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Editor's Note: The End of Population Growth
If human population tops out around 2100, what will that mean for
our planet and societies?
By Corey S. Powell, |Thursday, October 18, 2012
“What about overpopulation? ...”
It somehow seems all too appropriate that the two major future problems reported in this issue of ‘Discover’ is the coming troubling lack of overpopulation and our near immortality. Personally, I could use a little of that immortality stuff, but I can also recall the “War on Cancer,” to conquer that disease in a decade, launched during the Nixon administration.
People who don’t know anything about ecology, or pretend not to know, look at population booms that accompany economic booms and assume that the former happily fuel the latter, without realizing that they are generally both part of the same unsustainable pyramid scheme, particularly when a nation starts morphing into an empire. The center will just not hold as the empire merrily burns through its original abundant natural resources, including, through the mass importation of outsiders, the unique genetics of the founding group that made success possible in the first place.
Thomas Malthus could not have known about our tremendous advances in technology, but one might guess that he would have knowingly nodded his head when he found out that instead of our elites using that technology to achieve a sustainable healthy quality of life, much of it has been harnessed for the purpose of feeding ever more people and tethering ever greater numbers of humans farther and farther away from resource sustainability. Hence when more population crashes occur, such as the ones we periodically have seen in Africa and elsewhere, they are bound to be that much more monstrous.
In this, what I think of as Discover’s Special Overpopulation Denial Issue, its editors and writers even try to put a positive spin on the grossly overpopulated pesthole that has become Lagos, Nigeria, which in the minds of most Europeans and many Asians would be placed on a relative livability scale somewhere at about the mid-level of Hades.
Above I say “more” population crashes because those in denial, as well as the flat-out propagandists, continually reclassify any past or modern population crash, in Africa or elsewhere, as merely a political problem. But population crashes will always be accompanied by increased political dysfunction, making them perfect for those determined to pull off such reclassifications.
Finally, while there is the occasional quickly forgotten outlier media report on U.S. overpopulation, for example on the unmitigated disaster a place like Los Angeles becomes as it continues to redouble its population, this media pro-overpopulation drumbeat is so nearly complete and seamless that you can’t help wondering if all this is more than clueless optimism and fanatical gro-gro! capitalism, but rather serves the agenda of the owners, and their allies, of most of our mass media organs.
End Note: Cassandra, in mythology, was doomed to see the future but never to be believed, while, Dr. Pangloss, in literature, was comically grotesquely cluelessly optimistic.
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