Population Is Popping: Why We Cover Our Ears and Eyes [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Population Is Popping: Why We Cover Our Ears and Eyes

With 7 billion people threatening to become 8 billion people, and more, it is time to at least fight for consensus that much more growth is impossible. But even those well versed in overpopulation, trying to focus the world on the problem, may fall into the camp of many more people supposedly being sustainable. What they invariably are not taking into account is energy resource limits. Even if they understand peak oil, they may have the idea that it means we have simply entered the "Second half of the Oil Age," as claimed by geologist Colin Campbell. This is what happens when someone believes the peak oil bell curve can be applied to the whole world's oil demand based on dwindling reserves. However, the extrapolation for a mirror-image of the growth curve falls flat, or rather plummets in an L shaped curve, when a devastating oil supply interruption is factored in. Such an event can suddenly prevent enough people from getting to their jobs or accessing affordable food, so as to bring about rapid economic chaos that brings down even the oil industry infrastructure that individual consumers take for granted.

Without a definitive answer on overpopulation that most people can swallow, we may simply have to be Cassandras or keepers of the ecological truth. This means collapse-analysis perhaps coupled with the hopeful array of escalating Transition trends. But we don't know yet. For it is possible that a climate scare of epic proportions, showing 7 billion people how hundreds of millions can die off easily, can focus people in unexpected and even enlightened ways. Such as, believing "Gaia wants you to share the Earth with her fellow creatures in a fair and respectful fashion, for your own good and cosmic joy." But how many can go for that now? Few. That is why most everyone may be where Julia Butterfly said: When we do not embrace or make change according to our surrounding reality, we are hit upside the head with a 2x4 with "change" written all over it (Auto-Free Times interview, 1998, with Jan Lundberg).

Sometimes, however, we can only wait for change. While population or overpopulation is indeed "the elephant in the room," something unstated is that whatever one is thinking or saying will not budge the elephant. So it does not matter what we say or think about the elephant, if it is indeed already in the room. It goes or stays on its own power, as it wishes, because it is stronger and much bigger than we are. It is in charge. So, to succeed in getting a global discussion going on population or overpopulation may accomplish very little -- even if this elusive goal were to be achieved -- until nature takes charge and culls our excess numbers as if we were just another species.

Meanwhile, we can buck the dominant culture and prepare for a sustainable future by respecting life more than short-term economic gains that are increasingly unlikely for almost everyone.