The Elephant in the Room: Human Population Growth

STOP Procreating. Boulder, Colorado, 2016

It doesn’t get talked about as it should due to politics and religion, but it is human population growth on our little spaceship Earth that is the big threat to our ultimate survival as a species. Oh, the planet will always go on just fine even if we do continue to breed at the current rate, but it might very well be without us.

No, we shouldn’t have authoritarian governments telling us how many kids to have. But yes, we should have world-wide moral values that tell us not to over-procreate, that tell us that human life and our Earthly ecosystem are both so precious and inter-related that we as Earth citizens should weigh very, very carefully the decision to add a new human child to the equation.

Consider this…

When I was born, in 1958, the population of the world was under 3 billion souls. Now it is well north of 7 billion.

More locally, the population of Colorado in 1958 was somewhere around 1.5 million. Now it is home to around 5.5 million (and I’m pretty sure they all travel I-70 to and from the mountains every weekend).

All this, in just my lifetime. By the time I kick the proverbial big bye-bye bucket, there may well be some 10 billion human beans milling about on this Earth looking for jobs, needing to be fed, building more houses and strip malls, wanting the latest toys, and still procreating.

Combine this with the necessity for constant growth as dictated by our current economic model and you have a formula for eventual, global, environmental disaster. Something has to give…and give it already has:

#1  Increasing acidification of the oceans, caused by excessive CO2 absorption.

#2  Rapid warming of the planet, caused by excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

#3  An accelerating 6th Great Extinction, caused by excessive human pressure on the local ecosystems, natural resources, and overall species habitat.

These are the three huge problems that are currently–yes, right now–affecting us, and they will only get worse. And yes, the planet has gone through similar changes, fluctuations, and extinctions before…but never before have these changes happened in so short a time, genetically, geologically, and politically speaking. There is zero time for the various species (including us) to adapt.

My personal feeling is that we are well past the tipping point on all three of the above counts. It is too late and I don’t see that we have the political will to react in any significant way. Barring some unusual event–huge volcanic eruptions (Yellowstone!?), an asteroid impact, major world-wide epidemic, the Second Coming, extraterrestrial invasion, et cetera–the Earth will continue to warm, the oceans will continue to become less amenable to cute little fishies and colorful coral reefs, and species will continue to disappear at an ever-increasing rate, eventually collapsing the beautifully bio-diverse house o’ cards on which we depend for our food, shelter, and toys.

I have serious doubts that anything can really be done to stop it at this point.

And maybe that’s all for the better as it would–eventually–mean a quick and drastic solution to the planet’s “human problem”. It would be a very messy process, unfortunately, and the undertakers would be all giggles and smiles, but at least a few human beans would survive here and there. (We are almost certainly as tough as the hardy cockroach, no?) And with luck, those survivors will be much wiser for the experience thus making the next chapter of the homo sapiens story a more inspiring read.

Yes indeed, you caught me in a pessimistic mood today.