Reply #4: Great handling of the topic, very well done.

[greyl]

It's so well done that I hesitate to quibble with it at all, but here I go anyway.
I do see one area in your jewel of an essay where I think it's possible to cut another hopeful facet or two, and that is regarding the following statement: "2. Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off."

I'm of the mind that our culture does not represent humanity at large. I see no evidence that our particular civilizational experiment is to humans what the pod is to dolphins, what the flock is to geese, or what the hive is to bees. Those three systems of group organization are the result of millions of years of natural selection, and because of that fact nobody is surprised that they work well for dolphins, geese, and bees. Now, contrary to the rarely examined assumptions of our culture, there is also a system that has evolved over the course of millions of years of natural selection that works well for people, and that is the tribe.
The following graph looks like very strong evidence to me that overpopulation isn't a result of human biology or so-called "human nature", but is more the result of the vision of a particular human culture among thousands of others.

Two hundred thousand years ago is when a new species called Homo sapiens first began to be seen on this planet. As with any young species, there were not many members of it to begin with. Since our subject is population, I’d better clarify what I mean by that. We have an approximate date for the emergence of Homo sapiens because we have fossil remains—and we have fossil remains because a sufficient number of this species lived around this time to provide those fossil remains. In other words, when I say that Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago, I’m not talking about the first two of them or the first hundred of them. But neither am I talking about the first million of them.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was a bunch. Let’s say ten thousand. Over the next hundred ninety thousand years, Homo sapiens grew in numbers and migrated to every continent of the world.
The passage of these hundred ninety thousand years brings us to the opening of the historical era on this planet. It brings us to the beginning of the agricultural revolution that stands at the foundation of our civilization.
This is about ten thousand years ago, and the human population at that time is estimated to have been around ten million.
I want to spend a couple minutes now just looking at that period of growth from ten thousand people to ten million people. As it happens, what this period of growth represents is ten doublings. From ten thousand to twenty thousand, from twenty thousand to forty thousand, from forty thousand to eighty thousand, and so on. Start with ten thousand, double it ten times, and you wind up with about ten million.

So: Our population doubled ten times in a hundred ninety thousand years. Went from about ten thousand to ten million. That’s growth. Undeniable growth, definite growth, even substantial growth . . . but growth at an infinitesimal rate. Here’s how infinitesimal it was: On the average, our population was doubling every nineteen thousand years. That’s slow — glacially slow.
At the end of this period, which is to say ten thousand years ago, this began to change very dramatically. Growth at an infinitesimal rate became growth at a rapid rate. Starting at ten million, our population doubled not in nineteen thousand years but in five thousand years, bringing it to twenty million. The next doubling—doubling and a bit—took only two thousand years, bringing us to fifty million. The next doubling took only sixteen hundred years, bringing us to one hundred million. The next doubling took only fourteen hundred years—bringing us to two hundred million at the zero point of our calendar. The next doubling took only twelve hundred years, bringing us to four hundred million. The year was 1200 A.D. The next doubling took only five hundred years, bringing us to eight hundred million in 1700. The next doubling took only two hundred years, bringing us to a billion and a half in 1900. The next doubling took only sixty years, bringing us to three billion in 1960. The next doubling will take only thirty-seven years or so. Within ten or twenty months we’ll reach six billion, and if this growth trend continues unchecked, many of us in this room will live long enough to see us reach twelve billion.
The Story of B - Daniel Quinn

So, why does understanding this lead to hope? Because we don't need to change humanity, we only need to change one culture - us.

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False, but pervasive mythological understanding of human evolution:



True:


A simple proof of this, is that those thousands of other human cultures don't need to hear your message, or Al Gore's message, or Rachel Carson's message, or David T. Suzuki's message, or Daniel Quinn's message, or GreenPeace's message, or Dr. Alan Thornhill's message, etc.