Truthdig.com, March 09, 2009
We Are Breeding
Ourselves to Extinction
By Chris Hedges
All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our
ecosystem will be useless
if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to
reproduce at the current
rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people,
according to a recent U.N.
forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned
reviews, such
as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population.
Books and documentaries
that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss
the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that
a doubling in population,
even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all
our coal-burning power plants
and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of
extinction and desolation unseen
since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when
the dinosaurs disappeared.
We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's
life-forms-an estimated
8,760 species die off per year-because, simply put, there are
too many people. Most of
these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need
for energy, housing, food
and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray
whale, West African black
rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue
pike and dusky seaside
sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth,
as E.O. Wilson says,
is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing
at a rate of a hundred to a thousand
times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the
current rate of extinction
continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left
on the planet, its members
scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil
fuels and perhaps air until
they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic,
the age of mammals,
and entering the Eremozoic-the era of solitude. As long as the
Earth is viewed as the
personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone
from born-again
Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined
to soon inhabit a
biological wasteland.
The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles
because they have the
military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share
of the world's resources.
The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil
produced in the world each
year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates
as sufficient. It has
been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population
crisis. India,
Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child
policy has prevented
the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute
population control
measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding.
The U.N. estimates
that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception.
The population of
the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories,
will double in two
decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous
peak oil declines.
The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local
environments, cutting down
rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate
bid to grow food. And
the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create
an overpopulation
problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that
industrialized nations
consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive
to obtain. Rising water
levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such
as Bangladesh, will disrupt
agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to
areas on the planet where
life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have
already begun to destroy
crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects
of this devastation
will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread
within our borders.
Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the
sustainable population of
the United Kingdom-the number of people the country could feed,
fuel and support from its
own biological capacity-is about 18 million. This means that in
an age of extreme
scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be
able to survive.
Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of
many industrialized states
the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can
no longer be maintained.
This moment may be closer than we think.
A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for
diminishing resources will
not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done
in Iraq, turn to their
militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals
and other nonrenewable
resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will,
in the end, be unsustainable.
The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only
with cheap oil, will lead
to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction
of those on the bottom
will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the
chaos and bloodshed will be
so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence,
but this is hardly a comfort.
James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent
most of his career
locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that
disrupting the delicate
balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a living body, would
be a form of collective
suicide. The atmosphere on Earth-21 percent oxygen and 79 percent
nitrogen-is not common
among planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained
at an equable level for
life's processes, by living organisms themselves. Oxygen and nitrogen
would disappear if
the biosphere was destroyed. The result would be a greenhouse
atmosphere similar to that
of Venus, a planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter
than Earth. Lovelock
argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living
entities. They constitute,
he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock, in support of this
thesis, looked at the
cycle in which algae in the oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds.
These compounds act
as seeds to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide
"seeds" the cooling
oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is remarkable
because it
maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its destruction
would not mean the death of
the planet. It would not mean the death of life-forms. But it
would mean the death of Homo
sapiens.
Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the
latter, he says, can
be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those in
Arizona and the
Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide with large
plastic
cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean. These, he says, could
bring nutrient-rich
lower waters to the surface, producing an algal bloom that would
increase the cloud cover.
But he warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not
first control population
growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of
about seven. As the planet
overheats-and he believes we can do nothing to halt this process-overpopulation
will make
all efforts to save the ecosystem futile.
Lovelock, in "The Revenge of Gaia," said that if we
do not radically and immediately cut
greenhouse gas emissions, the human race might not die out but
it would be reduced to "a
few breeding pairs." "The Vanishing Face of Gaia,"
his latest book, which has for its
subtitle "The Final Warning," paints an even grimmer
picture. Lovelock says a continued
population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel use impossible.
If we do not reduce
our emissions by 60 percent, something that can be achieved only
by walking away from
fossil fuels, the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running
out. This reduction
will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce
our birthrate.
All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going
to work if we do not
practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times
of hardship, will create as
much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums
around the globe where
people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth
is often overlooked, or
at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists,
but it is as fundamental
to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the
polar ice caps.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from
Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign
correspondent for
The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists:
The Christian Right and
the War on America."
© 2009 TruthDig.com
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