8 BILLION AND COUNTING.

 

A few years ago, I made a comment beneath a post on Facebook.  I thought it was a fairly moderate, innocuous comment that suggested people should start to think about how many children they should produce if they considered the maths, the size of our planet and how many people it could sustain in the future.  I was certainly not prepared for the online vitriol I would receive.

I had, unbeknownst to me, commented on a post that originated in the USA.  A number of women, who had produced over six offspring, told me to mind my own business and that no one could tell them how many children they could have.  What I came away from this was that, if these were the type of people reproducing with great gusto, would their offspring have the brains to consider the effect of the numbers they would themselves produce when their time came?  The attitude was very much a 'Me first, bugger the planet and the future'.

Let me be clear.  I do not advocate the culling of humans or the horrible one child, or even two, policy.  I just want people to really consider the future for their descendants.  In fact, I believe schools should teach children from a fairly young age about how much arable land is available on the planet and how many people it can feed.   We don't need a terror campaign, we just need children to be taught this, the way they are now about climate change, so that they will think of their options in future.

When I was born in 1952, the world population stood at around 2.5 billion.  In seventy years, it has almost tripled.  That is scary.  The population is growing exponentially and yet every time I hear the media and politicians ranting about greenhouse gas emissions, I boil.  We have greenhouse gas emissions because of all the fuel and production necessities required for a massive population.  Dealing with solely greenhouse gases as being the potential source of the world's demise is like hosing the top floor of a building when the ground floor is on fire.

We are at the point in history where we have to stabilize the population before there needs to be the radical, unwanted and immoral ways to enforce population control, but people will not address it.  It will be almost impossible in third world countries to educate people about population growth, but wealthy and educated countries can use education to gradually make those who won't think, do so; to inform and encourage young people to have families of sustainable size.

Even as I write this, I feel I am treading on eggshells because I am expecting another serve of the vitriol I previously received.  I have never understood why people do not use their brains.  At the age of seven, I began to think about pollution and things that affected the beautiful, green environment in which I grew up.  I have come to understand, however, that a large percentage of people simply do not give any thought to the future or anything that doesn't immediately impact them.  When I hear people say, "Oh, I never thought that could happen to me", I am appalled.  Why not?

I am not a genius, so why can't other people put their brains into gear and use them.  I can't believe mankind has progressed as far as it has technologically and scientifically while common sense has remained the least common thing on the planet.

We have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al, racing each other into space to create new frontiers.  That's because they know Earth will, very soon, be stuffed.  This beautiful, amazing planet (and, no, I have no desire to live on a colony on Mars), is being destroyed by simple lack of thought.  No one will address the elephant in the room; overpopulation.  The politicians don't dare and so they keep rabbiting on about climate change.  Climate change is Santa Claus propped up in front of the unpalatable truth of untethered population growth.

I hope there is still time.  It is absolutely extraordinary that civilization has gone on with blinkers on in this regard for decades.  Politicians only care about votes and won't deal with it.  The great man, David Attenborough, has done amazing work using the media to awaken today's youth to the problem of this Earth's survival.  He has done, however, only one show on population.  I believe that is because he knows that addressing the youth and making them think about the planet is the best way to start without creating controversy.  All power to this man, I love him and thank him from the bottom of my heart.  I only wish he'd been around sooner.

THE END.