BoatBanter.com - America galloping toward its greatest crisis in the 21st century ( Frosty Wooldridge )

On Sun, 24 May 2009 16:00:47 GMT, (-) wrote:

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3...e-21st-century

America galloping toward its greatest crisis in the 21st century
May 22

By Frosty Wooldridge

The United States gallops headlong into its greatest crisis early in the 21st
century. At current growth rates, America expects to add 100 million people by
2035—a mere 26 years from now. Ironically, you hear nothing about it! Not one
word from the main stream media! No alarm bells sounded by political leaders!

You might think that George Will, Jim Hoagland, Thomas Friedman, Ellen
Goodman, Froma Harrop and the brilliant Kathleen Parker, all incredible
national columnists would turn their mighty quills to THE greatest issue
facing America and the world in the 21st century. You would expect Brian
Williams, Katie Couric, Jim Lehrer and Charles Gibson to speak up. You would
appreciate NPR’s Robert Siegel and Liane Hanson to ramp up the discussion. How
about President Obama or any of our 50 governors? But instead, silence!

While mountains of evidence and symptoms of overpopulation erupt in TV news
reports and newspapers, the general public continues its daily nonchalance
with indolent disinterest. No matter how many water shortage reports, climate
change indicators, mass species extinctions or air pollution stories you read
about, America blissfully adds 3.2 million people annually. Another 77 million
humans add themselves, net gain, to the planet annually and 1.0 billion add to
the globe every 12 years.

The population issue accelerates at Warp 9, but it cannot be sustained.
Religious and cultural interests push it ever faster. Capitalism drives it
with gusto. Money begets power and power drives the money.

While I write many columns about our accelerating dilemma, hundreds of
articulate and totally out of touch writers blast at anyone that might write a
cogent piece on hyper-population growth. They write with passionate emotions
that overpopulation is a New World Order myth or that the ‘Illuminati” expect
to kill off half the human population or some other nonsense based on
nonsense! As of today, Mother Nature kills 18 million humans from starvation
and related diseases annually. She’s the ultimate population Nazi! Others
scream racism, but again, Mother Nature takes the cake for being the supreme
racist.

Environmental groups, like Sierra Club, try to save habitat and animals from
extinction, but they won’t address the core cause of it all: overpopulation.
Everyone has created a different dance to waltz or tango around the root
cause.

You all know Paul and Anne Ehrlich who wrote, “The Population Bomb” and
“Population Explosion”. Many say they were discounted by the Green Revolution.
But the fact is, they hit the nail on the head. Ultimately, they prove the
final reality facing America and the human race.

You cannot fool Mother Nature for long! Let’s take a look at Ehrlich’s work:

“WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE” by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Department of
Biology, Stanford University, November 6, 2008, said, “The monumental task
before us is to solve the human predicament – the combined crises of
overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems,
growing inequity, increasing hunger, toxification of the planet, declining
resources, increasing resource wars (especially over oil and gas reserves and
water), and a worsening epidemiological environment that increases the
probability of unprecedented pandemics. The basic views of the scientific
community on the predicament can be found at www.dominantanimal.org (click on
“Further Information”). Here we just outline some of what needs to be done as
a series of interrelated steps in which we hope you will exercise leadership:

One: put births on a par with deaths

“The United States has been way behind in the population area. First, as the
most overpopulated nation on Earth (because of its combination of a giant
population and high per-capita consumption), it still lacks a population
policy. Furthermore, its population is projected to increase from 304 million
to 439 million people by 2050. And, despite earlier pledges, the US in recent
years has failed to help curb population growth in poor countries. Worse yet,
the Reagan administration’s "Mexico City policy" for killing women worldwide
by suppressing access to legal abortion had only a hiatus during the Clinton
years and was reestablished by Bush II. That policy should be dropped
immediately, along with ideological restrictions imposed on government
websites dealing with reproductive health.

“Human beings have always fought against early death from accident, hunger,
and sickness, and in the past century or so have employed improved sanitation
and the use of pesticides and antibiotics to raise life expectancy. But given
the frightening potential consequences of the explosion in human numbers that
has followed reductions of the death rate, it is essential to pay equivalent
attention to reducing high birthrates as well. Programs to educate and open
job opportunities for women, and to make effective contraception universally
available, must be an integral part of development policies in poor countries.
Placing women in important cabinet posts in a new U.S. administration should
have high priority and would send a strong signal in support of women’s
empowerment (even in developed nations, prejudice against women is
widespread).

“Public support of prudent population policies needs to be encouraged
everywhere. The United States must play a crucial role in supporting such
policies, providing both moral and financial support. The goal must be to halt
population increase as soon as humanely possible, and then reduce human
numbers until births and deaths balance at a population size that can be
maintained with desired lifestyles without irreparable damage to our natural
life-support systems. And, of course, a global discussion over the next
several decades will be required to reach a consensus on those lifestyles and
thus on the appropriate maximum population size – which we already know must
be smaller than the present 6.7 billion. Fortunately, the target can be
tentative, since (if we're lucky) it may well be a half century or more before
a worldwide decline can begin, so there will be decades to consider and
evaluate the best level at which to stabilize our numbers. This leads us to
point two.

Two: emphasize conserving more than consuming

“At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between the numbers of
people in a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be
sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share
of the pie must be. One way of dealing with this unavoidable trade-off would
be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more
appreciation and better stewardship of Earth’s aesthetic assets. That step, if
it were combined with a decline in population size, careful husbandry of
manufactured and natural capital (our ecological assets), and a crash program
to abandon the use of fossil fuels and transition to sustainable energy
technologies, would eventually permit most people to live satisfactory lives.
Of course, it would require abandoning the irrational idea that constant
growth in consumption is automatically good and can continue forever. That
malignant notion is still alive and well, as demonstrated by the 2008 rush to
bail out the sleazy de-regulated financial industry in the United States, and
even to further subsidize our nation's staggering, incompetent automobile
industry, in order to perpetuate economic growth among the rich.

“It is clear that most politicians and most citizens do not recognize that
returning to “more of the same” is a recipe for promoting the first collapse
of a global civilization. The required changes in energy technology, which
would benefit not only the environment but also national security, public
health, and the economy, would demand a World War II type mobilization -- and
even that might not prevent a global climate disaster. Without transitioning
away from use of fossil fuels, humanity will move further into an era of
resource wars (remember, Africom has been added to the Pentagon’s structure --
and China has noticed), clearly with intent to protect US “interests” in
petroleum reserves. The consequences of more resource wars, many likely
triggered over water supplies stressed by climate disruption, are likely to
include increased unrest in poor nations, a proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, widening inequity within and between nations, and in the worst
(and not unlikely) case, a nuclear war ending civilization.

Three: judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to
people and their life-support systems

“A novel synthetic chemical added to the plastic in a sports bottle may
increase its durability, but if it leaches into a baby bottle’s contents or
into the environment and functions in tiny doses as an endocrine-disrupting
agent, is the risk worth the benefit? In general, benefit-cost analyses are
not done frequently or carefully enough before the introduction of new
technologies. Freons (chlorofluorocarbons) looked extremely beneficial as
refrigerants until it was discovered they could destroy the ozone layer and
with it all life on land. Risk cannot be avoided completely. But a cultural
change toward more careful analyses and deployment only of technologies that
carry very clear benefits will help humanity keep the odds in its favor. It
should not always rate consumption as trumping safety – especially when the
evidence indicates that the toxics problem, especially the hormone mimics with
non-linear dose-response curves, might be even more disastrous and less
reversible than climate disruption.

Four: transform the consumption of education

“Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” – something that can be
consumed without reducing the amount available to others – and as such it is
an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. It is widely recognized
that literacy and civic education are keys to “development;” they could also
be keys to sustainable development. Reform of education to help us solve the
human predicament is thus crucial, with much emphasis on values such as
satisficing for the many as opposed to optimizing for the few. In the future,
both the need for sustainability and the multi-dimensional environmental,
social, political, and economic requirements to achieve it must be central
elements of education around the world. Many more people, especially
politicians, should be familiar with the I=PAT equation, should know how
agricultural systems work, and grasp the relationship between population size
and epidemic disease. Unless a much larger fraction of the human population
becomes aware of the predicament we all face and the science of that
predicament's basic elements and possible solutions, sustainability is
unlikely to be reached.

Five: rapidly expand our empathy

“We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups. Although we no
longer can associate exclusively with a clan of, say, 125 relatives, most of
us have a group of “pseudokin” – friends and close associates of about the
same number. In both cases, people tend to develop a sort of “we versus them”
culture, with the “themness” increasing with physical and cultural distance.
Thanks in part to global communications, people are gradually gaining more
empathy toward others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class,
culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also
increased. Cultural evolution is not reducing this discounting by distance
(caring less about situations the further away they are) fast enough. The same
can be said about discounting by time – not caring enough about the world we
will leave to our descendants in the more distant future. Can affluent people
in the West learn to empathize enough with a child in Darfur so as to take
real action to save her? Can they learn to care about the world her
grandchildren will live in, and act to move that society towards peaceful
sustainability? If the global community takes step five, the answers to both
questions will be “yes,” and we’ll be on the kind of road that could lead to a
level of global cooperation that might allow a billion or two, perhaps three
billion, small-group animals to live together sustainably in relative peace,
in the next century.

Six: decide what kind of world we all want

“What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Most development literature simply
assumes that “modernization” in the style of today’s rich countries should be
the goal of all nations – and perhaps that is what people want. Still, are
Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in
a ton or two of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives? While the
U.S. GDP has multiplied almost five times since 1958, satisfaction, as shown
by surveys, has not increased at all. The situation in other rich countries is
similar. Must all nations then strive to emulate the American super-consuming,
petroleum-based life style? The situation looked bleak enough in 1972 when
political scientist Dennis Pirages and Paul first asked (in an NYT op-ed) what
the world would be like if the then half a billion Chinese got automobiles?
Now 1.3 billion Chinese apparently have that goal.

“Or should such goals be discouraged and all of humanity strive together to
seek a more equitable global society, which could replace today’s bipolar
super-rich – desperately poor population in which the split widens as growth
continues? We could initiate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB)
to begin a discussion of what economic, social, and political systems will
best fulfill human desires as we struggle to live in gigantic, culturally
diverse groups. How, for example, do we take advantage of the enormous
benefits that market mechanisms provide to societies while constraining their
propensity to do enormous damage when unregulated? Starting and maintaining a
global cultural-ethical discussion is a step that would help determine the
kinds of lifestyles and relationships people really want. As we’ve already
indicated, armed with that knowledge, we could try to establish as accurately
as possible the conditions of population size, consumption patterns, economic
arrangements, and technologies required to make such lifestyles and
relationships sustainable. All of this, of course, would go against the
often-recognized “stickiness” (inertia) of culture. But as many cases show,
that stickiness can be overcome. It may be that even the Weberian
work-to-grow-forever culture that long has had development experts in its
death grip can be altered in ways that could lead to a sustainable global
culture. The United States, for example, could adopt some ideas from other
cultures – like more vacation time from European cultures or a tradition of
siestas from Mexico, or a more contemplative view of life from various aspects
of Buddhism. The USA could meet developing cultures halfway by focusing less
on “standard of living” and more on “quality of life,” and it could bring the
experts along with it.

Seven: determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a
planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of
sustainability

“This is closely related to step six. In the ~200,000 year history of modern
Homo sapiens, nation-states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny
fraction of our existence. In their modern form, they are little more than 200
years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine
greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while retaining
small-group psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is
clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival. Problems such as
climate disruption, global toxification, resource wars, decimation of the
planet’s biodiversity and thus of the crucial services that flow from
humanity’s natural capital, and escalating chances of global epidemics cannot
be solved one nation state at a time.

Pollyannaish conclusion

“We hope you are willing to attempt to dramatically change how the U.S. and
the world work. We hope you will not employ conventional economists who will
try to restore the same old growth machine that is destroying the world.
Equally important, we urge you not to allow a (reasonable) fear of being
accused of being “soft” on terrorism or on China, Iran, or North Korea to
prevent you from starting the difficult task of cutting back our overgrown
military structure and commitments. Similarly, we hope you will take steps to
transform our energy economy so the otherwise nearly inevitable eventual war
with China over fossil fuels can be avoided. Then there is the awesome issue
of curbing rich-world consumption. The U.S. with 4.5% of the global population
cannot continue to consume roughly a quarter of Earth’s resources; similar
statements apply to the other rich nations. McCain in his concession speech
showed some sign of his old self – and you could certainly use the help of a
maverick who has shown the ability to move away from some aspects of Neocon
nonsense. Maybe the Senate could get back to a situation, like that when Tim
Wirth (D) and Jack Heinz (R) were working together to try to solve
environmental problems.

“These are no tiny tasks, salted with unanswerable questions (e.g., is there
any hope that a temporary increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan can
accomplish anything? Is it likely that if we move toward sustainability, China
and India will follow?). You surely cannot do it all – we'll all need to help
you as much as possible. If you can’t get a good start toward real solutions,
then global collapse in the not-so-distant future seems nearly inevitable.”
Paul R. Ehrlich
Bing Professor of Population Studies
http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Staff/Ehrlich.html
Anne H. Ehrlich, Senior Research Scientist, Policy Coordinator, Center for
Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
94305-5020
http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Staff/Ehrlich.html

While these two brilliant educators spell it out, I have seen the devastation
around the globe on my world bicycle travels. I encourage anyone and everyone
to drive this issue to the top of the U.S. agenda. We desperately need a “US
Sustainable Population Policy” and we must lead the world toward a sustainable
future. I cannot think of anything more important for the future of our
children and this civilization.

##

Take Action: www.numbersusa.com ; www.thesocialcontract.com

Author: Frosty Wooldridge
Frosty Wooldridge is an Examiner from Denver. You can see Frosty's articles on
Frosty's Home Page.

Find out more about Frosty:

A Colorado math teacher, Wooldrige possesses a unique view of the world having
bicycled the globe across six continents and six times across the US. Author
of eight books, skier, bike racer, climber, photographer & volunteer.
www.frostywooldridge.com

2009 Clarity Digital Group LLC

A must read.

ted