Rosemary commented: “We are seeing a longing for so-called ‘traditional’ ways of life, a manic nostalgia for something that really never was–except it was a less crowded world.”
To which I replied: I’ve thought that same thing many times. The only reason human life ever seemed to be in any kind of harmony with the rest of nature is that there were a LOT fewer of us. Sorry, but there’s no way an ever-growing population of humans can hope to be sustainable.
Here is a simple yet accurate depiction of human evolutionary “progress.”
Exposing the Big Game 
Thanks for your comments! It is good to know that some of us realize the core problem with our species, which is tearing down the very life support system of this planet. Really appreciate your website.
Same back to you!
I agree. I see families like the Duggars with what, 20 kids, and they hit legal age and marry and start popping out kids. I know it stems from their religious beliefs, for which I’ve no respect, but I think there’s something psychologically wrong with this couple’s desire for so many children (biological) when there are foster kids and adoptable children here in the US and all over the world. We can’t feed who’s already here and this family gets a TV show and $$ to pay to keep overpopulating this planet, which hurts other human animals and billions of non-human animals. Doesn’t sound very Christian to me.
And let’s not get started on Octomom and her doctor! Those poor kids is all I can say.
I’d forgotten about her but yes, those poor children. Why wanna-be parents don’t have to pass tests to have children is beyond me. 😉
So well said! The women in that family apparently are brainwashed to be baby factories, they have not an iota of the outside world–and they never will. They stay at home, and then are married off to another close religious family to breed. There is something very wrong, and despite the “nice” “christian” veneer, I think there is much more going on in such cults/sects, which few ever see. Out of the 20 and growing brood, I’ll bet there are one or two (maybe more) who will “turn” sometime down the road. That young wife and breeder Anna, certainly is having babies almost every year–but its the “Lord’s Will” –as in Lord knows where this one came from! She is not the cute, wide-eyed little thing anymore–just a tired, bloated-looking woman, who will never have a life, or any meaningful thoughts of her own.
Very wrong, indeed. To be raised to dress and act according to some “Christian” crackpot dogma, to erase individuality, uniqueness, THOUGHT, questioning, growth…how could at least a few of them not break away–after having a breakdown, of course.
It’s like how one can take the Mormon faith seriously? They wouldn’t allow blacks but their underwear is sacred?!!!
I believe it was Paul Ehrlich and some others who wrote the book “Population Matters.”
Here is what is perhaps an overgenerous estimate of a sustainable worl human population, by nation, called the overshoot index.
Click to access overshoot_country.pdf
The numbers look a little like those of the early 20th century, when world human population had been in serious overshoot for well over a century.
North American wildlife and ecosystems had by the time of such numbers been so changed and wiped out that there were only fragments of actual natural habitats left. The bison was long gone from forest and plain, the immense migratory bird populations gone, the vast herds of pronghorn killed, the condors and eagles and hawks shot from the skies or starved by the human taking of all the species which served as their food; the wolf which had prevented animal crowd disease, saved forest succession and regrowth, assisted the near-vanished (overkilled a century before) beaver by controlling mesopredation -reducing erosion further by the last two and keeping ungulate behavior wild instead of erosively domestic, poisoned and persecuted into extinction in most of the US.
Ecology is a science largely documenting the tragedy of impoverishment and extinction of animal and plant species, and the vital processes by which the biological world heals itself, interrupted by one species.
When a species is let loose without sufficient population constraints (effective predators and diseases which reduce its gathering into too-high a density) this is called ecological release, and such occurrence sweeps natural ecosystems into disappearance, along with unpredictably large numbers of organisms.
Right here, 98% of the ancient redwoods are gone, the Port Orford cedar fast disappearing due expressly to motorized offroad travel and over”harvesting” of it to ship to the orient for coffins to keep bodies which should have been dispersed among the bear, canid, vultures and other cleanup species.
THe habits of humans to sustain improbably crowded populations have impoverished so much of the world.
The slow-swimming whales were nearly extinguished by the late 1700s in many vast ocean areas, and was more completed before world populations had reached the numbers in the overshoot index.
Yet, through taking up to over 40% of ALL the world primary production (photosynthesis), humans were able to continue to grow.
Right now, there is heavy pressure to establish open ocean fish farming, even though the practice of fish farming creates densities of fish that already created emergence of crowd diseases which spread among wild populations.
Ebola, SARS, MERS CoV, and other human crowd diseases are fast emerging. I do not believe that they will help reduce human populations – after all, one disease which was endemic only to humans (although it appears to have come from camel pox), smallpox, is pretty much eradicated, showing that even primitive medical science can exacerbate overpopulation.
Medical science is an ongoing biological release mechanism that will take us into an overshoot so massive, that we will likely extinguish most vertebrate life forms by the time the inevitable population crash occurs.
I say inevitable because no organism which has overshot its ecologically balanced numbers avoids a natural reduction.
Climate change alone, brought on by overuse of burning (originally to make sufficient heat for metals manufacturing, but also the forest killing for clearing of land and building of navies) will be a factor in ending this overshoot.
At least hopefully.
There is a psychological phenomenon called moving baseline syndrome, wherein humans tend to desire living situations and densities like the experience they had when children. This is a rather unfortunate characteristic, as the massive use of guns for answers to every problem one perceives, is now well-entrenched. It was guns, you might observe, that caused the vast killing of wild animals in the 1800s to feed the huge immigration into North America – specifically the temperate USA.
The present angry fractiousness of invidious human groups everywhere -you see it politically here – parallels lab studies of overcrowding in some mammals. Violence (in spite of greater governmental restraints on behavior) and other social effects involving the sexes, have gone on for centuries because even those seemingly idyllic populations were too large, too concentrated.
There is too much to be said, and I’ll instead end with a single fact.
The reduction of an overbloomed species is not a tragedy, but a rebalancing which is the natural way of the Earth.
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Funny how people seem to champion natural rebalancing, except when it comes to humans.