On 15 November 2022, Earth’s human population will pass 8 Billion, according to estimates by the United Nations. This sobering milestone should galvanise us to redouble our efforts to minimise further growth.
By Valorie M. Allen
I have found myself checking out the population counter on my website more and more often as it approaches the staggering number of 8 BILLION predicted for November 15, 2022. It is a surreal day, one that I never thought I would see, or wanted to.
Yikes, how do I feel about this? I have mixed feelings – apprehension of course, a sense of panic and dread, but then a sense of urgency and purpose takes over. This historic event makes me determined to do everything in my power to make this the last billion that is added to our small, crowded planet.
At times like this I look to some of my heroes for inspiration and the courage to continue fighting for a sustainable population agenda. One such hero had this to say:
“We can’t go on like this. We can’t push human population growth under the carpet. I would encourage every single conservation organization, every single government organization to consider the absurdity of unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources.”
This message needs to reach as many people as possible. That’s why I wrote the book, Eight Billion Reasons Population Matters. It’s my attempt to make the facts and issues accessible to a wider audience, and to ensure that the focus is on real world solutions.
Never before have so many people been so misinformed about something as important and urgent as population. After decades of dire warnings and scientific findings, it is clear that humanity must finally confront the myths and taboos that are holding us back from addressing our population crisis. My book is a bold effort to demystify the population puzzle and steer us toward a more intentional and promising future, rather than allow human nature to blindly forge a path forward that leaves no space for a healthful existence.
We are hearing a lot about climate change on the news lately, yet not a whisper about population. Do you think that this eight billion milestone will help us connect the dots?
What are some of the indicators of overpopulation?
- World population is increasing by 80 million people per year. It took 200,000 years to reach our first billion around 1800 – it took just 12 years to add our last billion. Experts tell us that a sustainable population level would be at most 3 billion, or in the range 0.5-5 billion.
- There are more human babies born each day – about 250,000 – than there are individuals left in all the great ape species.
- Humans and their farm animals now make up 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth – other mammals make up only 4%.
- Plastic is expected to outweigh all fish in the ocean by 2050 if we do not change our ways.
- As global population increases, the cost of food for everyone increases and we are increasingly at risk from pandemics, stress related illness and climate disruption.
As people learn to recognise the impacts of overpopulation, the realization sets in that the long and good fights by environmental groups and world aid groups are all for naught as every gain is soon overwhelmed by the pressures of more growth. But this must be a call to action, not despair. That’s why I prefer to focus on practical solutions and the good-news stories that set an example for others to follow.
What can world leaders do to help?
Unfortunately, many world leaders have repeatedly failed to meet their commitments for family planning made at UN conferences, and the UN has made little effort to ensure compliance. Rather than pointing out the connection between population increase and growing hunger or the “staggering backsliding across women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health” and championing efforts for more family planning, the UN has belittled population concerns and presented the 8 Billion milestone in a celebratory tone:
“Reaching a global population of eight billion is a numerical landmark, but our focus must always be on people,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “In the world we strive to build, 8 billion people means 8 billion opportunities to live dignified and fulfilled lives.”
It especially saddens me to hear the comment that “our focus must always be on people,” since it seems to me that is what our focus has exclusively been on. With this anthropocentric worldview, humans are put on a pedestal and animals and nature are reduced to nil. It is little wonder that other species are becoming extinct at such an alarming rate. In addition, I’m sure that the millions of people living in poverty wouldn’t view their lives as “dignified or fulfilled.”
Dr Natalia Kanem, the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, warns that we must not engage in “population alarmism,” as our soaring population is “not a cause for fear.” Yet, if the mounting pressures of overpopulation are not a cause for fear, what is?
Overpopulation is the driving force behind most of our critical world issues, such as poverty, climate change, water shortages, extinction of species, human trafficking, increasing pandemics, loss of our old growth forests, etc. Therefore, would it not make sense that increasing our population would only worsen these problems?
Fortunately, there are governments in numerous countries, like Thailand and Costa Rica, that implemented very humane and successful family planning programs that set an example for the world.
Since over 40% of pregnancies globally are unintended, if governments were to take appropriate measures to prevent these unplanned pregnancies, this one act alone could advance our society into a state of degrowth. The good news is that the funding required for this project would only require diverting a few months of military spending towards this far more beneficial endeavor.
The task before our leaders is to recognize the costs of inaction if they continue to ignore their responsibility regarding overpopulation, and to take effective and timely measures to achieve a sustainable population to benefit the common good. One step towards realizing this goal would be to adopt an economic system that took environmental impacts into consideration. For example, replacing the Gross Domestic Product with the Genuine Progress Indicator would emphasise what we sacrifice for the sake of growth.
What can you do to help?
If you are reading this blog, I’m sure you are wondering what you can do to make things better for the next generation. The good news is that there are a lot of ways to help.
- Start a conversation – at school, work, the dinner table, and with social media.
- Have smaller families. Did you know that having one less child will save 60 tons of CO2 emissions a year – 25 times the emissions avoided by living car-free?
- Demand a calm, fact-based dialogue around population growth from our political leaders.
- Support population and reproductive health groups.
- Since 40% of pregnancies are unintended globally, demand that your government provide access to family planning education and safe and effective contraception options.
- Read my book for many more solutions and success stories.
“Child-first family planning provides a clear human rights-based solution and path forward. It’s sustainable and equitable, and reflected in the worldwide trend towards smaller families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future.”
Clearly, living in a world of 8 billion is a wake-up call for all of us to step up and do our part to protect this jewel of a planet. So let me be the first to welcome all you readers out there in cyberspace to the zero-growth community. Together, let’s make it happen!
Valorie M. Allen is an award-winning Canadian conservationist, animal rights campaigner and author of the book Eight Billion Reasons Population Matters. Her website is www.populationinsync.net
Thank you for this article, especially the charts and recommendations. I will take it to my U3A environmental discussion group.
Unfortunately, too many people are just talking, but are not acting, and so we move from forward billion by billion, from 2.2b when I was born to today and beyond.
Margit, you see clearly in those two charts, World Population drives World C02. But UN Net Zero brainwashes the current generation, to obsess about the second while ignoring the first. To the extent of the current youthful passion for vandalising art galleries.
Sadly, Endless Growth is more in charge, than ever before. Sadly, world biodiversity and species would almost be better off, if global warming had never been discovered.
Yes, there seems to be a tendency in the current environmental movement to just focus on finding the most divisive, annoying and distracting protest tactic ever. Why not focus on spreading quality information and creating an alternative that people can aspire to, rather than just getting in the way of random people on the street or attacking innocent artifacts?
(And the rich are unaffected – no one is standing in front of private jets to prevent them from flying)
A perspective based upon ecological science of human population dynamics.
https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/human-population-activity-the-primary-factor-that-has-precipitated-a-climate-emergency-biodiversity-loss-and-environmental-pollution-on-our-watch/
First class. “There are other factors that help sustain life, but food is a root cause of the growth of all species.” Yes – including rats in big cities, and other pests on large monoculture crops.
“The conundrum: increasing food production and distribution capabilities continuously, specifically for the purpose of meeting the needs of a growing human population, has also fueled a population explosion. With each passing year, more people are being fed, yet more people are going hungry. ….. The United Nations mantra “food production must be increased annually to meet the needs of a growing population” is a widely shared and consensually validated mistake of colossal proportions. This mantra is not an expression derived from language of science. By recognizing how the mistake is generated out of the realm of the preternatural, we can replace it with a more accurate understanding of the condition of being human…..”
The last sentence of the article is a complete cop-out, lamely saying that fairer distribution could help, alongside lower birth rates. It is actually “charitable” distribution of food surpluses from factory farming to starving millions that is turning the starving millions into starving billions. But the cop-out is understandable – the rest sounds too harsh without sugaring the pill with a sweet lie. But the cliche that you have to cruel to be kind, sometimes, is not untrue.
To mark this occasion, I want to share with you a poem by 12-year-old Esther:
“Eight billion people on our planet means:
Eight billion hungry souls we need to feed,
Eight billion producers of carbon greed,
Eight billion people who need a place to live,
Eight billion educations we should try to give,
Eight billion people who must go from place to place,
Eight billion contenders for nature’s limited space,
Eight billion creators of plastic debris,
Eight billion polluters of the air and sea.
Eight billion people is just way too many,
Numbers wise humanity already has plenty.”
Esther was runner-up in Sustainable Population Australia’s competition “What does 8 Billion people mean for the planet, the environment and for you” in 100 words or less. You can read other short-listed entries here: https://population.org.au/winners-8billion-writers-competition/
Exceedingly good. No blaming, no finger pointing – we are ALL part of the problem. Thanks for posting.
THANK YOU! Now, I’ll get busy on the 5 MILLION more added to ours the highest per-capita NATION ON EARTH (3x that of China!) during just two years of the Biden administration. But a warning, my numbers will be based on U.N. data, not Census Bureau data, because the latter is always pressured to play low ball!
“Humans and their farm animals now make up 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth – other mammals make up only 4%.”
I keep reading this with small variations (sometimes it’s “vertebrates”), does anyone have the source?
A breakdown would also be interesting, e.g. how many of these are pets or sports animals.
Hi Gaia, the main data is from Bar-On et al. (2018) and it refers to terrestrial mammals. See: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
But I note that Our World In Data says Bar-On excludes pets and they added pets in, but it’s only another <1% on their chart (surprising to me if it's not more). There's an excellent chart at https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eppd95/earths_land_mammals_by_weight/ that puts pets around 4% (more than wild mammals at around 3%).
Thanks! That’s pretty insane. It actually seems hard to believe to me, I’ll have a look at how they came up with the data…
If true, it is sad beyond words.
Why don’t we focus on CAUSE, NOT SYMPTOMS, which is to ask WHY much of the human population–especially women denied the right to that which every AMERICAN WOMAN has–has no ACCESS TO FAMILY PLANNING. Consider: As babies are starving to death in Somalia, THEIR MOTHERS HAVE NO ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTIVES, as we sit here in the U.S. blathering on about methane farts!
We can talk about both. Also, not methane in this case, but biomass.
Surprise! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/15/population-8-billion-climate
Similar things on the Italian public radio the other day. Maybe the 8 billion mark really is scaring some people into speaking?
Well, last night on T.V., I watched a CBS report–with ALL THE BLAME ON CLIMATE CHANGE, and nary a mention of population–on hunger in Somalia, a heartbreaking feature that included our “getting” to see an infant girl who arrived at an aid station, one of many brought by desperate patents as drought devastates crops, who by the next evening had died, HAVING SPENT HER ENTIRE LIFE HUNGRY.
That our major media–now, with deregulation, substantively controlled by Wall Street–has removed’ population and the consequences of adding 80 million more people to the planet A YEAR from its news reporting (unless it’s a piece like a recent one in THE ATLANTIC with a “population doesn’t matter thesis), speaks to how dangerous the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, or more specifically, the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act really are, especially since similar things happened in almost every developed nation in the world, meaning we now have people who have the power to say, “No, you don’t need to know about population!”
And to those who in recent posts at this website, called those urging that family planning should be made available FOR FREE by developed nations to those in developing nations “racists,” let me ask you: Where do you stand on the NEEDLESS TRAGEDY of that little girl starving to death as countless others are being born BECAUSE THEIR MOTHERS DON’T HAVE FAMILY PLANNING OPTIONS, even when, during mega-drought, they know there is no food?
Somalia current population – 17 million. Somalia population in 1955 – 2.5 million. Somalia population forecast for 2050 – 35 million (double 2022) EVEN IF THE BIRTH RATE DROPS BELOW 2 per woman. Most of Africa is the same. Prosperity brings about falling birth rates – but not fast enough, and in any case it also brings about greater per capita consumption of natural resources. The censorship of even basic facts and figures is mindblowing. And yet a lot of prominent intellectuals complain that those in power are “Malthusian” and trying to shrink human populations for evil purposes and power-grabs. In fact the opposite is true.
Even clever people are irretrievably brainwashed, it seems.
“Prosperity brings about falling birth rates” is not a strategy, because rapid population growth destroys prosperity. The countries that succeeded didn’t rely on prosperity or education for girls, they got out and sold the idea of small families being the key to prosperity.
I am sure the book is wonderful, but there have been so many since Ehrlich’s in 1968 – and Ehrlich is still in the doghouse now, so are all the other truth-tellers. One book in 2013 by Stephen Emmott stands out from the rest. It is called “Ten Billion” and got a massive amount of publicity in the UK (some of it vitriolic, but mostly grateful) and was even turned into a stage play, and more importantly a documentary film which is free to watch on youtube. I had forgotten about it – but the title of Valorie’s book reminded me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qs_f4ZOA6E
Yet Emmott is hardly a household name, even in the UK, let alone anywhere else. I think this may be PARTLY because everyone who came across “10 Billion” immediately started to make preparations for moving out of society as it is currently structured. Emmott himself, asked by someone at a lecture at the London Science Museum what we should do, simply said “get a gun”.
This remark was not well-received by the metropolitan audience. However, I suspect a lot of more sensible people took note – or came to the same conclusion after reading the book, which is not optimistic about humanity changing its primary mindset fast enough, or at all. It is obvious that all human endeavour wants MORE punters, not less – probably this website wants more visitors, for instance, if only to prove its own worth – it is not always for financial reasons. Everything drives towards MORE, and not towards LESS. Even after MORE has clearly become TOO MANY, or TOO MUCH.
Emmott is in the stratosphere as a computer scientist. He started out with a First Class honours degree in Biological Sciences, then got a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, then became Chief Scientist at Microsoft in 2003. From 2005 to 2010, he was scientific advisor to the UK Chancellor of The Exchequer. He was named one of London’s most influential scientists, and one of the most influential people in London by the Evening Standard in 2012. His book “10 Billion” came out in 2013. It is brief and to the point, as you would expect from a computer scientist. However, Emmott is also empathetic, somewhat publicity-shy, and not completely despairing. He has been beavering away since 2003, leading the field in the creation of numerous scientific and technological advances that might assist humans to weather the coming storms. His stated aim is ‘to pioneer new computational methods, tools and technologies to enable new kinds of science and accelerate radical solutions to the unprecedented challenges and opportunities of our time.’.
The advances he has pioneered include 1) the new science of biological computation and ‘Living Software’; 2) programmable Artificial Photosynthesis as a cheap, global energy technology; 3) the world’s first predictive mechanistic model of all life on Earth (General Ecosystem Model); 4) the first mechanistic model of the Global Carbon Cycle; and 5) the development of a computational platform enabling hyper-parallelisation of the Scientific Method. All well and good – but clearly, at some point after 2003 and before 2013, he became certain that these advances had to go hand in with human population reduction. It would be interesting to hear what stages he went through, but his own journey is possibly deemed irrelevant by him to the factual situation. His research does not involve tinkering with basic human instincts – either this is not possible, or he thinks it would be disgusting like Eugenics, or both. In short, I don’t think he is one of these Transhumanists. He wants to work WITH human nature, and all its faults and glories – not play god with it.
I don’t know what Emmott thinks about activists like Extinction Rebellion. Probably he thinks everything plays a part, including more books about Overpopulation. But until any of it (including his own research) has a measurable effect on human BEHAVIOUR (as opposed to immutable human NATURE), it is probably best to head for the hills, arrange a bolthole away from a large city, and try to live off-grid and sustainably, if you are young and fit. Or – just dance the night away like the orchestra on the Titanic – I reckon a lot of people have chosen the latter option, it is also a basic instinct in humans, just as much as the instinct for survival and the instinct to defend yourself and your family (with violence if necessary).
Deforestation Brings Bat-Borne Virus Home to Roost
By Emily Anthes, Nov. 16, 2022, NY Times
In Sept. 1994, a mysterious interspecies outbreak erupted in Hendra, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. First, a pregnant mare fell ill and died. Soon, more horses were sick, spiking fevers and expelling a foamy discharge from their snouts. Two middle-aged men — a stablehand and a horse trainer who had reportedly tried to hand-feed the dying mare — developed flulike symptoms, too. Although the stablehand recovered, the trainer ultimately died, as did more than a dozen horses.
Scientists eventually traced the outbreak to a virus carried by fruit bats, also known as flying foxes. The bats shed the pathogen, which was named the Hendra virus, in their feces and saliva, spreading it to horses, which can then pass it on to humans. In the years since, there have been dozens of additional outbreaks in horses, and several more cases in humans.
A new study, based on 25 years of data from Australia, suggests that environmental changes have been driving these spillovers by radically altering the ecology of black flying foxes. Deforestation, coupled with climate-linked food shortages, has driven the bats into human-dominated habitats like farms, where food is readily available but may be of poorer quality, scientists reported in Nature on Wednesday.
In many of these new roost locations, the bats are not only in closer contact with horses but may also shed higher levels of the virus, perhaps because of nutritional stress, according to a second study conducted by many of the same researchers and published in Ecology Letters last month.
“We’re transforming the planet in this way where we’re driving animals to be really at the brink — at the edge of their capacity to cope,” said Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University and senior author of both studies. “And this is creating stresses that are also more likely to drive pathogens into human populations.”
[ . . . ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/16/health/deforestation-bats-hendra-virus.html
Someone might want to answer this: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/20/dont-panic-about-birth-baby-8-million-before-hes-65-numbers-will-be-in-reverse …
It is wrong in so many ways.
It also contains a new one that I had never heard before: the human population explosion is the fault of… white men! (And imposing the opium trade on China???)
Thanks – I am not surprised, it is by Danny Dorling. Back in 2014, Stephen Emmott mentioned Dorling (kindly) in a lecture he gave at Cambridge University (someone put it on youtube in 2020). He mentions Dorling at about 19 minutes in, praising him but hinting that he might be too optimistic as a demographer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUTGQvDQ8xE
Dorling had also written a book in 2013 called “Population 10 Billion”, in which he claimed that it was not going to be a problem, for a variety of reasons. John Gray reviewed both books together for the Guardian in 2013 – I am afraid he found Dorling’s flawed and Emmott’s convincing and indeed “indispensable”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/05/ten-billion-stephen-emmott-review
John Gray is an extremely famous philospher based at Oxford University – and is not optimistic about humanity so it is not surprising that the found Emott’s book more realistic. Wiki says that
“Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray has written that “humans … cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.” ” This is actually quite a moderate stance – because he does not claim the planet needs saving, just that we might be the architects of our own downfall as a species. The planet will go on without us or without so many of us – it might even fare better, but basically its systems are going to ignore us and our attempts to control them, Earthquakes, volcanoes, melting glaciers, weather and climate, are not within our control, though our activities can affect such things a little (earthquakes) or a lot (climate).
But… what if this is not true, and we manage to survive and destroy the planet instead?
https://thelocalreporter.press/on-ravaging-gaias-web-of-life/
Absolutely superb article, written in June 2021. The use of English is also splendid – style and language are very important in communication using words, though it no doubt remains true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but we cannot always deal in pictures.
I specially like the primary focus on pollution, mainly by various waste products. And on monetary Debt (which seems to go hand-in-hand with ecological Debt).
Again, it is just the last sentence that bothers me. I don’t agree that only a handful of the super-rich are to blame for the calamity. The article has been careful to say throughout that we all play a part, however small, in our own downfall as a species. It is important not to lose sight of this. It is too easy for committed enviromentalists to become holier-than-thou because they are living simply. We “goody goodies” are still living in a Consumer Society, unless we have retreated to a hut in the woods like Thoreau.
Thoreau himself was the opposite of sanctimonious and preachy, insisting that he could only describe his own path and other writers should describe theirs, not try to adopt his lifestyle unless it fitted them exactly. He also warned against stretching his “coat” to fit larger purposes, as all this would do was ruin his particular “coat” which was tailored to fit only certain individuals. There is no way we can all run off to live in the woods – there are hardly any left for a start, and even if they were in their original condition there are far too many of us to do this now. We have to find a way, not of stretching Thoreau’s coat, but of somehow copying elements of it into a design that helps each one of us to achieve the maximum harmony with Nature possible in our particular circumstances. And that first and foremost means avoiding blaming conspicuous and unrepentant Consumers as if fixing THEM would help. A) it won’t help and B) it wastes precious time and energy – and in the worst cases of blame-shifting enables us to relax and think there is nothing we need to do about our own lives as it is all the fault of the “rich”. We can see this happening as I write in the “Third World” attitude to the “First World”. Many grasping types in the Third World are eager to blame the First because it shifts the focus from their own Nation. Yet the advice since the 1960s or before from the First World has been “DON’T do as we did – take a different path”. Advice largely unheeded.
Just because we can do something (artificially extend life spans by
suppressing communicable diseases) doesn’t mean the benefits will
outweigh the costs in perpetuity!
It could take an extended period of time before all the true
costs become apparent and realized! That’s how we overturned
lead paint, leaded gasoline, asbestos, CFCs, DDT, Thalidomide, etc.
Few experts in population biology, related fields of science, demography and economics appear ready and willing to see what is in front of naked eyes. Too many experts have confused cause and effect and thereby vitiated the coherence of mind and clarity of vision required to sensibly interpret evidence of whatsoever could be objectively correlated with reality. As a consequence, they appear to find the ecological science of human population dynamics simultaneously unbelievable yet virtually irrefutable.
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226928770_Human_Population_Numbers_as_a_Function_of_Food_Supply,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227269417_Human_Carrying_Capacity_Is_Determined_by_Food_Availability.)
We do not have a food production problem. Food harvests are abundant; food is sufficient to feed the human community plus many more. The problem is food redistribution. Granted the fair and equitable redistribution of available food to the human community writ large would lead in all likelihood to a temporary, exacerbating increase in absolute global human population numbers; however, limiting total global food production that humans consume would in the course of space-time return Homo sapiens to balance within the natural world.
Consider biomimicry, the design and production of materials, structures, and systems that are modeled on biological entities and processes. For a moment let us assume that nature has the answers to the problems human beings have induced by relentlessly increasing the human food supply, and must now confront and overcome. By following the laws of the natural world, by changing our way to conform with nature, humans would consciously and deliberately mimic nature’s way where we find that all resources (including food to feed a growing population) are categorically limited by the size and finite resources of the planet which is our planetary home, the house humans have filled beyond its natural carrying capacity through the massive deployment of complex systems and inventive technologies.
One of the worst mistakes of the second half of the 20th Century has been and continues to be generated by the United Nations. A delusion in the form of a meme, or unquestioned cultural transmission, has been viewed as real and spread virally by misusing the imprimatur of science upon which the meme is not actually based. Large scale human organizations have held tightly to versions of the same meme prior to this time period. Most experts became captives of a satisfying false cultural transmission: humans must continuously increase food production to feed a growing population. This misperception/misconception of reality cloaks our view of the way the world really works with regard to the population dynamics of all species within the evolutionary ‘tree of life’, including Homo sapiens.
There are hallmarks that define a deluded cultural transmission. They include political convenience, economic expediency, social suitability, religious tolerance, and legalization. All seem necessary for a false meme to become culturally prescribed. Purveyors of false memes willfully ignore the questioning of ideas upon which their misinformation is based — a hallmark of science. Without the support of science we find ourselves in a festering haze of delusion.
With regard to its population dynamics, our evolving memetic species has a vital task. Substitute a scientifically founded meme for the unquestioned false one. Then the new meme would be: increases in the total production of food for human consumption lead to a global population increase of H. sapiens. We would acknowledge not only that we have a food distribution problem but also a problem derived from our tragic failure to use available ways and means to prevent unwanted births humanely.
How the human community chooses to act in response to this daunting predicament is something others more capable than I will have to address and find a way to overcome. Years ago, before the 21st century began to unfold, my spouse advised me not to communicate the ecological science of human population dynamics until I had a solution to the existential situation disclosed by the evidence. I told her then and say to all now, I do not have answers to the thorny questions or solutions to difficult problems the heretofore uncontested science raises. Please allow me to add the belief that any program of action to rein in the size of the human population by limiting the human food supply must begin by taking simultaneous steps to feed the human community as well as to save the flourishing of life (i.e., biodiversity) as we know it.
It is neither necessary nor sustainable to continue increasing food production to feed a growing human population. To the contrary, such a determination ultimately carries with it profoundly harmful consequences. In the case of H. sapiens the species eats itself out of house and home.
I appreciate all these heartfelt comments, but all lack IMMEDIACY, which is staring us right in our dying faces. Population density stress is killing us now, through all of our myriad and rapidly increasing “diseases of civilization”. Since 2018, I have been giving away the free online e-book “Stress R Us” and you may wish to take a look for some smack in your face immediacy, like the fact that 55% of American adults already have at least one serious chronic health problem requiring ongoing treatment just to survive another day. Do you “feel me”? Stress R Us
Greeley Miklashek, Retired clinical psychiatrist (42 yrs.) and stress researcher,
author of “Stress R Us” and numerous essays, including the widely read
“The Psychology of Donald J. Trump”.
https://independentscholar.academia.edu/GreeleyMiklashek
You know, I just find that kind of insulting. Immediacy? How to you achieve that, genius, when all of NOW-DEREGULATED BIG 6 MEDIA are working–since they are (under post-1987 and post-1996 DEREGULATION)–against us, and are no longer required to serve the INFORMATION NEEDS OF THE NATION OR THE WORLD and have no agenda to do other than to MAKE SURE WE CAN ACCOMPLISH NONE OF THE REFORMS THE OLIGARCHY, now allowed to own them, want?
I have roughly 35 years “immediacy” over your “immediacy,” and however ‘free’ you book, not interested.