Save the Earth, Don't Give Birth

Save The Earth

Don’t Give Birth

To Ruby

My One and Only

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. How Did We Get Here?

Chapter 2. Populations

Chapter 3. Impact: Apocalypse Soon

Chapter 4. A Tricky Subject

Chapter 5. Words of Wisdom

Chapter 6. The Bounty of the Commons

Appendix

References

Preface

This book contains everything you ever wanted to know about overpopulation but were afraid to ask.

Our ever growing numbers are leading us to a potential cataclysm of epic proportions. We have to ask, ‘How did we let this happen?’ It is happening right now and we are carrying on as if everything is normal.

It is a truth universally ignored that a planet on the verge of collapse must be in want of a stable ecology. Allowing the world’s population to rocket to its current level is the biggest act of criminal negligence ever committed, by ourselves upon ourselves. We know we’re heading in the wrong direction, but we blindly follow the path towards the cliff edge.

We have faced world wars, famines and plagues and have lived to tell the tale. But the scale of the challenge today is on a different level: the climate is changing; icecaps are melting; the oceans are acidifying; forests, wildlife and ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes. We continue life in the modern world as if everything has always been like this and always will be – driving, flying and consuming. Meanwhile, we are destroying our own life-support systems.

World population has grown more since 1950 than it has since humans first appeared on Earth. We are wrecking the planet, heading towards a cataclysm and sitting back and watching it happen. The most urgent task faced by the world today is to stabilise and reduce the human population together with its rampant levels of consumption. Today’s enlightened world knows what is happening and what the consequences of the growing population means, but we have done almost nothing to stop it.

Population size is a vital factor in the world today, yet awareness and action on it is tiny. It has niggled in my mind for years, gradually making sense and then explaining so many of the disasters that the world is experiencing today. We are so used to thinking that the planet is tailored purely for human purposes, we simply don’t realise what we’re doing.

Chapter 1 How Did We Get Here?

‘The raging monster upon the land is population growth.

In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical concept.’

Edward O. Wilson

Why Does Population Matter?

We humans are young, greedy, inexperienced killer primates. We have recklessly allowed our population and consumption to rise beyond the capacity of the Earth. The rise in human population is the underlying cause of the most pressing ecological disasters of today, yet almost all action to protect the ecosystem is focused on consumption only. Every year, more species become extinct, while many of the surviving species decrease in number, both on land and in the oceans. The causes are many: habitat damage by pollution, habitat lost to farming, and deaths caused directly by hunting for food or sport. But everywhere, the underlying cause is the same: people. Addressing the population explosion will make the world a better place for us all. Solely addressing consumption creates a conflict of interest where land is needed both to feed a growing population and to protect vulnerable species. Addressing population has no conflict of interest.

Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than for the entire previous history of humanity. There are more humans alive today than ever before, with a population still increasing faster than ever before. Factor in the unprecedented overconsumption accompanying it, and we have the most dangerous problem ever faced by humankind.

We have done very little about the growing population. It is an overarching issue that is rarely discussed. Those who try to talk about it are often ignored and side-lined. Governments that are based only on votes, money and economics don’t look at the wider picture of the common good and planetary stability. Voters tend to only elect parties that promise personal gain in the form of tax cuts and public spending, rather than policies aimed at keeping our planet alive. The media usually reports on immediate, attention-grabbing stories. The bigger underlying picture is ignored, even when the future of the world itself is in question.

Population size isn’t addressed because the subject is too big and too controversial. It affects everything – biologists and naturalists must take human numbers into account; economists (and their worshippers, the politicians) should consider rising populations in all of their calculations; the world’s religions have played a major part in determining our numbers. Its consequences are both macro and micro, from the effects it has on the individual for food and shelter, to the effects on the planet. The subject is immense. Its sheer size and complexity is daunting: it is planetary in its scale and effect, and needs action on a planetary scale too.

Our planet is a tiny speck of life orbiting the Sun with a fragile life-supporting ecosystem that we are busy destroying. The intricate natural systems have been operating in perfect harmony for millions of years – until now. The champion of marine wildlife environmentalism, Captain Paul Watson wrote about worms being more important to the planet than humans and was excoriated for it. But he was right: the Earth doesn’t need humans; in fact, it would be much happier without us. But it does need worms: the Earth relies on worms to carry out the essential task of decomposing natural materials. Worms are an essential part of the ecosystem. Humans are not.

The human population is increasing and will increase for decades to come. The sooner we can slow and eventually stop this increase, the better everything will be. Population should have been addressed decades ago. If it had been, the world would be a far greater place than it is today. Human well-being and the environment would be in far better shape and climate breakdown would be less of a challenge than the crisis facing us now.

We can’t change the past, so have to make the best of the way forward. Can we wake up from our daydream and finally change the way we look at our numbers? Are there any leaders or organisations willing to raise the subject on the world stage? Our world has never faced a dilemma on this scale, and we can’t continue with business as usual. The truth about sustainability must be made a top priority, with real action taken to realise the benefits brought about by human population stabilisation.

We have developed at an exponential rate with technology and industrialisation, turbocharged by our addiction to oil, coal and gas. This has enabled us to wipe out nature and exploit resources at an extraordinary rate. Combine this with capitalism, which promotes economic growth at any price, and it is a recipe for disaster.

We know what is happening and yet we do nothing. The subject has been off the agenda for so long that the general public has no concern about our numbers and barely recognised it as an issue at all. We are cocooned in our world of consumerism and other trivial distractions. Governments and organisations across the world don’t talk about population; even environmental charities such as the WWF barely acknowledge overpopulation.

We are smart in many ways, but we’re unbelievably, astoundingly dumb in others. So smart that we can create nuclear weapons, but so dumb that we build thousands of them and threaten ourselves with annihilation. We are predatory animals at our core, not equipped to deal with global issues, and become out-of-control lunatics when provoked. We consider ourselves advanced with our cars, planes and smartphones. We have become addicted to modern life and are trapped by banks and jobs with no apparent way out. This is all at the expense of the natural world on which we depend for our existence. A century from now we will look back at our gross stupidity and wonder how we could have allowed it to happen. The solution is simple, but at the same time very difficult. We know what we need to do, but we can’t just change the system as it is. We have to adopt a new mind-set and change fundamentally.

The Human Freak of Nature

Overpopulation was recognised as far back as the 3rd century, with the Christian theologian Tertullian saying: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us... already nature does not sustain us.’

The speed with which overpopulation has happened has taken us by surprise. Modern humans appeared 200,000 years ago – a long time to us, but a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Civilisation has only been with us for 10,000 years and industrialisation for a mere 200 years. The massive impacts of the modern world, changing the climate itself, have taken place in current human lifetimes. The sudden growth in human numbers and increase in consumption have resulted in us consuming more in the past 50 years than in all of previous history. This has crept up on us slowly, but has been accelerating to a crescendo. Rather than recognise its unsustainability and try to slow it down, we have fanned the flames and encouraged it through oil and overexploitation.

We are a true freak of nature; something the world has never experienced before. The great, clever, yet lumbering, fundamentally barbaric and brutal ape has taken nature by storm and ripped it apart. We are the number one predator on land and sea and mercilessly wipe out anything that stands in our way. Our unusual abilities have allowed us to dominate and destroy as we have smashed through the usual checks and balances of nature.

We have changed the planet and we continue on our seemingly unstoppable course. Never before have we been able to see with such clarity how we arrived in the modern world. Today’s way of life is considered normal, but our perceived success is really a catalogue of errors. Our wealth and happiness is greater than ever before and still increasing, but it can’t continue for much longer. The end isn’t nigh quite yet, but it could catch us by surprise at any time.

The history of the human race is always told as a story of advance and achievement. But this is a narrow focus that doesn’t look at the natural world and what we’ve done to it. The vast majority carry on with business as usual. Individually, we are a drop in the ocean, with one person’s actions having only a tiny impact against the tidal wave. Garrett Hardin, writer of the renowned ecology article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, said there are some problems that don’t have a solution. There is no way to have a world that is both successful and overpopulated – we either have smaller numbers or we fail.

If you look from the side of everything else on the planet, then history is very different. This story is of a wild, merciless animal, storming the world, plundering everything in its path and taking no prisoners apart from the ones it intends to eat later. Our intelligence and brutality have combined to give us free reign over all of nature. Nothing has a chance against a band of spear-throwing apes. Give those billions of apes oil and bulldozers and the planet itself becomes sick.

Our history of destruction has taken place in accelerating phases. We are in the last phase of that acceleration, which will end in this century. Each phase is of equal significance, but has taken place exponentially faster than the previous phase. We are rapidly approaching the crescendo of the final phase.

The Sixth Extinction: Part 1

At the end of the last Ice Age, humans and their livestock made up less than a tenth of one per cent of the terrestrial vertebrate weight. Today, humans and their livestock make up 98.5 per cent of that weight, with many wild animals facing extinction.

There have been two phases to human-caused extinctions on the Earth. The first phase began 200,000 years ago with the arrival of modern humans with their capacity to take on and wipe out any large animal in their path – which they did.

40,000–50,000 years ago, in Australia, rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, and the horned tortoise as big as a car were all made extinct. In the Americas, sabre-tooths, eight-foot beavers, the mammoth and the mastodon were all hunted to extinction 10,000 years ago.

Madagascar was one of the last places to be reached by human beings, only 2,000 years ago, with only a few hundred people. Today, 80 per cent of Madagascar’s forests have disappeared, with deforestation still happening. 50 years ago, the human population of that country was six million. Today it is 23 million. Giant lemurs, over ten feet tall, and elephant birds – the world’s heaviest bird, weighing half a ton, with the largest egg of any bird – are now extinct. Their broken shells still litter the southern half of the island. The last bird died around 1,000 years ago; their eggs, each 60 times the size of a chicken’s egg, were a valuable source of food for humans.

Archaeologist Todd Surovell has shown how it was no coincidence that these extinctions took place just after the arrival of human beings. One of the survivors is the smallest primate in the world, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, weighing only one ounce, clinging on in a tiny reserve in the Menabe forests. As we continue with our day-to-day lives, the lives and histories of thousands of other species are vanishing.

Anthropocene – the last 200 years

We have, ominously but accurately, given an entire epoch our name: the Anthropocene – ‘The Age of Humans’. From a biological perspective, we are just another species doing what species do – trying to survive. The trouble is, we are too good at it. We have been too smart for our own good, with language, intelligence, co-operation, and an ability to switch to almost any food, hands to make tools and hand-held weapons, a throwing arm to allow us to kill animals from a distance. We are the nemesis of every other animal alive. We destroy everything in our path, including our own kind through wars and invasions.

One of our early victims was from our own species, Neanderthals. There is no record of the direct cause of their disappearance, but it is likely that they were less aggressive and didn’t work with weapons or in groups and so were out-competed. Through survival of the fittest, or survival of the slightly more intelligent, Homo sapiens became the sole dominant hominid. By 20,000 BCE, we had spread throughout Europe, into Asia. Evolution is usually a slow process, with new characteristics emerging gradually over hundreds of thousands of years. Any new beneficial trait can have a dramatic impact on a species’ success, however, and numbers can increase dramatically. This is the case with humans. The inquisitive ape with dexterous hands and an ability to use tools gave us a clear advantage over other apes, and over animals of our own species.

Easter Island: A Micro-extinction

Easter Island was settled between 700 and 1100 CE. The Polynesian name of the island is Rapa Nui (‘Big Rapa’). The name ‘Easter Island’ was given by the island’s first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday (5 April) in 1722.

There has been debate over the cause of the island’s demise, which left it barren, the curious and beautiful statues of giant heads being the only remnants of a once flourishing community. The original story of the island’s fate was that the inhabitants gradually cut down all the trees. Once they were all gone, the islanders could no longer fuel their fires or build canoes with which to fish from a boat. Trapped in a degraded environment, they fought among themselves for the last of the resources, leaving only a tiny relic of a remaining population when the Europeans arrived.

The story now thought to be more accurate is an even sadder indictment of the modern world. Easter Island’s downfall was brought about by the European visitors, over a number of decades. First they took some of the inhabitants as slaves, and brought diseases, including measles, to a community with no natural immunity, decimating the population. Returning on later visits, the islands had changed and the visitors’ records noted their degraded state without realising that they had caused the degradation themselves. Later visits and European settlement brought further deforestation of the remaining trees and the introduction of invasive species such as sheep, which destroyed the delicate soil structure, completing the ecological