https://futurism.com/david-attenborough-if-we-dont-limit-our-population-growth-the-natural-world-will/
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IN BRIEF
- The famed British naturalist warns that our current rate of population growth is unsustainable and will ultimately have devastating consequences for the human race.
- He recommends several ways to combat this problem, emphasizing a need to give women political control of their bodies and investing in sex education worldwide.
“A PLAGUE ON EARTH”
David Attenborough, renowned British naturalist and TV presenter, has some pretty scathing words for humanity: “We are a plague on Earth.”
Attenborough made that statement to the Radio Times back 2013, but it’s far from the only time he’s shared his controversial views on population growth. Attenborough has made it clear that he believes that at the rate humans are growing we will soon be unable to feed or house ourselves. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but one that needs to be faced, especially for anyone who agrees with Attenborough that humans have become a plague on this planet — a relentless force of destruction tearing its way through a world shared with other creatures.
“It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde,” he said in that same interview. “Either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.”
The rapid growth of our population is making it very difficult for the world to address several serious environmental challenges. What’s needed is a real discussion about the reality of overpopulation. Too many people, combined with insufficient methods of creating and distributing resources, ultimately leads to loss of life and resources.
“We can’t go on increasing at the rate human beings are increasing forever, because Earth is finite and you can’t put infinity into something that is finite,” Attenborough said in a story published by The Independent.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE?
Despite all his efforts to bring awareness to the subject of overpopulation, Attenborough sternly warns that simply acknowledging these eventualities is not enough — we must act. He believes that controlling our population is dependent on investing in sex education globally, giving women more political control over their bodies, and implementing other voluntary means of population control in developing countries.
“The only straw of comfort or of hope, and even that is pretty fragile, is that wherever women are given political control of their bodies, where they have the vote, education, appropriate medical facilities and they can read and have rights and so on, the birth rate falls, there’s no exceptions to that,” Attenborough says.
Putting more emphasis on women’s reproductive rights and empowerment, as well as providing universal access to birth control and education, will ultimately give people an opportunity to make informed family planning choices. Our only hope of living on this planet for a long time into the future is making sure we start planning for it now.
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.
Attenborough is right. But we have been a plague ever since our pre-sapiens forefathers developed enough brain power to make weapons and start killing. Now, we have metastasized to become a pandemic.
In this country Catholic bishops remind their flock that life begins at conception and no form of contraception is allowed, as they fight making Catholic institutions provide birth control in health insurance for employees. Conservatives with similar views pass one law after another to curtail abortion. They try to defund Planned Parenthood.
In the meantime the population is approaching 9 billion, as habitats shrink, wild animals are being driving from their homes, and extinctions are increasing, and desertification is causing crop failure.
Ecologists, such as Garrett Hardin, and ethical philosophers, such as Herschel Elliott, warn of the consequences when the lower populated countries will no longer be able to provide enough food to save the starving millions and even suggest they do not have the moral obligation to do so.
In the June 2017 edition of Population Connection, Michael Kimmelmin has this to say in his article on the water shortage in Mexico City: “At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City . . . no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.”
But for the adherents of ideologies and religions set in stone, Attenborough and Kimmelman may as well save their breath.
He probably said plague instead of pandemic because he thought that although humans have long had enough brain power to make weapons for killing wildlife, most may never be able to see their place in causing the 6th mass extinction.
True, although when the killing spree first started, our hominid ancestors were in more isolated pockets in the Old World. When they had destroyed the animals in one place they could move on. Now we’re everywhere, and can’t even admit the damage we’re doing.
To me, the biggest and most heinous killing sprees are the ones where we intentionally and deliberately want to wipe out a species to extinction because of some irrational superstition in our minds, that isn’t reality but only our own misguided belief.
Other human cultures may have hunted, but they never had the mindset to drive an animal extinct intentionally and deliberately because they didn’t like it, were afraid of it, or made up a superstition about it, that wasn’t based on any reality but their own subjective impression.
Nothing will be done to stave off our overpopulation. In fact, everything is done to ensure people breed…..tax breaks for every child born, at least in the US, paid maternity leave in Europe, fertility clinics. Capitalism needs ever more people to buy goods and services. And all this in the “educated” developed countries. In less developed parts of the world, no regular or any access to birth control, ignorance, superstition, and cultural mandates ensure too many births.
Add to this the fact that few people realize the correlation between human population growth and wildlife extinction, or even care. It’s not even on most people’s radar. Try bringing it up and see what inane comments you will get.
You’re right.
Absolutely. Opposition to population control is baked into everything: major religions, the economy, our social values, and the tax code. And time is running out.
I think there are more people now who decide they don’t want to breed, if that’s any consolation. There are still many who mindlessly ‘just let it happen’ to them, though.
We have been aware of that for a long time, but believing we are the superior species we still under the impression we can fix everything so that we may continue along our destructive path.
I think we can see the beginnings of what overpopulation is doing – resources spread too thin and getting thinner, not enough jobs to keep up, products we buy cheapening and poor quality because of volume, and generations turning on each other because ‘you got more than I do!’ millennial vs. boomer, etc. Terrible traffic and crowds everywhere, not to mention garbage accumulations the size of nations.
We can fix or account for everything, and what we try to fix we bungle terribly – look at fish farming, terribly inferior to natural.
oops, that should read ‘we can’t fix or account for everything’. And ‘products we buy getting more expensive, but cheap and poor quality because of volume’.
The scary part is that every other living thing will suffer and/or go extinct before we accept reality – except those that have learned to survive on our garbage for millennia.
This is one of the best recent posts on this blog. Renee is right. Even countries that are either ZPG or close to it are now trying to encourage more births. This is true Human Insanity–I fear it is a Self -Fulfilling Prophecy, now even close to Total Extinction because of what creature is now in power in the U.S. The Nuclear Clock has now been pushed forward:
https://www.globalzero.org/blog/trump-moves-doomsday-clock-closer-midnight?gclid=Cj0KCQjwprbPBRCHARIsAF_7gDa-Lw6b7Nk-gfuTtR82HZ-gbWXList74BXCaZE4Q0f0tykSMAOlKzIaAg0MEALw_wcB
ALERT: The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is sponsoring its First U.S. Rights of Nature Symposium Friday, Oct. 27, in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Tulane University. The all-day program will be livestreamed and is free0 to attend. I hope all of you who care about wildlife and this fragile planet will attend or listen to the livestream to learn how to break the deadlock that has excluded us from protecting our beautiful wildlife and this fragile earth.
This is from Jim’s latest post featuring PR Madravenspeak…very telling about what we are up against and why nothing ever seems to really work when it comes to seriously protecting wildlife and wild places……