Karen I Shragg - What I came to understand is that if climate change were to magically disappear as a threat to life on earth, overpopulation would remain as an existential threat to our existence. Because we live on a limited planet with a fragile biosphere, we would continue to suffer from scarcity and the issues that it perpetuates: poverty, lack of fresh water, war, traffic, and loss of species.
Furthermore, each of us cannot help but contribute to our carbon footprint with our diet, use of water, energy and need for shelter as well as transportation and other products. One million people are added to our already overpopulated planet every 4.5 days. If climate change is the fire, overpopulation is the fuel.
Economists carry a lot of weight in our culture yet their over-arching perspective is damaging to both the issues of climate change and overpopulation. According to Dennis Meadows, author of Limits to Growth, in an interview with Alan White in 2015 entitled, Growing, Growing, Gone: Reaching the Limits:
“The economics profession is based on the assumption that continual growth is possible and desirable. Likewise, most politicians have a predisposition for growth because it makes the problems they address—unemployment, poverty, diminished tax bases—more tractable. Instead of having to divide a fixed pie, which gets you in trouble with some constituents, you can grow the pie so that nobody has to make a sacrifice or compromise. So there was—and is—a set of vested interests in the notion of growth.”
Buying into the growth model does satisfy Wall Street investors, but it becomes a barrier to getting at the source of the planet’s current predicament.A quick Google search of articles on Climate Change produces over 473 million choices. The same search of overpopulation produces a bit over 2 million hits.
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Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.-Isaac Asimov
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" -Edward Abbey
Humans had created Famine, too. Oh, there had always been droughts and locusts, but for a really good famine, for fertile land to be turned into a dustbowl by stupidity and avarice, you needed humans. -Terry Pratchett
Food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, as this headline from Asia Times (31 October, 2018) attests:
'In Yemen, plenty of food but few have the cash to buy it'.
And:
'While agriculture and food distribution suffer from the war, food remains available in markets across the country - but few can afford it. "All kinds of food and other items are available in the market. The problem is not a shortage of food in markets but that we do not have money to buy food that is now expensive," Sofi said' (Middle East Eye, 9 November, 2018).
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