz.org or Commondreams.org. Stop supporting green NGOs and left wing think tanks that repeat their lies and exclude our voice. Stop pretending that environmentalists, feminists and ‘progressives’ are friends who have lost their way, friends who share our goals but don’t yet understand our perspectives. These people are our enemies. They aim to destroy us. All of them. The McKibbens, the Monbiots, the Brunes, the Hartmans. THEY are the sectarians, not us. They are the ones who deserted the IPAT equation, not us. We have tried to work with them but they will not work with us.

“In fact, they work very hard behind the scenes against us—using their friends at Hampshire College, the SPLC, the CNC and the other smear merchants as their hit men. Their objective is not ours. They are not authentic environmentalists. They want to manage the environment to accommodate endless population growth, but we want to end population growth to accommodate the environment. There can be no fellowship between us. We must end our unrequited love for this so-called environmental ‘justice’ coalition. Wake up. This is war.”

Mother Nature Will Reveal Herself Rather Drastically

Mother Nature Reveals Her Energy Descent Action Plan…

Introduction: It seems that we are under the impression that Mother Nature will award us points for effort. If we do our best and try living less unsustainably, she will forgive us our sins and let us stay in the game because, well, surely she realizes that we are something special—and should get special treatment. But the truth is, this lady is not for turning. She is one ‘hard-ass’, a referee that cannot be swayed by our histrionics or our pleading. We have got to understand that she has her own schedule, and will not hold up the train for us.

http://candobetter.net/node/2662

We all love Mother Nature because of her beauty, flowers, animals and oceans. We revel in the wilderness. We love our outings in the mountains and by the seashore.

However, for the past 100 years, humans have bashed, cut, slashed, poisoned and destroyed the very ecological systems that gave this planet balance and equanimity.

My Canadian friend Tim Murray put it all into perspective from his cogent viewpoint:

“In the wake an announcement by Transition Towns College in Pennsylvania to hold a workshop about  an “Energy Descent Action Plan” that would outline a model for developing strong sustainable communities and strong local economies less reliant on fossil fuels, Mother Nature issued a press release today announcing her Energy Descent Action Plan, which was apparently formulated without public participation,” said Murray. “Despite her declaration that this plan is non-negotiable, she nevertheless invites all stakeholders to present their amendments and counter-proposals at the upcoming General Meeting on Earth day—if that is what makes people feel good about themselves. But she warned that  she will not be attending the meeting—- explaining that she is disinterested in our input, doesn’t give a damn about prospects for survival, and doesn’t accept our credentials as an exceptional species deserving of special consideration.

“As could be predicated, the announcement was met with incredulity and outrage. Eco-socialists complained that her plan was unnecessary, fascist and Malthusian. There was no need for energy descent because there is enough energy to go around, if only the rich were made to pay and share the wealth. Dump capitalism and this phony energy crisis would be unmasked for what it is, a capitalist plot. Monbiotists argued that the plan was scapegoating the poor for the sins of the rich, and if Canadians stopped hogging energy and learned to freeze in the dark for 5 months a year, then there would be no energy shortage.

“Feminists from Hampshire college joined in on the swarming, claiming that Mother Nature was blaming women for climate change and peak oil, and if only women were “empowered”, they wouldn’t demand so many natural non-renewable resources.  Finally, human rights advocates demanded that the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, gays, lesbians and transgendered ‘people of color’ be exempted from her austerity measures.  Apparently, however, these entreaties and demands fell on deaf ears.

“When she was told that we are trying our best to live more sustainably or rather, less unsustainably, and that we are determined to build resilient, self-sufficient communities, she appeared unmoved. Sounding like Vince Lombardi, she is reported to have said that “Either you make the cut, or you don’t. Living within your resource budget is not everything. It is the ONLY thing.”

“That statement did not go down well with identity groups. “We won’t accept these cuts!” they exclaimed. “Billions of innocent people will die…. our species may even go extinct.”

“It was at that point that, reportedly, Mother Nature shrugged her shoulders and replied, “What the hell do I care?”

“It is rumored that another wave of “Occupy” demonstrations will be planned, modeled on the one that took place on Easter Island in the 17th century, when protesters demanded an end to income disparity and debt slavery as a solution to restore old growth forests. (No mention was made of overpopulation however, because it was thought to be a red herring employed by the rich to blame the poor for their own excess, besides,  if women had been empowered, they would have chosen to give birth to fewer loggers.)

“It now appears that we are at an impasse. We have bargained in good faith. We have tried to meet Mother Nature half-way, and moderated our demands in the hope that our sacrifices would provoke reciprocal concessions. But Mother Nature doesn’t seem to understand that successful negotiations involve give-and-take. We have agreed to cut our consumption of natural capital in half and slow our use of natural resources that cannot be replenished.  But we are obviously dealing with an intractable opponent.

“Nonetheless, we must remain confident that by our resolute solidarity and determination to secure special treatment, we will convince her to give way. Either that, or thanks to human ingenuity, we will come up with alternatives. After all, we always have before, haven’t we?”

“Now repeat after me, “The People, United, Will Never be Defeated…The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated…..The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated…..etc. etc.”

As Tim Murray talks, we may want to listen to understand Mother Nature better.  If not, her wrath will be our reality.  As to Transition teams, we need to talk about overpopulation, because, in the end with 400 million people in the USA in the blink of an eye, it will be a human mob trying to find food in any way it can.  It won’t be pretty.

Is Malthus Relevant In The 21st Century?

Is Thomas Malthus relevant today?  Are his predictions of mass human starvation caused by overpopulation true?

In 1798, Malthus said, “The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

According to the World Health Organization, 18 million human beings die of starvation around the planet annually.  That delineates down to 10 million children under 12 and 8 million adults dying of hunger year in and year out.  Last week, humanity reached 7 billion on its way toward 10 billion by mid century.  Those starvation numbers will accelerate as human numbers grow past the carrying capacity of the land.

The green revolution was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

My Australian friend, Mark O’Connor, author of Overloading Australia, gives his rendition of what humanity faces.  Please Mr. O’Connor, give readers an understanding of Malthus’ brilliant work:

“There has been a view, much put about by rightwing pro-business think-tanks, that Malthus was a gloomy pessimist from whose story we should learn not to listen to “pessimists,” said O’Connor. “This view is now looking very shaky as famine stalks more and more countries. Journalistic articles are beginning to appear that use as their opening “peg” the remark that Malthus may not have been such a false prophet as we all assume.

“In fact scholars and reputable encyclopedias never did so assume — that claim was wishful thinking by those with their own reasons for wanting to believe population growth is not a problem.
“Just lately there has been much interest in the researcher Alison Bashford’s study of Malthus. She emphasizes the importance of 10 chapters that have traditionally been omitted from reprints of his 1803 Essay on the Principle of Population, and claims the missing chapters show his thinking in a new light. See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2011/3349279.htm 

“I’m not getting too excited about this argument, since the Essay, even in its traditionally abbreviated form, was (for its day) an impressive piece of work. And scholarly information is of limited value in dealing with the propagandists of the growth lobby. When they talk of Malthus, they are not interested in scholarly precision, and not fond of reading his works closely. They have two simple (and quite invalid) arguments that they use; and anyone debating with them needs equally brief refutations to these. I call their two arguments the two-card trick and the three-card trick.”

The two-card trick is a simple two-stage argument (or syllogism):

1.     Malthus is the greatest and most famous expert on the supposed dangers of population growth. He prophesied that population growth would lead to famines, which did not come true.

2.      Therefore all later warnings, no matter by how many eminent experts, that famines or other disasters due to population growth may happen, or will probably happen (or are already happening) will not come true and should be ignored.

“This is an obviously fallacious argument,” said O’Connor, “One might as well say, “Eminent seismologists have warned of tsunamis that did not occur; therefore no one should heed such warnings”.  The logical fallacy, reduced to a syllogism, is of the form:  “My horse is grey. Therefore all horses are grey.”

“Of course the cleverer growth lobbyists realize that if they present this argument as a syllogism, its logical flaw will be noted. Their skill is to disguise the logic, and make a great parade of talking about, say, the fruits of historical experience, what we can learn from the case of Malthus, etc.

“In replying to the two-card argument, I always point out the main logical error first. Then I go on to point out a second logical flaw: If in fact Malthus is simply a man who made a spectacular mistake, why are you buttering him up, representing him as pre-eminent in the field, and implying that he is more likely to be right than the modern experts you seek to discredit?  Have demographers and agricultural experts learnt nothing since his day? And have there been no improvements in our ability to gather data and to observe global patterns? Would you argue “The founders of modern medicine used to deny the heart pumped blood, so why should I believe my cardiologist?”

“We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises – exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Over-consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”   Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer

“Also, did Malthus in fact prophesy, or merely warn?” said O’Connor.  (In which case the first card is as false as the second). “And then, how specific were his predictions of human numbers exceeding food supply, and how often has what he warned about in fact occurred?  Would you refuse to believe eye-witness accounts of famines on the grounds that someone once predicted a famine or famines that didn’t occur?

“By the time I’ve run though these points, and then suggested the opposition should apologize for using this misleading argument, they tend to look “tolerably foolish”.  But note that it is important to start with the two good-as-gold logical points: that one prophet being wrong doesn’t mean all prophets are wrong, and that if Malthus was simply the false prophet they claim, he would not deserve the pre-eminence they have pretended to give him.

“But if you start instead with the last point, and defend Malthus by saying that he wasn’t necessarily prophesying and wasn’t necessarily wrong, it will sound like you are defending a weak point in your own position. They will then contest your defense of Malthus, and you will find yourself in the glue-pot, since the more you defend Malthus the more you will seem to be conceding their basic (and illogical) contention, that unless Malthus can be exonerated, no subsequent prophesy or even observation of famine should be believed. Target that absurdity first, and then mop up the minor dishonesties at leisure.

“Incidentally, the main reason Malthus’s expectation of continuing famines in the UK (as future population outstripped future food supply) did not come true, is that during and after the Napoleonic wars Britain and France emerged as pre-eminent colonial powers, and proceeded to bleed each other white of young men. They did this via a long series of land battles and sea battles, not to mention the practices of sending troops and bureaucrats to tropical colonies where they died like flies.

“Since in those days single women tended not to have babies, population growth was much reduced. As well, relations with the United States improved, so that even though the US was lost as a colony, it obligingly took off a substantial proportion of the UK’s population (including the Irish who were starving after the potato famine) as emigrants.  Further Britain happened to emerge as the dominant colonial power, and with complete control of the seas, and so could afford to import food from other countries — which to this day is the only thing that keeps its bloated population from starving.

“It was not improvements in C19th agriculture that kept up with population growth and prevented the Malthusian famines occurring; it was the combination of death in war, death from colonial diseases, and massive emigration to North America.  This unlikely combination of factors was not inevitable, and could not in Malthus’s day have been given a high probability of coming true. But don’t waste your breath explaining all this to those who don’t want to know.”

The three-card trick is a more elaborate version of the two-card. It goes like this:

1.    Thomas Malthus was the first or at least the greatest thinker to argue that population growth tends to outgrow food and resources. (Largely true).

2.     Malthus was a pessimistic false prophet who prophesied a famine the British never experienced. (Grossly unfair, as any good encyclopedia article on Malthus will show. If that was all he was, he would not be the most famous thinker on the subject, and the three-card trick would collapse at this point. In fact Malthus did not claim to know the future, and he did not so much predict a future famine as provide an intelligent account of existing famines — and of reasons they were likely to recur.)

3.     Therefore those warning of famine today are minor Malthuses, and even less worthy of respect. (Note that even if the second card was valid, the conclusion would still be clearly invalid.)

“In the debate-book on population that I am currently (late 2011) writing for Pantera Press, called Big Australia Yes/No?, my opponents are two “fellows” from the rightwing Centre for Independent Studies. Their beguilingly gentle version of the three-card trick begins: Thomas Malthus, an early 19^th century English philosopher, famously said that unchecked population growth would lead to worldwide famine and disaster. Two hundred years later, entrepreneur Dick Smith is running a similar line.”

“In a brief right of reply, my comment, which may or may not survive the editing and compression process, is that they may have been innocently misled into repeating this nonsense, but they should now distance themselves from it, and apologize. World hunger is not an issue to dismiss with such glibness.”

“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 and land-use management is sophistic.”  Harvard scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson

Part 4: The 7th Billion Human on planet Earth—Nobody ever dies of overpopulation

Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.0 Saving Civilization said, “The world has set in motion environmental trends that are threatening civilization itself.  We are crossing environmental thresholds and violating deadlines set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock.”

In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will land on this planet.  From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years at the mid century.  The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking American.  This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.

Following the recent loss of life in Haiti, Chile and China due to earthquakes or the loss of life from Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami that killed 100,000 in Sri Lanka in 2005—it reminds me of a 39 year old column by the late Dr. Garrett Hardin: “Nobody ever dies of overpopulation.” It is reprinted with permission from Science, 12 February 1971, Volume 171, Number 3971, C 1971 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (www.thesocialcontract.com ) Professor Hardin taught in the biology department of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Not mentioned, but increasing in numbers as the human race accelerates its own populations across the globe-an astounding 18 million human beings starve to death or die of starvation related diseases every year. (Source: World Health Organization)  The breakdown: eight million adults and 10 million children perish at the hands of starvation annually.  Fully 2.0 billion humans subsist on less than $2.00 per day.  That same number cannot obtain a clean glass of drinking water.

For example: India sports 1.16 billion people.  Out of that number, 10 million do not possess a toilet to use, so they squat onto the land every day.  They contaminate ground water, lakes and rivers with their human waste.  The Ganges runs in raw sewage 24/7 and its dead zone expands to over 10,000 square miles-contaminating and killing ocean life.  Result: 1,000

Indian children die of diarrhea, dysentery and other water borne diseases-DAILY. (Souce: www.populationmedia.org) Yet, Indians do not practice birth control as they add another 12  million people annually on their way to surpassing current-day China and hit 1.6 billion in 40 years.

For whatever reason, Americans as well as citizens of many countries never make the connection of overpopulation and their vulnerability-to disease, famine and Mother Nature’s rage.  Nature thrives on destruction, i.e., hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, forest fires, famines, hail,

tornadoes and epidemics.

INCREASING HUMAN NUMBERS ON EARTH CREATES GREATER SCENARIOS FOR MASS HUMAN DEATHS

For some reason, call it hubris or “false pride”; or massive ignorance or ethnocentrism-Americans cannot and do not think they would ever find themselves on the receiving end of water shortages, food scarcities or energy deficiencies.  Thus, they happily grow their numbers, by adding 3.1 million people annually, ironically, mostly through other humans fleeing overpopulation pressures worldwide.

Dr. Garret Hardin, author, Stalking the Wild Taboo, brings home our dilemma:

“Those of us who are deeply concerned about population and the environment -”eco-nuts,” we’re called, – are accused of seeing herbicides in trees, pollution in running brooks, radiation in rocks, and overpopulation everywhere. There is merit in the accusation.

“I was in Calcutta when the cyclone struck East Bengal in November 1970. Early dispatches spoke of 15,000 dead, but the estimates rapidly escalated to 2,000,000 and then dropped back to 500,000. A nice round number: it will do as well as any, for we will never know. The nameless ones who died, “unimportant” people far beyond the fringes of the social power structure,

left no trace of their existence. Pakistani parents repaired the population loss in just 40 days, and the world turned its attention to other matters.

“What killed those unfortunate people? “The cyclone,” newspapers said. But one can just as logically say that overpopulation killed them. The Gangetic Delta is barely above sea level. Every year several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms. If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place. Ecologically speaking, a delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril.

“In the web of life every event has many antecedents. Only by an arbitrary decision can we designate a single antecedent as “cause.” Our choice is biased – biased to protect our egos against the onslaught of unwelcome truths. As T.S. Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:

“Go, go, go,” said the bird, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

“Were we to identify overpopulation as the cause of a half-million deaths, we would threaten ourselves with a question to which we do not know the answer: How can we control population without recourse to repugnant measures?” said Hardin. “Fearfully we close our minds to an inventory of possibilities. Instead, we say that a cyclone caused the deaths, thus relieving ourselves of responsibility for this and future catastrophes. “Fate” is so comforting.

“Every year we list tuberculosis, leprosy, enteric diseases, or animal parasites as the “cause of death” of millions of people. It is well known that malnutrition is an important antecedent of death in all these categories; and that malnutrition is connected with overpopulation. But overpopulation is not called the cause of death. We cannot bear the thought.

“People are dying now of respiratory diseases in Tokyo, Birmingham, and Gary, because of the “need” for more industry. The “need” for more food justifies over fertilization of the land, leading to eutrophication of the waters, and lessened fish production – which leads to more “need” for food.

“What will we say when the power shuts down some fine summer on our eastern seaboard and several thousand people die of heat prostration? Will we blame the weather? Or the power companies for not building enough generators? Or the eco-nuts for insisting on pollution controls?

“One thing is certain: we won’t blame the deaths on overpopulation. No one ever dies of overpopulation. It is unthinkable.”

As Hardin said, we abhor dealing with reality.   In fact, in Joel Kotkin’s recent book, he celebrates adding 100 million people to the United States as if it amounts to a “Red Badge of Courage” in a diminishing world.  He speaks on NPR with glowing reviews from Jennifer Ludden.  He enjoys interviews in papers as he crosses the country to pitch his book.  He leads

Americans down a primrose path of  more denial, stupidity and ignorance of their predicament.

Yet, they fully embrace his message.  Should he strut his book in Bangladesh, that grows by six children a minute, with a population of 157 million people in a landmass the size of Iowa, they would toss tomatoes into his face. Change that! They would eat the tomatoes and throw sticks!

Reality has already manifested in very ugly ways for the people of Bangladesh.  They live in pure daily human misery with no way out!  They live in what Kotkin celebrates: overpopulation.

Part 3: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—1,700 people added to California daily

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will land on this planet.  From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years at the mid century.  The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking American.  This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.

The United States adds 8,490 people, net gain, every day of the year.  That equals 3.1 million annually.  That equates to 100 million added by 2035 at current immigration-driven growth rates.

Ironically, since 1970, American females enjoyed an average birth rate of 2.03 children.  The great “Zero Population Growth” message of the 60s made an impact, but, to counter it with more people, in 1965,Congress passed a sweeping mass immigration bill that remains in force today.  That bill added 100 million people to the USA within 40 years.  And, true to form, 100,000 immigrants land on American soil every 30 days without pause, 12 months a year, year in and year out, decade in and decade out.

While we grapple with accelerating environmental, bloated cities and quality of life issues, not to mention water and energy—we continue adding more and more millions of people without a clue or a plan as to what to do when we max out and exceed our carrying capacity.  In fact, we already exceed it beyond anyone’s comprehension as you will see in this series.

At the University of Colorado, Dr. Albert Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced, by having continued population growth—at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

Doesn’t anyone find it astounding if not exasperating that America’s political leaders, environmental groups, academics, scientists and citizens fail to address hyper-population growth within this country?

How about the fact that top newspapers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News as well as Time, Newsweek, Forbes and U.S. News and World Report—won’t print a single article on America’s most daunting and accelerating issue: overpopulation.

One reader said, “I know! It stuns me that the “human numbers” issue is so OFF everyone’s radar.  And yes, I feel fortunate I got my turn here on earth before the impact of all this is fully felt.”

Frighteningly, a Forbes Magazine writer, Joel Kotkin, wrote a book celebrating the addition of 100 million people.  National Public Radio’s Jennifer Ludden wrote a glowing review for the book.  A radio talk show host, Michael Medved, interviewed Kotkin with glowing praise for his seminal work.  Most scientists would say that Kotkin, Ludden and Medved need to have their heads examined for lack of common sense, rational thought and ability to work simple math.

Instead of dealing with our population dilemma, our media feeds off the death of Michael Jackson for three months.  They rode the Tiger Woods “Infidelity horse” to its knees.  They will find another ‘national trauma’ to entertain us ad nausea.

CITIES BEYOND REASON AND GROWTH BEYOND UNDERSTANDING

What’s the ONE aspect of big cities that makes anyone’s blood run cold?  What can be said that’s wonderful about cities?  Crime, rape, gangs, graffiti, traffic, toxic air and just about everyone lives in a state of tension—for starters.

The late environmentalist John Muir said, “Tell me what you will of the benefactions of city civilization, of the sweet security of streets—all as part of the natural upgrowth of man towards the high destiny we hear so much of.  I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found. If the death exhalations that brood the board towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made visible, we should flee as from a plague.  All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in all of San Francisco.”

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a few years ago that New Yorkers need to prepare for an additional two million residents—as if another two million people added to its already gross 8.5 million human ants crammed into its concrete jungles would make New York an even more delightful place to live.

All the while, monumental environmental predicaments face every city in America.  At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on climate change, the brilliant author of, Peak Everything: facing a century of declines, Richard Heinberg said, ”…the discussions in Denmark took place in a conceptual fantasy world in which climate change is the only global crisis that matters much; in which rapid economic growth is still an option; in which fossil fuels are practically limitless; in which a western middle class staring at the prospect of penury can be persuaded voluntarily to transfer a significant portion of its rapidly evaporating wealth to other nations; and in which the subject of human overpopulation can barely be mentioned... it’s no wonder more wasn’t achieved in Copenhagen.”

From our swollen eastern seaboard, let’s travel 3,000 miles across America’s heartland to the former land of milk and honey: California.  That state, at 38 million people and bursting at its demographic seams with water shortages, energy problems, toxic air and eternal gridlocked traffic—adds an extra 1,700 people daily!  With that, California adds another 400 vehicles to its already clogged roads each day.  It destroys over 250,000 acres of land turned into real estate annually.  California adds 600,000 more people annually on its way to adding 20 million more within three decades.  Can you fathom what their children will face in a blink of time?  For more information on how crazy California grows, visit www.capsweb.org with Dr. Diana Hull.

This relentless growth paradigm extends beyond anyone’s understanding.

In my world bicycle travels, having seen it up close and ugly, I must claw my positive attitude back from the abyss of depression daily.  Why?  If we allow this “Human Katrina” to manifest, no one will escape and all will ‘deal’ with their degraded conditions.

Part 2: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—Frog in the pot metaphor

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.”  David Suzuki

In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will land on this planet.  From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years at the mid century.  The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking American.  This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.

From 1964 to 2006, the United States, via mass immigration, grew from 193 million to 300 million.  It added over 100 million people in a 40 year span.  Today, America stands at 312 million people in 2011.  It adds 3.1 million people annually.  It races toward adding 100 million people by 2035—a scant 24 years from now.

In many ways, the American public cannot fathom its own critical condition as to overpopulation.  Americans charged onto the North American continent with unlimited topsoil, trees, fresh water, resources and unimaginable spaces.

If truth be told, the Native Americans kept it perfectly intact for thousands of years of ecological balance and harmony. They also kept their own numbers in equilibrium with nature.  Birds, ducks, geese, deer and buffalo numbered in the millions while clear skies and crystal clean streams offered unlimited food, shelter and clothing.

But starting in 1850, Europeans fled from potato famines, wars and diseases to stampede into America by the millions.  They brought horses, farms, locomotives, chemicals, booze, diseases, factories and the Industrial Revolution with them.  They blasted, mined, poisoned and trashed the national landscape. If you look along America’s highways, lakes, streams and farms, you will see billions of pieces of trash and dumps covering the land.  Americans individually or collectively show no responsibility for picking up after themselves.

Over the last 150 years, Americans enjoyed no end to water, energy and resources.   A sense of cultural entitlement runs through this society with the idea that all these resources available today will be there tomorrow.

A CULTURAL PARADIGM OF NO END TO PLENTY OF EVERYTHING

Four things operate in the American mind in the 21^st century: 1. Religion  promotes “Go forth multiply and take dominion over the land.” 2. Capitalism  promotes unlimited growth, production and consumption—that demands ever increasing human population expansion. 3.  No limits to water, energy and resources. 4. Technology will solve any problem.

Man! Are we in for a rude awakening or what?!  One look at one billion humans living in misery and squalor around the planet today renders a hint and harbinger as to America’s future.

Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, offers a sobering reality check to those four aforementioned myths. “In his brilliantly written Collapse, Diamond examines in fascinating historic detail why past societies succeeded or failed. He then connects these stories to troubling scenes from 21^st century in Rwanda, Australia, China and Montana—and extracts practical lessons for a world that desperately needs to redefine progress.” James R. Karr

As it stands today, Australia may be the first “First World” country that exceeds its carrying capacity.  With 96 percent of that continent covered in desert sand, it lacks water and arable soil.  A new book, Overloading Australia, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines, points out the obvious facts that Australia cannot support its current 21 million population let alone its immigration-driven projections to add 20 million by mid century.  Additionally, it suffers accelerating carbon emissions and unsustainable ecological footprint dilemmas—that can only worsen with population growth.

Another book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Dr. Joseph Tainter, illustrates how highly multifaceted civilizations fail.  If not for the 70 percent importation of oil burned in the US daily, our civilization would fall within days. Astoundingly, U.S. leaders push for population growth by pressing for more immigration.

Ironically, those immigrants flee already overloaded civilizations that expand by 78 million annually.  Startlingly, no one possesses the ability to connect the dots at the national, local or personal levels.  Societal ethnocentrism!

In “On American Sustainability—Anatomy of a societal collapse”, by Chris Clugston, “Most Americans believe that we are ‘exceptional’—both as a society and as a species.  We believe that America was ordained through divine providence to be the societal role model for the world. We believe through our superior intellect, we can harness and even conquer nature in our continuous quest to improve the material living standards associated with our ever-increasing population…we now find ourselves in a predicament. We are irreparably overextended—living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically…we are about to discover that we are another unsustainable society subject to the inescapable consequences of our unsustainable resource behavior—societal collapse.”

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS POINT AND AVOIDANCE OF REALITY? 

Dr. Jack Alpert, www.skil.org, wrote, “Think better or perform genocide”, “When you lower a frog into a pot of boiling water, it feels the heat and jumps out. When you lower a frog into a pot of cold water and then place the pot on the stove and heat it, the frog does not feel the heat, does not jump out, and boils to death.  It appears a frog gathers, processes and values, the available information well enough to save its life in the first case, but not in the second.

“Is it possible that humans think like frogs?  When immersed in our environment, we cannot appreciate our dangerous destination and cannot identify or change our behavior that would avoid it.  Consider that we are experiencing ever increasing social conflict and cannot see it.  We are experiencing ever diminishing wellbeing and cannot see it.  That our progeny will live an animalistic life near subsistence and we can’t see it.”

The question I ask: will we awaken as a civilization before Mother Nature becomes the grim reaper of the 21^st century on a scale far greater than ever experienced in history?  It will be up to the thinkers and doers at this point in time.  You are one of them if you’re reading this series.

Part 1: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—Our Perilous Future

Part 1: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—Our Perilous Future

“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 and land-use management is sophistic.”  Harvard scholar and biologist Dr.E.O. Wilson

In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will land on this planet.  From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years at the mid century.  The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking American.  This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.

In the early years of the 21^st century, the United States continues on a course toward adding another 100 million people by 2035. (Source: “US Population Projections” by Fogel/Martin, PEW Report, U.S. Census Bureau)  Beyond that, population projections show America doubling its current populace to 600 million in the latter half of this century.

With accelerating symptoms exploding across America and the world via water and food shortages, species extinction rates, energy crises, climate destabilization, ocean dead zones and more ramifications on multiple levels—we find ourselves passengers within a civilization that parallels the metaphor of the Titanic.  If you remember, on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the finest steamship of its era, on its maiden voyage, sped too fast and arrogantly through iceberg infested waters of the North Atlantic.  It hit one and sank—to become one of the greatest tragedies that didn’t have to happen in the 20^th century.

Our own grave overpopulation crisis need not manifest within the United States, either, if we change course.   Like Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic, he could have slowed down or steamed further south to avoid his fate.

The United States could also change course and avoid adding 100 million people within the next 25 years.  However, no American leaders step up to the microphone with any concern.  The passengers of our American civilization continue ‘trusting’ their leaders similarly to the passengers on the Titanic.  “Captain Smith knows what he is doing,” they said.  “Our U.S. Congress and president must know what they are doing,” citizens lament.

But like Titanic’s Captain Smith, the U.S. Congress and president of the United States—don’t know what they are doing.

This series will explain exactly what few Americans understand as well as the accelerating ramifications of adding 100 million people to the USA in 25 years. It will educate you from the finest minds in the 21^st century such as Dr. Diana Hull, Dr. Albert Bartlett, Dr. William Catton, Dr. Joseph Tainter, Richard Heinberg, Don Collins, Sally Epstein, Governor Richard D. Lamm and dozens of other leaders in the demographic field.  Hopefully, at the end of each part in the series, you will be able to take action that ‘encourages’ the Congress and president toward a sustainable future. You will be able to join website organizations that will empower you toward collective action of like-minded and well-educated citizens that care about the future of this civilization.  You might say that you’re taking action for your kids.

In all great social change, it takes a ‘consciousness shift’ of becoming aware, which then leads to a ‘critical mass shift’ of activated citizens, that ultimately moves toward ‘tipping point’ whereby a civilization moves toward a more positive future.  Examples abound with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Susan B. Anthony winning the vote and rights for women, Gandhi in India and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for bringing human rights to all people within The United States.

UNENDING POPULATION GROWTH ON A FINITE PLANET CANNOT CONTINUE

In “Matters of Conscience”, January 2010, www.centerforpublicconscience.org , by Bromwell Ault, “Ours is a world of extreme and imminent danger.  It crackles with messages of political, economic and religious conflict and, when tensions build and words fail, as they often do, violence is visited by one group upon another. If that were not enough, our planet shudders from spasms with changes in technology, population, wealth distribution and our natural environment.”

You may notice newspapers, environmental magazines like Sierra Club and National Public Radio addressing growing ‘symptoms’ brought about by overpopulation. But, you will never hear them connect the dots as to hyper-population growth.  In fact, they avoid any mention of their ‘sacred cow’ of our world filled with too many people.  Obviously, religious, political and racial ramifications enter into the passions of this issue.

In the 16^th century, men like Galileo found themselves under house arrest via the Catholic Church, because they ‘bucked’ the conventional wisdom with their research. They called him a “heretic.”   Ultimately, the Pope lost because Galileo proved that the earth revolved around the sun.  Today, if anyone speaks up against mass immigration into the United Kingdom, France, Holland, Canada or the United States—the term “racist” echoes from every quarter.

Ironically, those immigrants flee overpopulated countries where average annual death rates from starvation and related diseases exceed 18 million people. (Source: World Health Organization) Worse, third world countries add 77 million people net gain annually to our finite planet.  Thus, they form an endless line of desperate refugees.  In the end, Mother Nature doesn’t care about anyone’s race, creed or color—she’s an equal opportunity grim reaper for anyone that exceeds carrying capacity.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE AND WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The late oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau said, “We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises—exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources.  Over consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”

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