A chilling commentary on the worlds overpopulation problems by one of the worlds leading naturalists....
Please read these excerpts and then follow the link to the whole article. Do what you can to help resolve this crisis....
Quote 1:
Fifty years ago, when the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) was founded, there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion - over twice as many - 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, roads and airfields. Where could that come from? A little 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 had had to themselves - the natural world.
Quote 2
But the impact of these extra billions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically claimed. The spread of industrialisation has changed the chemical constituents of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. The earth is warming. 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.
Quote 3
The population of the world is now growing by nearly 80 million a year. One and a half million a week. A quarter of a million a day. Ten thousand an hour. In this country (the UK) it is projected to grow by 10 million in the next 22 years. That is equivalent to ten more Birminghams (UK).
Quote 4
But, surprisingly, there are some things that the project report does not say. It doesn't state the obvious fact that it would be much easier to feed eight billion people than ten billion. Nor does it suggest that the measures to achieve such a number - such as family planning and the education and empowerment of women - should be a central part of any programme that aims to secure an adequate food supply for humanity.
Quote 5
I simply don't understand it. It is all getting too serious for such fastidious niceties. It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births - in a word, by contraception. That is the humane way, the powerful option that allows all of us to deal with the problem, if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate - the way that all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That, translated into human terms, means famine or disease or war - over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth.
http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2011/04/human-population-essay-food
This heaving planet
Published 27 April 2011
Peter D. Revers
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