Your February 3rd issue contained two of the best letters to any editor that I have read since moving to Bend last June. Carlos Wysling and Vanessa Schulz nailed the roots of their arguments by analyzing the big picture, something many people seem incapable of doing, especially when such an analysis results in conclusions that seem to threaten their perceived individualism or income. Mr. Wysling addressed the enormous cost of U.S. imperialism, and Ms. Schulz discussed our nation’s war on wildlife on behalf of them good ol’ cowboys and their almighty cattle.
For the past few decades, our nation has put its environmental efforts into mitigating the effects of ecologic disruption rather than confronting the ultimate foundation of those problems. This is also the pattern for modern medicine, where pushing pills to counteract the effects of body imbalances has taken precedence over eliminating the causes of those imbalances with exercise and good nutrition. We think that we can avoid societal difficulties by dealing with the edges of the big problems rather than tackling their collective tap root and taking an honest look in the mirror.
Our economy suffers and again we refuse to see the Big Picture. We need to add something like 150,000 new jobs every month just to keep pace with population growth; every single talking head has discussed how to increase job production, but none have mentioned slowing or eliminating population growth. Big Growth, like U.S. imperialism, Big Cattle and Big Pharmaceuticals, is never to be questioned because it is The American Way (now cue “America the Beautiful” or our national anthem). For example, tackling unemployment long-range by changing the tax code to penalize people for having more than two children rather than rewarding them with tax deductions is decidedly not open for discussion, nor is providing abortion assistance to poverty-stricken third-worlders. Can you imagine the big whining that the U.S. right-to-lifers and right-wing fanatics would raise if such discussions were even contemplated? Those unenlightened folk freak out when people discuss the possibility of making huge ammo clips for handguns illegal, so how do you think that they would react to any federal inducement for smaller families, or any program that would use their foreign aid tax dollars for abortions rather than ridiculously expensive weapons systems?
Decades ago, Paul Ehrlich warned us of the impending population explosion, but his argument fell out of favor as modern technology appeared to somewhat mitigate the ecological and societal effects that our expanding population was causing, at least in the U.S. But now we witness a dangerously warming planet; a Texas-sized floating mass of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean; the extinction of countless species worldwide and people in third-world countries around the planet living in clean-water-starved, resource-depleted and garbage-clogged communities. And we still refuse to see the forest for the trees (which, after all, can be turned into wood products).
Millions of Americans refuse to give up a single “right” that they think they should have, even though many of those “rights” are causing us to overrun our planet with humans and our waste products. Few seem willing to make the tiniest sacrifice in their accustomed lifestyles for a sustainable planet. Most people either ignore or deny that we live on a finite spaceship whose life-sustaining systems are being taxed by our seven billion fellow humans, or they think that someone else should solve the problems. It is an old story called “the tragedy of the commons” when myopic, individualistic and ultimately self-defeating competition destroys the entire cooperative system, and that pretty much sums up our present-day relationship with our biosphere.
We cannot create a sustainable planetary spaceship until we stop reproducing like bacteria. Mitigation of the negative effects of human population growth has probably solved about all of the ecological problems that those technological Band-Aids are capable of solving. Since unlimited growth in a finite space is mathematically impossible, should we not as a society start addressing the root problem of modern-day humanity? Or is it preferable that, like a bacteria colony that has consumed all of its agar on a petri dish, humanity’s bloom is followed by eco-catastrophe as we poison our environment, run out of essential resources like clean water and polar ice, and choke on our own plastic-wrapped shit? We are all in this together, so we’d all better stop infesting our planet with more billions of humans. The path toward sustainability of our civilization and biosphere is as logically simple, realistically complex, and improbable to attain as that.
Post Script: If you read this letter at the same pace I just did, the planet has added 727 more humans while doing so (www.ibiblio.org). Frightening!
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2011.
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What is even more frightening are the people who, believing in the supposed superiority of their own enlightenment, give themselves a pass on extermination while simultaneously condemning the rest of us pill popping, meat eating, gun toting, plastic using oafs to death.
Population control fanatics are scary, scary folks.
Hola Eddie Kinnamon,
Delighted to make your acquaintance. Such a voice of reason is all too rare.
Here’s a wonderful data point for those who are sensible enough to loathe today’s GOP’s insane attack on Planned Parenthood and sensible family planning. In 1968 two of the members of the Houston, Texas Planned Parenthood Board of Directors were…. wait for it…. George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife Barbara.
What happened to turn them against a pro-choice enlightened position on family planning? Pure amoral and venal calculation that a manipulable and dim-witted populace existed who could be mustered in their hateful millions to be tricked into giving up the civil liberties while voting insanely on the issues preached to them of the pulpits of the myopic, xenophobic fundamentalist churches across the nation. It sure didn’t hurt that this crowd that hated abortion also hated blacks, Latinos and those nasty A-rabs in their deserts.
So here we have one of America’s leading families hypocritically posing in front of the masses for electoral advantage, believing in nothing that they tell the people, but believing exquisitely in their right to aristocratic privilege no matter how dishonorably achieved.
I’m reminded of the satanic spawn of George and Barbara. In the spring of 2001 in his first months occupying the White House after his successful coup d’etat, George W. Bush was asked what the key to his success in the election was. Without hesitation the Shrub replied: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones to concentrate on”.
Some of those fools are finally waking up to the fraud the GOP has become. Hopefully more will finally see the light before malevolent men like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker can prove that we are a fully fascist police state.
Amen. Go Eddie. 1 cause of all our environmental problems. OVER POPULATION. The beautiful little planet of ours can only sustain so many hungry, greedy, wasteful blind humans and we are over subscribed by 12 to 16 times. How stupid we really are. Maybe it’s too late and we are already reaping what we deserve, a complete collapse. I just feel for all the other billions of species that suffer because of us.
Always for Gaia
Thank you Eddie, for addressing the most taboo of all subjects. And still we are required to say “Congratulations” to the people we know who are choosing to breed, despite the consequences being so abundantly clear and devastating to all.
ZPG (Zero Population Growth) was around in the 1960’s, obviously we have not learned much since then.
Luckily I don’t have any kids to dump this mess onto and with luck I’ll be dead before it really get bad (yes, I have a feeling that we are in the good times compared to what the future will bring).
Anyway with luck maybe the cockroaches will do a better job with what we leave them in a thousand years or so.
Scary, scary folks indeed.