CommUnity of Minds — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Imagine you own a comfortable 3000 square foot home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a big family room, and a three car garage located on over an acre of land. Your home provides very comfortable shelter for you, your spouse and your three kids.
Then your spouse’s brother loses his job. Soon he and his wife can’t make their mortgage payments, and so they move in with their two kids. Now your home is less comfortable with nine people living there, but with some creative scheduling, it is livable.
But the economy continues to worsen, more family members lose their jobs, and suddenly you have twenty people living in the house. With this four-fold increase in population, living conditions in your home have changed from being livable to being nearly intolerable.
You are reaching the limits of your home’s ability to shelter you. After all the home is finite — it is limited to 3000 square feet.
Now humanity’s home is the Earth. While the Earth is quite large, it is still finite. As in the example above, living on Earth was comfortable when the number in the human family was under one billion. Our species, Homo Sapiens, has existed for over 200,000 years on the planet. For 199,790 of those years, our population remained under one billion.
We reached 1 billion humans in 1800. By 1900, the world population was 1.5 billion. At that time, my grandfather was a young man raising his family that would eventual include 8 children. I was born in 1945, and would be one of three children. When I was a freshman in high school in 1960, the world’s population had doubled to 3 billion. Today, as I write this essay the World census is estimated to be 6.8 billion.
Humanity’s home, the Earth, is getting full. Our human population has increased over four-fold since 1900. We are reaching the limits of the planet. This is what really lies at the heart of our current world economic crisis. We are encountering Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak Soil and Peak Food as a result of overpopulation, and the political-economic policy of over-consumption in order to maximize corporate profits.
Modern humans are no longer called people, they are consumers. Remember, when George W. Bush called on the American people to: “Go out and buy something.” Peak does not mean we are out of oil, water, soil or food. It means we are reaching the Peak of possible production for these necessities of life on a global basis.
Our current system of Market Capitalism, which is based on the premise of unlimited growth, has collided with the reality of a finite planet.
Things must change. We can expect no help from Big Government, the long term for Government is the length of time before the next election, and all political decisions are based on one dollar = one vote. We can expect no help from Big Business, they are only interested in the bottom line of their Profit and Loss Balance Sheets, and they clearly own our government directing it to base every political decision on what will increase the bottom line. Remember, “What is good for business is good for the nation.”
It will be up to us ordinary humans to solve our own problems by ourselves, and despite the actions of our government and corporations.
So, what can we do?
Imagine, if every human limited themselves to having only one child, the total population could be reduced dramatically within a few generations. This is something we can do voluntarily, if we choose to. Human reproduction remains in the control of ordinary humans.
In the meantime, there are lots of very practical things that can also be done. Today’s author shares two proposals that you can begin implementing tomorrow. (06/01/12)