Monday, March 09, 2009

People --- too many people

I've been an admirer of Chris Hedges for some time now. Today I came across an article of his entitled "We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction". Here's how it gets started:

All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.

We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms—an estimated 8,760 species die off per year—because, simply put, there are too many people...


Now here's what one commenter said:

Thom Hartmann has an intersting take on this subject. He says that a major part of the problem, if not the nub of the problem, is that populations grow out of control in societies where women do not have equal rights and equal standing.

Well, so there you have it. The solution.

1 comment:

  1. Thom Hartmann's not the only to think that there is a strong link between the education levels and degree of equal rights for women and population growth/women and child health. Now if we could just get governments to recognize this simple fact...

    ReplyDelete

New policy: Anonymous posts must be signed or they will be deleted. Pick a name, any name (it could be Paperclip or Doorknob), but identify yourself in some way. Thank you.