It’s unbelievable to me that in the year 2014—going on ’15—the media still does hyperbolic backflips every time some celebrity gets pregnant or decides it might be fun to become a daddy, as if human reproduction is some mysterious miracle we should all be awed by. Well, there’s only so much awe I can take before something becomes truly awful–especially in light of the fact that every new human born equates to less biodiversity for everyone.
That’s something I’ve known for a long time. Now, recent studies have officially confirmed that in the forty-six years since human overpopulation was first recognized as a serious problem, our numbers have more than doubled, while the number of naturally occurring animals is half of what it was then.
I’ve seen countless distressing instances of human “success” negating that
of the rest of Earth’s creatures. The most vivid recent example pitted a new Costco, Home Depot and the site of a soon-to-be future Walmart against an elk herd’s migration corridor. Where stately Roosevelt elk once freely travelled between protected park lands, a lit-up strip mall and associated blacktop parking lots now spell the sad end for wildlife and wilderness alike.
In a scene played over and over across anywhere USA, more land is taken up by more lanes of highway so more people can visit more superstores. More and more road-kill results finally in fatality for a few humans, and before you know it, a “cull” is implemented on whatever wild species dares to stand in the way of human “progress.”
Throughout the land you can hear the battle cry: “Out of the way, animals, we’ve got diapers and baby carriages to buy.”
Exposing the Big Game 
Pingback: As the Population of Humans Doubles, the Number of Animals Halves | GarryRogers Nature Conservation
The anthropogenice extinction: The study (http://usat.ly/VpWhx4) is about sorting out the man caused and natural global warming, and corroborates a body of research, 97% of scientists agree, of mankind caused global warming since the Industrial age and accelerating dramatically in the last 40 years. We are also destroying flora and fauna with one in three of each threatened or endangered. Animal farming, meat extinction of ourselves and most else, contributes heavily to greenhouse gases, plus it is unsustainable, “eating” up more and more land, encroaching on and displacing wildlife and wilderness, cutting down forests and jungles, destroying wildlife habitat, fragmenting habitats, polluting streams and rivers and oceans. The way we are going, this could be The Anthropogenic Era of the next mass extinction. Humans kill 27 million animals daily for food, not counting the sea life. We are overfishing the oceans, over hunting the wild, eating ourselves off the planet, polluting air and waters, and with ever increasing population, over 7 billion now growing to 10-11 billion by mid to end of century, accelerating it all. We are destroying biodiversity and the wild. We are not yet asking ourselves how can we live with wildlife instead of against it and farming it for sports killing distorting the health (balanced ecology) of it in the process. Wildlife needs maybe half the planet and corridors of connections. We cannot seem to help ourselves, we are a destructive species as per the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves wherein aliens come to save the Earth from mankind.
Thank you for addressing this incredibly important issue. Human breeding is not necessary and should be more often publicly discouraged.
You’re welcome, somebody has to talk about it.
I think we’re shit and hope we all die, so I won’t be having children.
Now, recent studies have officially confirmed that in the forty-six years since human overpopulation was first recognized as a serious problem, our numbers have more than doubled, while the number of naturally occurring animals is half of what it was then.
All in only 46 years. And yet people cry about ‘replacement value’ and human extinction.
In the years I’ve been on this planet, you can really see the difference – much more noise, pollution, traffic, garbage, interminable lines, wooded lots succumbing to another lookalike home and a two-car garage, infrastructures that cannot support our numbers, not enough resources to go around. Phalanxes of exhaust-spewing school busses. Nobody wants to pay taxes to support themselves nor their own kids’ needs. No solitude to be found anywhere. Not to mention the amount of food and ungodly cruelty to animals in order to feed us.
Ida, you have said it all–you are so right: this exponential human explosion can be see everywhere, especially in the traffic and the ticky tacky sprawl where we live. And, the atmosphere is no longer blue and clear as it was a few decades ago. Thank you for your comments.
And Jim–you are magnificent!! This sickly mania we have with birthing and babies is disgusting, and increasing as we crowd out all other life on the planet. I am so glad I have not had children. I do believe it is the absolute most selfish act by a human there is!
And the selfish act grows exponentially as the offspring decide to have offspring of their own.
Excellent article.
Thank you.
Well stated! For the record it might be instructive to go back and see who or what were the major villains that ultimately derailed the promising efforts at world population control in the 1970s: my votes would go to Ronald Reagan and his “Moral Majority”/”free markets” entourage, and soon-to-be-canonized Pope John-Paul and his Roman Catholic Church with its ironic obsession for birthing children but striking lack of concern for protecting they from abuse once they are born. Maybe not everything wrong with the world stems from these two monsters but a good bit does.
Those two are definite culprits; and I’m sure there’s a short list of others responsible for hijacking common sense and the concern a majority of people once had for the planet as a whole.
The Roman Catholic Church is obsessed with babies and I am sick of it. I am glad I have never had children. The Anglos have a lesser birth rate than the hispanic community with their emphasis on familia.
Children are not necessities! I consider myself a child-FREE single adult. The majority of humanity simply breeds more redundant clones who will raise the demand for animal products (meats, dairy, eggs), leather, fur, etc, into infinity. No matter how many people die from wars, crimes, diseases, disasters–these events can’t cull enough of the human population to reduce the global human biomass to a sustainable level that benefits the other animals as well as the rest of the planet.
Meanwhile that global human biomass keeps growing out of control.
And getting dumber with each succeeding generation!
You can see it on people’s faces: stress, frowns, a numbed look, waiting in line for everything & nothing, fixated on their electronic gadgetry, as if somehow it will save them from facing reality: overcrowding is here, everywhere, but humans still don’t want to see it, afraid of what the reality may mean: that we are slaves, to each other, to our junk, our mania to stay numb and dumb, with drugs, drink, food that is killed & killing us, meaningless “entertainment”,… with little or no thought about what is “out there”–that disappearing place beyond the concrete, poisons, bombs, guns, our civilized “wasteland”–where humans don’t fit in, don’t belong, that they don’t understand, don’t want wild: the last quiet place, where the Wild Ones Still Roam–that,too, must be controlled, tamed, so the Death Cycle Continues, until Earth has no more to give.
Homo sapiens, be damned. The Scourge of this planet. If there is a hell humans have created it. Now, we are Gods.
http://www.foranimals.org
A human is born every 8 seconds. Every 20 minutes, another 3 thousand humans. During that 20 minutes of human fecundity, a plant or wild animal goes extinct, to the tune 27 thousand species every year. I do not think humans will stop–on their own. I shudder to think that it will take the annihilation of most of Earth’s Biodiversity that will finally destroy the Rogue Primate, once and for all. It will not be the Blue/Green Planet, if seen from outer space. We are witnessing something so profound, so terrible; it is not science fiction.
I, too, am so glad I have not had offspring. It is, indeed, the most selfish thing a human can do.