1,000 times too many people

My teacher in the fourth grade told us population growth would be the death of the world.

The world population then was about 3 billion. It would soon double. The only solution was Zero Population Growth., Sister Philomena said.

"Imagine having another student sharing you seat. That's how it will be if we don't do something about it now," Sister said.

A growth rate of 1.5 children, max, for each family was tops for controlling the population explosion. Her numbers made sense then, and have been borne out since.

Only years later did I come to understand how rebellious and revolutionary her message was, considering the times and her situation. After all, we're talking a Catholic nun at Sacred Heart Grammar School, Portland, Maine, in 1955.

Sister did not expand on how restrictions on a population growth rate of 1.5 kids per would or should be accomplished. Instead, she left it up to our nine-year-old imaginations, should we happen to think of it some future day.

If she ever did expound any theories and recommendations elsewhere, she would probably have been excommunicated by now.

I never forgot Sister Philomena's ZPG warning. When from time to time I would stopped to think about it, I could only wonder why her mathematical logic had disappeared from public debate.

Eventually, I put two and two together, and figured out the dynamic of why this issue was verboten.

I was walking along with my uncle Frank one day and was asking for his opinion about what I might do with my life when I passed 19. Center my life around a big city, New York, was best, he said.

Why? I wondered.

"Because the only things that spend money is people. Go where the people are, if you expect to make any money," he said.

Later, when I was living in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn I read another tidbit that confirmed Uncle Frank's logic, but from a different angle.

An Hasidic Jew was interviewed by a New York Times reporting covering the about neighborhood tensions between the burgenoning Hebraic cultural community and resident Irish being overwhelmed

"We'll prevail," the Man-on-the-Street confidently replied. "We've got the birth rate." And so they did.

Economically and politically more bodies is the answer to more money and power. It's easy enough to figure that one out.

Since greed and lust for power are the sole criteria for mankind, it is dead certain that society will continue to ignore the problem, for fear it might reduce the financial flow, or trim the voting base.

Now comes a study that proves up Sister Philomena's warning in spades.

It seems there are presently 1,000 times too many humans on earth than the planet can handle. Read the article and the logic of the scientists is unassailable.

"Collectively the risks reflect the complexity of biotic systems, but specifically (they) include things like the risk of extinction, starvation, and disease," [Charles] Fowler told Discovery News.

Such pathologies can be alleviated, according to the paper, but changes would have to be profound and widespread.
"It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here," Fowler explained. "It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves."

William Rees, professor of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia, disagrees that humans are abnormal and said, "I would use the term 'unusual' instead."
Rees explained that humanity has been inordinately successful. Unlike other species, humans can eat almost anything, adapt to any environment and develop technologies based on knowledge shared through written and spoken language.

Rees, however, said that we may be "fatally successful." He agrees that industrial society as presently configured is unsustainable.

"In the past 25 years we have adopted a near-universal myth of 'sustainable development' based on continuous economic growth through globalization and freer trade," Rees wrote in a recent Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society paper. "Because the assumptions hidden in the globalization myth are incompatible with biophysical reality the myth reinforces humanity's already dysfunctional ecological behavior."

Rees believes unsustainability is, in part, driven by a natural predisposition to expand, in the same way that bacteria or any other species will multiply. He claims that it is an old problem, reflected in the collapses of numerous civilizations, such as the early human population at Easter Island.

What will we do about it? Nothing. The prevailing failures of human nature, tight religions and personal greed of corporations and governments, so far as I can see.

We're just too greedy, horny and stupid to adopt a lifestyle that doesn't drive towards instant gratification and perpetuation of the status quo.