Our planet and the human avalanche

By Frosty Wooldridge

In this continuing series, Marilyn Hempel, director of www.PopulationPress.org , provides readers with the most compelling writers and speakers of the 21^st century on the environment and population equation.

David Attenborough of the United Kingdom stands as preeminent in the environmental movement.  Here is what he said:

“Fifty years ago, a group of far-sighted people in this country [Great Britain] got together to warn the world of an impending disaster,” said Attenborough.  “Among them were a distinguished scientist, Sir Julian Huxley; a bird-loving painter, Peter Scott; an advertising executive, Guy Mountford; and a powerful and astonishingly effective civil servant, Max Nicholson. They were all, in addition to their individual professions, dedicated naturalists, fascinated by the natural world not just in this country but internationally. And they noticed what few others had done—that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear.

“The Arabian Oryx , which once had been widespread all over the peninsula had now been reduced to a few hundred. In Spain, there were less than a hundred imperial eagles. The Californian condor was down to about sixty. In Hawaii, a goose that had lived in flocks on the lava fields around the great volcanoes were reduced to fifty. The strange little rhinoceros that lived in the dwindling forests of Java—to about forty. Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants—both animals and plants.

“Something had to be done. And that group determined to do it. They would need scientific advice to discover the causes of these impending disasters and to devise ways of slowing them and hopefully, stopping them. They would have to raise the awareness of the threat to get the support of people everywhere; and—like all such enterprises—they would need money to take practical action. They set about raising all three. Since the problem was an international one, they based themselves, not here, but in the heart of Europe in Switzerland. And they called the organisation they created the World Wildlife Fund.

“The methods WWF used to save these endangered species were several. Some, like the Hawaiian goose and the oryx, were taken into captivity in zoos, bred up into a significant population and then taken back to their original home and released. Elsewhere, in Africa for example, great areas of unspoilt country were set aside as National Parks where the animals could be protected from poachers and encroaching human settlement. In the Galapagos Islands and in the home of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, ways were found of ensuring that local people who also had claims on the land where such animals lived, were able to benefit financially from the creatures they were protecting by attracting visitors. Eco-tourism was born.

“The world awoke to conservation. Millions—billions of dollars were raised. And now fifty years on, conservationists who have worked so hard and with such foresight can justifiably congratulate themselves on having responded magnificently to the challenge.

“Yet now, in spite of a great number of individual successes, the problem remains. True, thanks to the vigour and wisdom of conservationists, no major charismatic species has yet disappeared. Many are still trembling on the brink, but are still hanging on. But overall, today there are more problems not less, more species at risk of disappearance than ever before. Why?

“Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many—and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants have to themselves.

“The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all —the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.

“There have been prophets who have warned us of this impending disaster, of course. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. His surname – Malthus – leads some to think that he was some continental European savant, a German perhaps. But he was not. He was an Englishman, born in Guildford in Surrey in the middle of the eighteenth century. His most important book, An Essay on the Principle of Population was published over two hundred years ago in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he termed ‘misery and vice’. Today, for some reason, that prophecy seems to be largely ignored—or at any rate, disregarded. It is true that he did not foresee the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ which greatly increased the amount of food that could be produced in any given area of arable land. But that great advance only delayed things. And there may be other advances in our food producing skills that we ourselves still cannot foresee. But the fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth. There cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.

“Many people would like to deny this. They would like to believe in that oxymoron ‘sustainable growth.’ Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy’s environmental advisor forty-five years ago said something about this. ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet,’ he said,’ is either mad – or an economist.’”

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You may contact Marilyn Hempel at www.PopulationPress.org for more information and you may join her organization in order to keep yourself educated as to what humanity faces.