Posted on by Robert Kyriakides

One of my regular readers who calls himself Davy Stephenson recently commented about population growth. Mr Stephenson is a gadfly who stings me from time to time into thought. He set me thinking and set me thinking as to how population growth is central to all planetary change and how the growth of human population has created many problems as well as solving problems.

In the final and infinite analysis population growth is the curse of humanity; we are so frightened of it that either we dare not speak its name or we ignore it, claiming that it matters not at all and there is plenty of room on this planet for everyone today and everyone that we may create in the future for all of time to come.

My publishing my conclusion that population growth is a curse, not just for the species with which we compete for space on this planet but also for ourselves, will offend many. Many religions preach the necessity of propagation but I have reached the conclusion that as a species we have already filled every easily habitable corner of the earth and it is time to slow down and find an equilibrium before our numbers increase to such that we will have sown the seeds of our own destruction.

When we chase something, whatever it is, selfishly and with excessive focus on the result and without regard to the consequences we do not smell the flowers that line the pathway of our journey of our pursuit, but destroy them. Living competitively destroys those with whom you compete. That is the point of competition, to win. If that opponent is other animals that compete with us, then those animals become extinct by our actions.

If we compete with the environment, instead of living with the environment, then, just as we cause extinction of species so we make part of our environment extinct. The expansion of human numbers has, in the past fifty years seen such important eco systems as the tropical rain forest and the wetlands of the Everglades shrunk in area, so that they now have cover less than half the areas they covered fifty years ago.

In our rapacious need to multiply we have destroyed these environments and many more. We have used their resources for our necessities and our pleasures. It is arguable that if we could change our environments without there being any adverse consequences, then, in order to ensure the survival of the human race and the production and improvement of our individual deoxyribonucleic acids, then that is the price worth paying.

However it does not work like that. In destroying the natural environment in copious amounts we destroy the things that have made the environment to which we have adapted over hundreds of thousands of years. Our climate, our water and our food are all affected by the destruction of environments caused by the expansion of the numbers of humanity.

In small numbers humans adapt and prosper. In large numbers humans will end up destroying those things upon which they depend for life.

Of course we are not yet at the population “tipping point” when it comes to numbers. It is possible that the infinite complexity of nature will prevent us from reaching that part of the lever which when pulled will send the human race to oblivion, as a footnote in natural history. It may be that there will inevitably be famines, new diseases, massive infertility and other unimaginable changes that will keep human numbers to a level that the planet can more or less sustain.

Perhaps the things we treat as threats, like climate change, will be our salvation by limiting and cutting back our numbers, to levels that will permit our planet to recover equilibrium. There may be in order in apparent chaos and a design of which we can not perceive.

And thus it seems to me to be that our population may outgrow our capacity to sustain it; it is not about our acting sustainably but about our planet being capable of sustaining our species. If that happens than we will have bred ourselves and our species to extinction.

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Filed under: climate change, global warming, religion | Tagged: breeding ourselves to extinction, competing with the environment, population growth, the planet sustaining humanity |