[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction

Wed Mar 11 19:04:19 MDT 2009

by Chris Hedges

Truthdig (March 08 2009)

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
eight billion and ten billion people, according to a recent UN forecast.
This is a fifty 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 (2006), 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. Most of these extinctions are the
direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other
resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African
black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue
pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation.
Population growth, as E O Wilson says, is "the monster on the land".
Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster
than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of
extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms
left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves
for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear.
Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and
entering the Eremozoic - the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is
viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by
everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market
economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland.

The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles
because they have the military and economic power to consume a
disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone
gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year.
These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as
sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the
emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia,
Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400
million people, have all tried to institute population control measures.
But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The UN
estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to
contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the
Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that
will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines.

The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local
environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness
areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and
destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation
problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that
industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and
more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may
submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture
and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet
where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have
already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and
California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places
like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data
suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population
of the United Kingdom - the number of people the country could feed,
fuel and support from its own biological capacity - is about eighteen
million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million
people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation
will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized
states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no
longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think.

A world where eight billion to ten billion people are competing for
diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations
will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a
steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources
in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be
unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made
possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine,
disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be
the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and
bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through
violence, but this is hardly a comfort.

James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent most of
his career locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that
disrupting the delicate balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a
living body, would be a form of collective suicide. The atmosphere on
Earth - 21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen - is not common among
planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained at an
equable level for life's processes, by living organisms themselves.
Oxygen and nitrogen would disappear if the biosphere was destroyed. The
result would be a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Venus, a
planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth.
Lovelock argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living
entities. They constitute, he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock,
in support of this thesis, looked at the cycle in which algae in the
oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds act as seeds
to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide "seeds" the
cooling oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is
remarkable because it maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its
destruction would not mean the death of the planet. It would not mean
the death of life-forms. But it would mean the death of Homo sapiens.

Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the latter, he
says, can be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those
in Arizona and the Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon
dioxide with large plastic cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean.
These, he says, could bring nutrient-rich lower waters to the surface,
producing an algal bloom that would increase the cloud cover. But he
warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not first control
population growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of
about seven. As the planet overheats - and he believes we can do nothing
to halt this process - overpopulation will make all efforts to save the
ecosystem futile.

Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia (2006), said that if we do not
radically and immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the human race
might not die out but it would be reduced to "a few breeding pairs". The
Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), his latest book, which has for its
subtitle "The Final Warning", paints an even grimmer picture. Lovelock
says a continued population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel
use impossible. If we do not reduce our emissions by sixty percent,
something that can be achieved only by walking away from fossil fuels,
the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running out. This reduction
will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce our
birthrate.

All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to
work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation,
in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized
nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people
struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often
overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many
environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing
the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.

_____

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090309_we_are_breeding_ourselves_to_extinction/

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/