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Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

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By Frosty Wooldridge

 

Book review: Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

 

Part 11: The Laws of Ecology and Human Population Growth by Captain Paul Watson

 

Almost beyond astounding if not mystifying to any rational and intelligent mind: how do we continue thinking we can get away with exponential human population growth on this finite planet?

 

(Our landscape explodes with gridlocked traffic from gridlocked cities to air polluted countries and beyond.)

 

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

 

For a quick refresher, Paul Watson created Greenpeace and commands ocean-going ships that attempt to stop whaling nations from breaking the law by harvesting endangered leviathans.

 

“The needs of the crew of any spaceship (Earth) are more important than the needs of the passengers, and we humans have been enjoying first-class service at the expense of the crew for too long,” said Captain Watson.  “We will survive only by rejecting the anthropocentric perspective in favor of a biocentric point of view, and by living in harmony with all other species. We must realize that any species, including our own, survives as part of a collective whole, in accordance with the laws of diversity, interdependence, and finite resources.”

 

Watson understands that we ride a delicate “spaceship” hurtling through the black void of space.  Some esoterics call it a “one-time” fluke in the middle of the universe.  Religions think “The Creator” ordained Earth especially for humans.  No matter what you think of Earth’s origins, it’s a tiny speck in the middle of an unfathomable universe.  Most humans take for granted an extremely complex and delicate eco-system engineered over billions of years.

 

“The living entities that crew this spaceship are millions of species working within diverse ecological niches to maintain the complex life-support system of the ship,” said Watson.  “The foundation for this life-support system is made up of the species that most human beings regard as the lowest forms: bacteria, insects, plankton, plants, invertebrates and fish.  We could call them the custodians or the working crew of Spaceship Earth.  The spaceship belongs to them, not us.  They run it.  We so-called higher life forms are merely passengers.  The custodians don’t need us, but we need them.  We humans suffer from the delusion that we own this planet.  We do not. We have not been here long, and we will not be here much longer if we continue to operate in contempt of the rules of ecology and in total disrespect of the ship’s crew.”

 

Watson spells it out rather bluntly.  When you look around you, we boast 72,000 chemicals that we inject into the land, air and oceans 24/7.  We drop our plastic feces everywhere 24/7.  We saw the 100 million ton floating plastic dung-island the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean 20 years ago only to do nothing and watch it grow ever more ominous as it obliterates the balance of life in the oceans.   We kill the pollinators without end.  We change the DNA of plants and animals without a single thought to the consequences.  We carbonize the air by burning 84 million barrels of oil daily—with no end in sight.  With all the accumulating damage, we add another 80 million of our species annually.

 

Every time we see the DOW go up on the New York Stock Exchange, you understand that Mother Nature degrades, declines and descends into environmental terror.  Every year we see another 80 million of ourselves, we see accelerating extinction rages of every other creature on this planet.  We humans drive the current “Six Extinction Session” now steam full speed ahead.  (Roughly 100 species suffer extinction 24/7; Source: Norman Myers, Oxford University)  At some point, in this devolution of life on this planet, the shit will hit the fan.

 

“The ecological reality is that no species can survive long outside the laws of ecology,” said Watson.  “A violation of these laws leads to extinction. Between the year 2000 and 2065, we will lose more species of plants and animals than the planet has lost in the preceding 65 million years.”

 

What might be called intellectual cognitive dissonance or willful denial of reality on a stupidity level beyond comprehension for anyone with a three digit IQ—we keep on truckin’ with 80 million more babies, net gain, annually to make sure the human race completely jacks up what ecology we might see left.

 

“It is hard to comprehend the enormity of the catastrophe we are creating,” said Watson.  “Especially on a spaceship where the majority of the human passengers are slaughtering the more important non-human crew because of greed, apathy, collective denial and a sense of self-designated superiority.  It is like the passengers on an ocean liner partying in luxury, while slaughtering and feeding upon the engineers, navigators and crew, only to find themselves adrift with no place to go, no way to get there and nothing to eat or drink, and wondering where the crew went as they slowly starve.”

 

Watson calls for a reality check as to birth babies. We need to reduce our worldly population drastically to fewer than 1 billion; some top-notch scientists like Dr. Jack Alpert say 100 million stands as the limit if we want to maintain our current quality of life with ample resources.

 

This chapter doesn’t mince words and you cannot escape the harsh reality of what we can expect when oil exhausts itself. Nothing can replace it, nothing.

 

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 

 

Watson wrote the most compelling chapter in this book thus far.  His brilliant metaphors of the spaceship, crew and passengers cannot be denied.  We intelligent passengers need to take action or our children automatically become self-inflected victims of our arrogance and stupidity.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muw22wTePqQ

 

Jack Alpert PhD

         http://www.skil.org               

Too Many People Video series

How Much Degrowth is Enough? “NEW”           Sept. 2012

The Human Predicament and What to Do About It      Feb. 2012

Overpopulation Means Civilization Collapse         Aug. 2011

 

 Take action by joining for free:

America: www.CapsWeb.org ; www.NumbersUSA.org ; www.Fairus.org ; www.CarryingCapacityNetwork.org

Canada:  www.immigrationwatchcanada.org

United Kingdom:  www.populationmatters.org

Australia:  www.population.org.au  Sustainable Population Australia

 

Part 11: The Laws of Ecology and Human Population Growth by Captain Paul Watson

Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

Authors: Philip Cafaro, Eileen Crist

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

ISBN: 978-0-8203-4385-3

Price: $24.95  www.amazon.com

 

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