Watch the movie, it was very prophetic.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/

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Liked to see you "make us" LOSER!!!

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But just try to get elected promising a diminished future ... try to run our capitalist economy and debt denominated monetary system without ever increasing growth ...

The Cornucopians will prevail until the situation overtakes all of humanity. Only unknown variables will decide if and how much of humanity will survive.

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In view of the overwhelming exclusivity, concentration and power in matters of decision available to the class of Capital in the relatively few humans in whose hands the means of production and finance reside, it would be immensely appropriate to ask: Who Decides?

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Here in Bangladesh, the most densely populated country in the world (150,000,000 people in a place the size of Florida), the population growth has slowed somewhat but continues despite the fact that they stand to lose up to a third of the country to global warming.

My ICU is full of severly malnourished kids, many with severe birth defects, and the uneducated, slum residents keep having more because the imams tell them children are a gift from Allah and He will provide for them.
A glance at the skeletal children and street beggars should convince people otherwise, but as with most things religious belief trumps experience every time.

Lest one think this is exclusively a Muslim perversity, consider the Christian fundamentalists, Mormons and Roman Catholics who, despite better education and greater access to information than the people we serve, keep having more children than the planet can support.

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Much like adopting companion animals is preferred over breeding a new companion animal, if one believes the world is over-populated then one should seriously consider adoption instead of procreation.

Some female humans long to experience pregnancy and child birth, and I often suggest that they have no more than one pregnancy and child birth, and adopt more if they so desire (presuming they believe the world is overpopulated by humans).

If about 95% of the female humans have one or fewer biological children, and 4% have two or fewer, then as a world we can probably buffer the impact of the other 1% who have too many. If we do not control an out-of-control population growth, then related intense suffering may occur or societies may resort to authoritarian limits on the number of biological children one can have,

As long as adoption results in a better life for the child than an orphanage, adoption is better for the child, even if the parents have one or more biological children who get a little more of the parent's care / love / affection.

Some laws restrict financially challenged people who want to adopt from adopting, even if they can provide a better home than the child would have otherwise. This should be changed. It may become a non-issue if and when societies have a stronger commitment to leave no human behind (unless the human is able to but unwilling to make any contribution to the functioning of the society).

Sincerely,
Aouie

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They are the human race's biggest enemy. Arguably even worse than those those promoting Wars and Genocide.

Governments need to wake up to reality and arrest these mass homicidal lunatics.

Over Population can be solved gracefully, but not while psychotic idiots are in control of us.

We all need to understand the basic concept of exponential growth to realise the severity and the urgency of the population growth problem we are facing.

This explains the basics in 6 minutes 21 seconds

Tony

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My father said that 50 years ago, right after my sister, his fifth child was born.

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Here in the USA we reward teen girls for getting pregnant. With each baby, they get a bigger “CHECK”! The majority do not properly care for their children and the children end up abused, neglected and in foster care. These children's futures are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their dumb mothers. The only difference between a wild dog and these pregnant teens is that the wild dog takes care of their pups!
We have all of the idiotic vaccinations why do not we make Mandatory birth control for teens in high school, mandatory birth control for entrance to college, for those on welfare, for every unmarried or uncommitted woman that has had a baby and is on welfare. Free sterilization to those in prisons in exchange for early release. Free sterilizations to teens that have had one baby.

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It's pretty obvious that population growth reduces average human happiness. Why do "we" pursue population growth, then? Because human happiness is not the relevant goal, at least in American politics. Most politicans, implicitly supported by confused voters, are more concerned about the latest Microsoft stock price, not "human happiness." Rising GNP is the way "progress" is measured and of course rising production and profits require rising population.

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Average number of children per household is below 2.0 in North America and the developed West. Stopping people here from having children isn't what's needed - we need to stop people from having children in the rest of the world.

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http://www.global-elite.org/node/26

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Will it ever change, it's their right to breed on your tax dollar. Sure wish the government would quit rewarding them , it's time for the egg and sperm donor to be responsible.

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First off, let's look at the policies and who's really the culprit here. We the Americans consume more resources than most folks in other nations. As a matter of fact, if China and India were as consuming as we Americans, the resources would have been gone already. Instead, they're actually moving to better solutions and technologies while we're stuck at the mercy of Corporate America. Why do we keep shooting ourselves with pols who continue the policies of rewarding the gas guzzlers while not giving conservationists any rewards for doing so? Make public transportation better quality and less costly so we don't have to sit through bloody traffic jams everyday. And stop rewarding tax breaks for gas guzzlers while giving little to nothing for fuel efficient counterparts.

Second, this author although I like most of his articles, fails to mention the fact that most rural lands, at least as witnessed in my state of MO, are actually DEPOPULATING while the crowded population in the big cities and their surrounding suburbs are increasing disproportionately. It's like misusing the distorted GDP figures to make it look like the economy's hunky dory. Again, no discussion of the policies of land privatization that lead to this mess.

We can't assume that we'll all sit by and stay the course as the author incorrectly predicts. It'll get to the point where we'll permanently have to change our lifestyles and I seriously doubt that people will die off once they move from the big cities back to the rurals and reverse the depopulation mess.

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The better part of a half century after Erlich's "The Population Bomb" was published, TruthDig hits paydirt.


FREE AMERICA

REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY

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Worldwide, the primary factor that has led to reduced childbearing is emancipation of women. Women who have access to education and decent employment opportunities have fewer children without state coercion. Where women are treated like cattle, the birthrate is typically exceedingly high.

I don't know whether religion oppresses women in order to keep the birth rate high, or encourages over-breeding in order to oppress women, but either way the effect is the same.

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The Religious fanatics have to be called out on their Two major hypocrisies.Pro birth agenda and End of Days delusions.And these two ideas are linked in their quest for the Rapture.The 'Savior' must come to help them 'ascend' and then the Earth is to be destroyed.
what they are doing with their "Pro Life" agend is searching for the messiah, If you're not the 'One' they stop giving a shit about you- send you to War, let you starve, live in squalor and disease. where the hypocrisy lies is in the Fact that if the Almighty wants to send a messenger, He needs no assistance from mere mortals- Oh Yea of Little Faith! Granted the stories say he often blesses a Female with the pregnancy and entrusts HER with the nurturing, but since He 'created heaven & earth', It's His choice to use such a method- not a requirement. Otherwise He would not be the 'Almighty', and no more Powerful at Creating than Humans.So they can stop worrying their 'Savior' will end up in a biologicals container. Have a Lil' Reverence for the idea of All Powerful and All Knowing.
The next heresy lies in their quest to bring on Armegeddon. apparently The Religious right has decided THEY are the 'chosen' generation.And since THEY have decided it is time,THEY are going to do whatever it takes to hasten that timeline. Overpopulation- Great plan, leads to resources shortages which provoke wars,increase disease and famine: Global Warming- yep feeds right into the 'signs'.God's Will and Design not good enough for you?
What they fail to mention with their agenda is they must also glorify the coming of the 'AntiChrist', Can't have the Apocalypse without the that main player, Right? so as much as they revere the 'Messiah', they must also revere the role of the Anti Christ. Which do they actually hold more dear?
Think about it, they basically despise humanity by being willing to act as Judges (working WAY over their Pay scales).They are the first to sing in unison with the other Religious fanatics about 'Holy Wars'. They disregard any attempt to be the Stewards by addressing Global warming (Drill Baby Drill) or sound 'Husbandry' practices- esp in our own species (abstinence Only).
Stating you are 'Religious' does not indicate to which entity they are referring. Satanist are 'religious' too. Let's not assume which they worship or serve when their actions prove it is not the Divine Almighty.
John's Revelations was not a foregone conclusion, it was a warning of what could happen. Seems the Religious 'right' are hell bent on bringing it to fruition. And which entity would love to see Humanity and 'Eden' Destroyed?The One who created it, or the one that Hates both?
The Very name Religious 'Right' denotes THEY have judge all others to be wrong- Again Working WAY above their pay scale. I find their claim to not only be Arrogant, but Blasphemous.When it comes to morality there is Only One Judge. those who are Humble and revere that Singular Power, do not claim or attempt to possess such a Right. It does not say 'Judge thy neighbor' does It?
Actions speak louder than words.You all may be 'Religious' but it is only through self anointment and self righteousness, you call yourselves the 'right'

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For the past 60 years there are those who have pushed for population control control. However it is the lifestyle of the individual that waste precious resources. A wealthy family of three uses up more resources and leaves a carbon footprint larger than a poorer family of seven. Quit making people feel guilty of procreating. Also having a low birth rate and growing older population has its drawbacks as well. I am not advocating everyone have large families, but there are drawbacks in preaching population control. The biggest problem is not population growth, but those procreating that have few skills to bring a child into the world. Maybe we ought to have mandatory birh control until a person or family proves they can provide for one or more kids.

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I'm single. I live in an apartment. I don't have a car out of choice because I don't think it's worth it. 90% of my transportation is done using a bicycle. I don't have kids and I don't plan on having any, if I do it'll be via adoption.

Which is exactly why I do as I please regarding my "carbon footprint". I fly to thailand if I feel like it, I eat sirloin if I feel like it. I buy all the flatscreen tvs that I care for. If you're a little greenie sitting in your country house with 8 kids around your knees why don't you go ahead and calculate for me what those kids will contribute over the next 100 years as they themselves get houses, cars and start breeding. Yeah, I didn't think so... no eco-guilt here buddy.

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Why do adoption agencies place financial restrictions when the world is full of poor people who apparently have every right to procreate? Why not allow poor people to adopt, and what happens when a couple qualifies for adoption but then loses their income(s)?

Those that don’t procreate are in the minority—trying to convince the majority who do procreate to instead adopt or not procreate—proves those who procreate (and don’t adopt) are selfish and contribute to overpopulation.

The smaller number of people who do not procreate will never accomplish negative population growth against the majority who do.

Back to selfishness:
33 excuses to breed, the real reasons behind the excuses and suggested alternatives
(You will have to scroll down one full page to view the table of selfishness)

The entire site is worth exploring:
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

After reading all the excuses, no one can truly defend the position that they love humanity if they also refuse to adopt. I say humanity because people that do adopt overwhelmingly prefer to adopt infants, and let us not forget how rarely teens are, or those who are the wrong gender, race, age, size, disabled...can anyone add to this?

One issue is empowering women. Imagine how many women in developing nations under religious extremism must marry or possibly perish. Many women are correct in seeing themselves as having value through being able to procreate. How we can change people's mindset with these two major problems and dare I say, ambitions, is beyond me. The only solution will come in the form of some disaster or plague that will reduce the popluation, but even then we won't win against the procreationists.

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Dear Mr Hedges, if South Africa has ever tried to institute a programme of population control, it passed me by - perhaps it happened 50 years ago, before I was born?
Thank you to the poster who pointed out that one of yours equals seven of ours. The only guaranteed way of ensuring a reduced birth rate is to empower and educate women. If a woman knows how to prevent pregnancy or get a safe abortion, and can provide for herself and her children, she will have fewer.

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why not reliable birth control and access to safe abortion for all on this planet???

some people end up being parents when they really were not planning on it...

others only want to adopt 'cute babies' while thousands of kids are warehoused waiting for help or wallowing in hunger because their parents are unable to provide for them...

if you crave kids, ADOPT FIRST!!!

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and you can see it on TLC. go ahead, tune in to an episode of "jon and kate plus 8" or "seventeen and counting". our culture is glorifying these families that overproduce children, overproduce to an extreme that is mind boggling. and now we have this sick woman who has 14 children, no husband, no job. by the lack of heartwarming response to her "plight", contrary to what has been the case in the past with births of over 4 babies at once, we are tired of this BS. legislation is a very tricky road when you are talking about the rights of people to reproduce (look at china after the tragedy of the earthquake, when many families lost their only children in the collapse of schools). i don't know what the solution is, but i think a great first step would be to stop giving positive press to people so obsessed with having babies that they wind up with 5, 6, 8 at one birth. this is beyond ridiculous; it is selfishness taken to an obscene degree.

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Hedges is a smart guy, but I have a concern about the undue focus on population as the primary cause of environmental catastrophe. I suspect that the earth can sustain great heaps of us quite comfortably if we abandon our piggish ways. More than a century ago, Malthus warned of the doom we would face due to population growth. The social darwinists did the same. They were wrong of course.

The solution suggested by the social darwinists was always that persons other than themselves should lay down and die so that the world could be sustainably populated by...well... the social darwinists. They proposed embarassingly bad science (eugenics) to accomplish this. They discouraged charity because poverty was a sign of a person's lack of fitness to survive. In a word (two words really), they were elitist assholes.

Don't ever expect a proponent of population control to volunteer himself for extermination.

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I agree with the birth control and adoption posters, but that will not solve our issue.

As insensitive as it may sound, we ought to stop supporting population centers that would not be viable without outside support. Stop sending food aid to places that cannot create enough food to feed themselves. Those places obviously cannot handle the amount of people living there, so less people should live there. No outside support = substantially less population way sooner than a global sex ed campaign with all the red tape that entails.

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Let's face it, my fellow Boomers - we're the problem. I say this sincerely, and with all fingers pointing at myself. We consume too much, and there are too many of us. The system as structured will not be able to sustain us in our old age. So rather than telling other folks what to do, we should be making preparations ourselves to check out ahead of schedule. It would be the nicest thing we could do for future generations.

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states that the only time human populations explode is when societies are making the transition from rural-tribal to urban-industrial. I.e., when they are modernizing, in our world. Left alone, even better encouraged, this happens fairly quickly. When they are oppressed, brutalized, manipulated and otherwise held-back by imperialism, this happens more slowly. With the consequences that Hedges observes. How to deal with this problem? The humane solution is obvious. So is the inhumane "solution."

Hedges description of the consequences of overpopulation is valid enough, but his focus on its causes leads something to be desired. Unless people decide that everyone on earth matters as much as their friends and countrypeople, the problem will not go away. If at some deep level people imagine that an Orwellian "final solution" will remove many of the overpopulating from the scene, this probably contributes more to the likelihood of planetary suicide than any healthy reduction in the rate of population growth.

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But then again, nice to see the Malthusian nuts quackin' here ! LOL !!

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So here's a funny story...you see there was this little planet, nice place blue-green, oxygen, carbon, life that sort of thing and every so often around every 50 to 60 million laps around it's star the clock gets reset, part of a cycle you might say. Once, a comet, big one, got dragged smack into it set off all kinds of changes. Another time a real nasty, aggressive species evoloved on it, chewed up everything spewed poison everywhere, acid oceans... all kinds of changes. The funny part, the nasty aggressive species did not know it was just part of the cycle. A "natual" event. A comet, a vast cloud of methane, a gamma ray burst - natural events, they happen. A mutant ego-maniacal ape-like sub-species that breeds out of control sets off all kinds of changes... they happen, how amazing!

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I have noticed for years that the population growth issue has been absent from the media. Considering that it is the impetus of alot of our environmental and social problems it seems a little too odd. Makes me wonder about the dealings of the people that could survive when no one else could. It may behoove them to let us destroy ourselves, there would surely be an area on the planet in which a very few could live most comfortably.

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Good article. What do you do with a woman who chooses to have another 8 kids on top of her 6 a;ready/?
How do we deal with that kind of mentality in these times?

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Back in 1992, I was having a beer with some old college buddies who were active while undergraduates in Zero Population Growth. We agreed that since we got out of college in the mid 1970s, the world's population had DOUBLED. But we just don't seem to want to talk about it these days...despite talk of global warming, etc.

Yeah, some churches are responsible for it. (Mother Teresa was a profound advocate of "be fruitful and multiply!) But there are also issues of EGO; as someone else indicated, SELFISHNESS.

My in-laws are pathologically devout Catholics. And my spouse is one of 11. Nearly all of her sibling have at least three kids, and they're now dropping them like fertlizer. And my father in law--perhaps the most sexually obsessed individual I've ever known--justifies his sex drive on how righteous it is to have more and more kids.

Then my brother in law, an engineer (i.e., intellectually capable, at least) won't even talk about population. It's a non-discussable issue to him. *sigh* Pathetic.

This article indicates what I've been suggesting for years: we (the US) are going to have to have laws regulating family size too, or the disasters will start all too soon...

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Start by limiting the child deduction on income tax to 2 children (with some way of phasing it in - those with more already shouldn't have to be suddenly hit with this). Then institute a sliding scale for general assistance benefits; decreasing amounts for each child over 2. How about a tax credit for couples with no children or only adopted children? In other words, we need disincentives to overbreeding.

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As some others here have discussed here, consumption and environmental impact (environemental footprint) are as important to discuss as over-population. There is a fine balance that we as humanity should understand when examining these issues. Other concepts that should be understood are freedom, rational and reasonable laws, happiness, and responsibility...and the balance we need to find.

Nothing will change, as far as humanity's view of these topics, until the majority of people become a lot more critical of indoctrinated beliefs, honest about their lifestyles, have a rational understanding of their impact, and become a lot less ignorant of reality.

With this all said, just examining over-population is a finite look at a complex issue in my opinion. I do think though that over-population is one of the problems that humanity must understand and act rationally and logically upon though.

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I propose a new terrorism. Dropping birth control pills in the municipal water supply!
Let's refine the techniques by starting with Indonesia. Microencapsulation of the birth-control chemical should prevent it from being attacked by chlorine and other water additives. We could watch with glee the new birth stats from the country as they plunge. Haaa!

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Yes--but suggesting Zero Population Growth is futile without a mechanism for doing it. The question is HOW to do ZPG without being oppressive? As a woman, I could fleetingly think of castration of males with high testoserone levels--which would assuredly solve several problems--but creating hordes of gelded eunuchs would never get by my ethical barrier. (Or yours, I hope.)

Much less objectionable would be taxation. Years ago, probably back in the 1960s, I came to the conclusion that citizens with no children or one child should get a tax break. After two children families should be tax-penalized (never, NEVER rewarded!), to discourage having more--with additional taxation for each additional child. For those who enjoy big families, living communally or adopting more children would not be taxed of course.

One of the bloggers also suggested something like that, but we all know it won't happen in any clerically-hagridden nation like ours. Too many propagandists, lobbyists and head-in-the-sand legislators insisting on "MAN's dominion over the world." Question is--what kind of world will the new generation inherit 60 or 70 years from now?

A sad number of the bloggers on this article are dogmatically anti-religion, a la the atheist crank Sam Harris. They don't understand that religion, per se, isn't the problem. "True believership" is--of ANY hierarchical domineering structure that promotes male supermacy and a renewing population of babies for "racial", national or religious growth, cannon fodder, and performing repetitive slave-labor jobs. No house of worship ever preached endless birth more assidulously than the Nazi Party! I'm a churchgoer, but give me a democratic religion (like my own Unitarian Universalism and several others) that teaches stewardship of the earth, not dominion. My church was ordaining women before the Civil War, in a long tradition that has promoted women's, minority, immigrant and LGBT rights, championed the various ZPG alternatives, and preferred peaceful persuasion and education to coercion.

But if you know anyone who insists on belonging to an organized hierarchy that won't use common sense about population control, better warn them to salt away silver, gold and canned food, since they or their children will need to hide out from retribution by furious mobs in about 40 years or less. Extrapolating the cancerous growth of population over the past 400 years leads inevitably to our species' greatest tragedy: extinction. With both a bang and a whimper.

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i have read a couple posts saying it and i will reiterate:

give women the knowledge and control of their own bodies and they will have fewer babies.

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The issue, or rather the issues, of the overpopulation problem are delved into deeply in the first 7 books of the free ebook series " . . .And Gulliver Returns" --In Search of Utopia--Read them at http://andgulliverreturns.info OR
gulliverreturns.googlepages.com
The answers to the question are not simple.

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In America at this time there are over 10 million Americans who see the destruction of the planet environment as joyous sign of the return of Jesus. In a sermon about ten years ago on of the most influential "End of Times " Pastors said. Jesus will return after the last fish in the ocean is gone, after the the last bird in the air is gone, and after all the clean air and waters have been used. For the true believers Jesus will once again multiply the fishes and the loaves. G. W. Bush buried many people of these beliefs deep into our regulatory systems over the last 8 years.
There is a carrying capacity for idiots on our planet that has been exceeded. It takes very few committed idiots to ruin the lives of everyone else. It can take a hundred people weeks to fill a well with buckets and only one idiot with a dead animal to make it poisonous.

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I've been concerned about overpopulation for ages, and yet I still wanted to be a parent. So my spouse and I decided to have one child biologically and after that a vasectomy!

But what I think is contributing towards the rapid growth in the US and other Western nations is the idea that three or more is okay; two kids replace the parents of one family (without considering if someone had a child in a previous relationship). After that the third +++ kid(s) in environmental terms is superfulous.

While there are quite a few families in the western world who have none, one or two, there seems to be even more who are having three or four.

See, the crazy folks like the Duggers or Nadya Suleman are an exaggeration and most people wont go there. But even a third or fourth is too many if we think in terms of carrying capacity.

What drives me crazy is that there seem to be so many out there in our over-consumptive western world who are neither overly religious or uneducated, yet they think it's okay to have three or more. Why?

Perhaps if Julia Roberts, Allison Dubouis and Steven Spielberg and all the movie stars featured in People magazine quit having so many kids, it wouldn't look so cool anymore!

Rather than legislate against more than two, wouldn't it be better to make having less more cool? Also, maybe for those who don't have kids and for those who have only one biological kid (adopt all you want) there be a tax incentive. How about free k-12 education for the first two biological kids and after that, you pay. Imagine how much of the overcrowding in schools would go away after 10 years!

Oh well, I am starting to believe, we as humans are getting the planet we deserve, a crowded, stinking, miserable mess. I just want to apologize to all of the animals out there. To all the animals who posses neither greed nor entitlement, I'm very sorry.

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While fundies of ever stripe whether they be Christian, from Roman Catholic to Westboro Baptist, or right wing "West Bank settler" Israelis trying to out reproduce the seemingly over fecund Hamas-led Palestinians, garner the lion's share of blame for our planet's overpopulation, and right fully so, they couldn't do so without backing from those who profit from their fertility.

Let me give you some hints.

From InvestorWords.com comes this definition of mature economy:An economy where the population has stabilized or is in decline.

Not clear enough? Here is BusinessDictionary.com's definition of mature economy:In which the birth rate is the same or lower than the death rate.

Now ask yourself, what has been the catch phrase from politicians of every stripe, save died-in-the-wool socialists, for the last thirty, forty years?

Well, in some form or other, they invariably say, "We have to grow the economy." Right?

So, besides expanding production or the the flow of credit and financializing every bit of paper that floats across the NYSE floor, how does a society "grow the economy?"

By increasing the population! In fact "growing the national economy" by increasing the population was one of the reasons Benito Mussolini banned contraceptives in 1924, with the tacit agreement of the Catholic Church, likewise in in Hitler's Germany about ten years later.

By 1969 that villain of U.S. history Richard Nixon was calling for zero population growth, in 1970 Congress created The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The Commission submitted its report in '72 and it was promptly forgotten, due to fear from backlash by the Catholic Church and various fundamentalist Protestant churches.

But recall the definition of mature economy I provided above?

Capitalist investment is, in a demented sort of way, a direct beneficiary of the "throw away the rubbers and reproduce like bunnies" theology of the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant denominations. And both fascism and libertarianism are extreme expressions of capitalism. It should come as no surprise then that libertarian poster-boy Ron Paul is fervently anti-abortion. More babies equals more consumers equals bigger profits. It is also why Paul, the laissez-faireest of the laissez-faire crowd, can write without a touch of irony, "The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America[.]" In Paulian/libertarian economic terms then Christianity equals unfettered capitalistic growth. And unfettered, laissez-faire style capitalistic economic growth is dependent upon unfettered, laissez-faire population growth.

In conclusion, neither the Catholic Church and its allies among certain fundamentalist, anti-birth control Protestant denominations would have as much political clout without the surreptitious financial backing of powerful capitalist business interests. After all, the federal government, as clearly defined by the Constitution, is a secular organization and at any time can tell any Pope, televangelist or rabbi to take his religion and go f*ck himself. Yet so strong is the unholy alliance of the churches and business investors, ...the government of the people, by the people, for the people... is raped in the name of unfettered capitalist economic expansion and wealth for a lucky few and increased poverty for the reproducing many who keep that economy growing.

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People forget that before the advent of public sanitation and modern medicine, life expectancy was far lower, mass epidemics and famines were quite common everywhere, and population was thus naturally held in check. Science has allowed humans to overcome these natural brakes on population growth allowing for exponential increases in their numbers. However, as the article points out, there are more ominous brakes waiting to be applied - the very ecosystem on which we depend will soon be severely damaged, and in the process nature will prevail. The only solution is scientific -that is, a rational approach to reward those who chose not to breed. Logistically, this is easily achieved since we have good means of more or less permanent contraception. To avoid simple economic discrimination, rewards could be both monetary nonmonetary - if you elect to have more than one child, you will be required to serve five extra years of national service as well as be taxed for every additional child (no more child tax credits). Children themselves would not be penalized because we would institute universal education and health care, emphasizing scientific understanding which would in turn reduce resistance to family planning. Of course, given the current state of human cultures the main problem is not logistical, it is psychological. I am among those who believe that such a cultural/psychological shift will not occur fast enough to avert disaster, even given our enormous capacity for mass media education. Thus it seems unfortunate but likely that only renewed epidemics, wars, and starvation will reduce population to a sustainable level. Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World" realized the trade-offs to human freedom in a world reborn into something like rationality. We could have a better and kinder "Brave New World" if we wanted it, but I doubt humans as a species are currently capable of such mass rational behavior.

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More industry,more factories,more factory Farms, spewing out more poisons, taking up more land and draining more quality water escources is the problem.

If we cut back factory animal production would be a great start. Cattle ranches use far more water than vegetable farms, depleting water needed for humans. considering there's almost as many cattle,chickems,pigs and turkeys
as their are people we seriously need to rethink just how much being 'Top Carnivor' is really costing us.

Cutting Factory Farms in half would make available great quantities of food crop to feed the population. protien comes in a great many plant forms and that's the meat=eater/producers biggest argument. They feed us protien. They also feed dead critter parts back to the critters they use to feed us.
How sick is that??

Before we jump off the 'too many people' cliff we'd better think about the fact that we have too many critters wasting our land,water and air for what, a Mickie D's burger?? I think we can do better than that.

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Humans were a fairly benign population before we got duped by Calvinist philosophy that somehow gawd wanted us to spend our lives working... all this doing and feeling we had to be doing or be damned reaped a lot of excess prosperity for a time, made it possible for a lot more people to be born and thrive, sure, but it chewed up the only planet we have. We are now seeing signs that we are near the end of our excesses. There is evidence in the fossil record from past periods of dramatic global warming that huge deposits of methane gas, like those currently submerged and frozen in the arctic ocean floor thawed and bubbled up into continent sized masses that the prevailing winds carried over the land wiping out almost all life forms. Halleluja, you morons.

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How about we celebrate those who refrain from reproduction? That might seem crazy, but it'd be a start!

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In 1990 the population of the United States was 250 million. In 2005 it reached 300 million. that's 50 million in just 15 years! Now we're in a deep recession and we're still taking in more immigrants. I don't care what anyone thinks, we need a moratorium on immigration now. Forget about promoting diversity. We're diverse enough already, be happy with that. With jobs disappearing and two clueless administrations in a row (Bush and Obama), it doesn't make any sense to create more competition in a shrinking job market.

The United States has been the promised land of choice for too many for too long. We're full now. The rest of the world will have to learn to get along without us for awhile. If all those countries are so much older and wiser than us, it should be easy for them.

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while i'm no fan of the narcissistic pastime of child breeding, especially with so many beautiful young people in need of adoption, this kind of malthusian apocalyptic fear mongering gets really ugly, as evidenced by most of the comments it has prompted (calls for forced sterilization, mandatory birth control, bashing single mothers and religion). what happened to liberal respect for reproductive rights? their may be a population problem, but focusing on this distracts from the real issue, our exploitive and unsustainable global capitalist system. it is the height of hypocrisy for wealthy gluttonous americans to point their turkey drumsticks at the poor starvelings of exploited nations as the cause of economic and environmental catastrophe. this kind of malthusian blame the victim attitude has been around for ages and allows for the perpetuation of an unjust economic system. the ruling class, observing the destruction and anarchy wrought by the policies that sustain it, takes aim at the impoverished and "irresponsible" masses, whose expanding size represents a threat to its lifestyle. poor people reproduce more and tend to be more religious. this is largely the result of their hopeless and depressing circumstance, and the enforced ignorance of bone-crushing poverty, not their stupidity. changing our economic system to make it more just and sustainable will do far more to curb climate change and ecological destruction than any totalitarian population control policy. i know chris hedges is a good socialist and doesn't support this kind of thing, but his poor framing of the issue, and allusions to the odious pro-nuke dr. lovejoy, make for a disappointing and unhelpful article.

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...for decades that there is a limit to the world's "carrying capacity" for humans. If you study animal species, you notice that the numbers of a species increase as long as times are good, because, eventually, bad times will come and as much as 80 or 90% of the species will die off, perhaps due to its own success and depletion of its food supply. The system is self-regulating; if we don't take care of it, Mother Nature will. It's just that we won't enjoy the methods she uses!

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Nice description of the problem, I'm glad it's at least being raised (unusual, as author pointed out). BUT I'd like to see some direction, some positive suggestions for real action to bring about this change, not just a restating of the problem, which at least Alternet readers SHOULD already be aware of. Maybe all we can hope for is consciousness raising at this stage of the game, but I'm afraid by the time everyone's consciousness is raised, we'll be at 8 to 10 billion. SO, shall we conclude that the best hope for the earth is our extinction as an overbearing unaware destructive species?

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Did you ever consider that Malthus and individuals like Malthus who were aware of the human impact upon our ecology and resources were the pioneers that ultimately helped enlighten much of humanity to the reality of pollution, human induced environmental destruction, over-consumption, over-population, the concept of non-renewable resources, scarcity, ill effects to human health due to pollution, and so on?

Maybe the reason you live in a world (at least in the U.S.) that is not extremely polluted, poisoned, destroyed, depleted, or populated is at least partially due to the thinking and actions of individuals like Malthus. The "doom and gloom" crowd, as you consider them, have most probably kept your world a bit healthier, less polluted, less scarce, a little bit greener, and/or a little less populated. Maybe they helped keep your world in good enough condition so you could use the world you live in as an example to mock their concerns. I think I see a paradox here.

It seems that your reasoning has a major flaw. You do not take into consideration that these individuals' and groups' thoughts, voices, and actions could have affected the outcome that you are using in your argument against them. It also seems that you do not take into consideration any world outside of the small part that you live in, when examining issues about over-population, scarcity, and pollution.

...but maybe this does not fit into your economic and/or political ideology.

BTW, there are many theories and opinions from Malthus that I do not agree with, but Malthus did have reason for concern over issues of over-population when taking into account the knowledge of the time IMO...and I do take pause when I realize that the human population has increased six fold within a hundred years (even with the tremendous loss of life from two world wars and many major conflicts during the 20th century) with human beings consuming more resources and energy than at any other time in history. Also, there are countries that are 'presently' dealing with issues of over-population and/or populations that lack basic resources, so maybe Malthus was not really that off with some of his theories after all. Taking this all into consideration though, I do not think the world is going to end tomorrow.

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...can multiply, but they can't add.

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Eugenics is the answer! Breeding licenses only for qualified individuals! Mandatory 2 child cap for all married and approved-to-breed couples! More bureaucracy! More laws! More regulations! More government!

Start breeding today!! Just trade in your carbon credits and get a temporary breeding permit!! Only 600 carbon credits and proof of payment of last years' carbon taxes will buy you a one child extension!

While supplies last...

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In the book "The Long Emergency" there is a conversation about huge "die offs" as food and water supplies vanish, areas of the world become too hot to sustain life and the current population becomes unsustainable. I think we have to be prepared for that. I don't think we're looking at how to manage life as usual. we have other shoes to drop - our declining fertility thanks to our dependence of chemicals - may make moot concerns about population growth. Certainly we should be socially responsible with our procreation, but I think we may have reached a tipping point for overpopulation already.

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...time for a huge World War! Otherwise, mother nature will take things into her own hands and 'assist' with depopulation by way of famine, disease and perhaps a real nasty pandemic.

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Once again, Alternet has proven itself to be on the forefront when it comes to good ideas and taking on difficult subjects. I'm a liberal that is against the bailouts of the banks and I have been fighting tooth and nail to enlighten the public about the impending disaster. Alternet has been there all along questioning the conventional wisdom on these matters. Well done!
For those interested in what the problems are and how they are converging upon us now, I suggest watching the Crash Course at chrismartenson.com

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Well, I'm not aware of any real organized popular movement against the population explosion, so what of it? When are environmentalists and the Left going to focus more on this? I have NEVER heard a word on excessive population from the big Leftist thinkers we can all list.

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How can we not blame the church? They are against everything that does not grow their numbers. No birth control or abortion because then their won’t be as many people when we pass the collection plate. No gays allowed. Why is it such a “sin” to be gay? Well they cannot reproduce several more churchgoers that grow their numbers. Therefore gays cannot be a members only a priests.

The Catholic Church realizes their numbers are shrinking every year. Some just stopped going to church, some decided they were agnostic or atheist, and some will convert to a spouse’s religion. Some just walked away when Priests raped little boys and the church covered it up.

The fact is religious people tend to stay in the same religion they were raised. Even the ones who do not attend church still identify with the religion they were raised. I know many people who haven’t stepped inside a catholic church in years but still consider themselves catholic. Any guess what happens when they want to get married or baptize a child? The priest says, “Would that be cash or check?”

For churches it is a numbers game. Say for every child born by catholic parents that 40% of them leave the church (find new religion, identify as atheist or agnostic), 25% become active members and 35% are not active members but still identify as catholic.

Think of it like a business. If a salesman makes a sale to 25% of the people he talks to what does he have to do to increase his income? Well he needs to talk to more people. Well the church doesn’t really like the whole door to door to convert so it encourages people to have as many children as possible by making birth control a sin.

Besides who cares about the earth when it will be destroyed in Armageddon anyways?

I’m completely pro-choice. But that goes both ways as well. Who am I to tell someone they cannot have children if they want. The church will never allow the U.S. to institute a policy like China has.

Overcrowding is a huge problem though and we need to stop paying people to have more children. I think the best way to handle the issue is for the government to increase the child credit up to 2 children. Instead of $3,500 per child make it $5,000 for one child and $10,000 for two children. If you have more than 2 children you get nothing for any of the children. Someone who has 2 children would think long and hard about giving up the $10,000 credit per year to have that 3rd child.

And if you are on welfare you lose money for every child you have while on welfare, instead of getting more for each one you have. Take that Octo-mom!

In the end if religion keeps encouraging you to have kids and the government keeps paying you to have them we will run out of food and resources. We can either end our fixation on growth and intelligently deal with the problems or we will run out of food and resources and billions of people will lose their lives through starvation, illness, and wars.

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The Corny-copians sound just about as stupid when they try to be serious, so I can't tell for sure.

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I do believe humans are causing serious damage to the Earth, that the current population is a factor in this, and that if we do not change our ways we will go extinct. However lowering the population and population limits should not be the goal. The decision to have children and how many should be the decision of the parents only. Should we educate people about birth control and what it means to be a parent? Absolutely, but not because having children is wrong or damaging the Earth but because it will allow them to make an informed decision about when/if to have a child and hopefully when/if they do they will be a better parent and raise their children to be productive. Should adoption be promoted? Again absolutely but not for some of the reasons I’ve seen above. We should encourage people to adopt because it’s good for society that children whose birth parents aren’t willing/able to raise them are raised to be productive members of the society.

I believe someone above already said it but the only true solution to our population problems is in science. We should pursue research in things such as easily renewable energy and food sources. Not only that we should examine the possibility of building large space stations to act as large population/industrial centers to ensure more land for food. We should look into the possibility of terra-forming some of the planets/moons in our own solar system to increase the amount of available territory. We should look to expand even beyond our own solar system. These are not new ideas but if we pursue them seriously they could become realities or even lead us to a discovery we never thought possible. There is no immediate solution to this problem but at the same time this is not an immediate problem even though it feels like one. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get started on a solution now. Like other great obstacles of the past we can overcome this and I believe we can do it with out depriving the very many people who want to bring a new life into the world of that opportunity.

In short instead of looking for ways to limit ourselves we should be searching for ways to allow us(the entire human race) to continue expanding but with a future instead of our current unsustainable societies.

And to all of you who believe the Earth is so overpopulated, why haven’t you removed yourself already? If you can answer that question truthfully then you should be able to figure out why population limits would never work anyway. Oh and for homework look up some of the consequences of population limits in countries that have used them.

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Let me offer some solutions instead of my usual bitching about the problem:
*End the tax credits for children
*Reduce the welfare payments for each child born into families receiving welfare to stop the 'more kids=more welfare' problem
*Free contraceptives, vasectomies and 'tube-tying'

None of these suggestions infringe on your rights and each offsets the others costs to a large degree.

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Helo everyone I am Leo here.The Great Corporations around the World say It's not they are afraid to die, But just they don't want tobe their except their employees.
Now, they face problems from every where.The World or People of this World have forgottan; that,we leave,run and lead an independent life under these Govt. or Private Corporations all around the world.I blame Corporations and their Money multiplier schemes make large impact on the poor individuals all around the world and rest of family dependent only on it & pensions. Amazingly no one has ever noticed or raised their voice against these corporations. Government can't play in thse employee or unemployee death race,without proper administration the World Corporations bodies repeat again and again these serious heinous t crimes against Ordinary citizen of this world.
Raise your voice let the others here it from you...
Thank you
leopat9@gmail.com

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Tribal man was so successful as a survival unit that we populated the whole planet, thus creating the circumstances where bigger was better in the survival game. The survival unit has peaked at the Nation State size - and that is a stretch in most parts of the world. [We are still best at cooperation in much smaller groups.]

If for no other reason, populations will be kept unnaturally high by the competitive survival interests of many survival units.

Eliminating the global competition seems well beyond our cooperative potential.

I don't have a solution, just a different take on the nature and genesis of the problem.

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This is not a topic just for Alternet. This is a topic that should be on every news station and every news site everyday! People are not aware and those that are want to hide it for some sick reason.

I know this may offend some people but the Catholic Church and I am sure other religious institutions that I am not familiar with are a large part of this problem. Catholic's are staunchly against birth control and when Catholic charities enter a poor community instead of providing the people with access to birth control they try to teach them "natural family planning." Unfortunately this does not work as well as condoms or pills or shots. My bother and sister in-law teach a NFP class at their church and they have 5 kids all under 7 years of age. None of which were planned. I think they are brain washed or something. Either way they are convincing these poor, uneducated people in the third world, where the population growth is the largest, that their multiple births are "Gods plan" hence God's plan must be for them to have more children than they can afford to feed or take care of. This infuriates me!

So does that mean that it is God's plan for us to us to destroy our planet, for our children and grandchildren to live through the hell it will be when there is so little food and water and so many people that we literally destroy each other to get at what little is left?

On a better note, most of my non-Catholic friends that are in their late 20’s and early 30’s don’t have children nor do they want them. Unfortunately it will not be my well off, educated American friends who will overpopulate the earth.

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Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes 3 times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!

Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over 7 dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. 17 western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose 4 million acres of topsoil each year and 85% of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace lost soil, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been 1 acre every 5 seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, 7 are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

1/3rd of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes 3 times as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."

Nor can fish provide any help here. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.

The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, humans have lived on "vegetarian or near vegetarian diets;" meat has traditionally been a luxury. Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than 3 ounces of animal protein per day; 3 ounces per week for his patients who had already suffered a heart attack.

Obviously, providing the entire world with a Western-style diet is absurd. But what about satisfying today's demand for meat--which provides only a fraction of the population with a Western-style diet? If the world population triples in the next 100 years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.

But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption.

On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size. The world's cattle alone consume enough to feed over 8.7 billion humans.

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I agree, that would be great in our country but it is not our country that is doing the most populating. We have to go to the countries that are doing the most populating and get education to them about contraception and access to free contraception.

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Educated societies have cut their population growth. The first step is to educate everyone else. Most people will figure it out. The next step is to make birth control available to everyone who wants it.

An honest discussion in the media is needed now. It should become a part of the global warming issue. Politicians and scientists should take the lead.

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I am loathe personally to face the responsibility that all of us who contemplate this issue especially having to bear perhaps even the tiniest smidgen of contributing to the problem, even overcoming basic ego and getting over ourselves. Whatever our position at some juncture in the future, it is deemed a very possible reality that we will have to deal with it. Perhaps better that we nonchalantly assume the standard finger pointy game as exemplified by our more culturally patriotic types, place fate in the four winds, excising the issue at the source of our perceived future woe's. Let our global think tanks assume the heavy lifting and decide the fate. Perhaps even as in the past we eradicate by Fiat that which offends our immediate delay to the onset whatever that may be, the black, the brown people, the Jews, the men, the females whatever form it takes always nasty. Perhaps as some would assume our savior would arrive and lift us to a great mortal emancipation, so perfect and enabled to scorn those who were not as perfect in their own personal legends in heaven.

Under capitalism the exploitative negative model based on pyramid theory fails, under religious edicts and concepts we have a similar argument with the notion of ownership dominion. Each flawed at root philosophy for forms of long term community structure. Infinite economy thinking with no reciprocal arrangements with natural resources not even a thank you note. Post industrial developments propelled humanity into more perverse machinations of himself, leading to an age of mass ignorance. Soma, somavision and somatized thinking, exploiting humans laizez faire whatever attitude. As stated by many a final arbiter of all this is our dear biosphere. The book revelations doctrine speaks to things that are not pretty. We may be far more humbled by the unpredictable breakdown of our resources, not withstanding atmospheric compositional change, temperate movements on geological time frames, and we are not geological creatures.

That aside, and resorting to half assed think tanks such as the NSC, CFR whose leaders are probably as bureaucratically clueless on implementing change as their pimple headed socially autistic Phd and military types who implement sociopolitical actuarial models. Using policy that simply address a capitalized cash profit requirement on the way. After all employing judicial edicts and public policy, is just simply exploiting and employing stupidity as a political tool.

If the document and accompanying material from think tanks such as the NSC, in memorandum 200, April 24, 1974. Regarding predicted fertility, resources issues and the future......'the population of countries with centrally planned economies, comprising about 1/3 of the 1970 LDC total, is projected to grow between 1970 and 2000 at a rate well below the LDC average of 2.3 percent. Over the entire thirty-year period, their growth rate averages 1.4 percent, in comparison with 2.7 percent for other LDCs. Between 1970 and 1985, the annual rate of growth in Asian communist LDCs is expected to average 1.6 percent and subsequently to decline to an average of 1.2 percent between 1985 and 2000. The growth rate of LDCs with market economies, on the other hand, remains practically the same, at 2.7 and 2.6 percent, respectively. Thus, barring both large-scale birth control efforts (greater than implied by the medium variant) or economic or political upheavals, the next twenty-five years offer non-communist LDCs little respite from the burdens of rapidly increasing humanity. Of course, some LDCs will be able to accommodate this increase with less difficulty than others....
....Moreover, short of Draconian measures there is no possibility that any LDC can stabilize its population at less than double its present size. For many, stabilization will not be short of three times their present size...

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Malthus, like many writers, wrote many things. Most of what he wrote, like most of what most writers write is not significant. When we talk of Malthus, we are referring to his significant theory, which, stated simply, is that human populations grow in the presence of abundant food, quickly outstripping their food supply and causing famine and suffering.
There is nothing controversial or uncertain or debatable about basic Malthusian theory. It is simple fact.
This is, of course, nothing new to nature. Humans have highly developed instincts for homosexuality, masturbation, genocidal warfare, and other natural strategies for dealing with overpopulation. Unfortunately, our unprecedented success has entirely overwhelmed the capacity for these instincts to ensure our survival. We need to apply our powers of reason to the crafting of a more effective expedient.

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The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter: What's healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet."

---John Robbins, author, Diet for a New America, and President, EarthSave Foundation

One study puts animal waste in the United States to between 2.4 trillion to 3.9 trillion pounds per year. The United states produces 15,000 pounds of manure per person. This is 130 times the amount of waste produced by the entire human population of the United States.

A 1,000-cow dairy can produce approximately 120,000 pounds of waste per day. This is the functional equivalent of the amount of sanitary waste produced by a city of 20,000 people.

A 20,000-chicken factory produces about 2.4 million pounds of manure a year. Poultry factories are one of the fastest growing industries throughout Asia.

One pig excretes nearly three gallons of waste per day, or 2.5 times the average human's daily total. One hog farm with 50,000 pigs in France produces more waste than the entire city of Los Angeles, and some pig farms are much larger.

Factory farm pollution is the primary source of damage to coastal waters in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Scientists report that over sixty percent of the coastal waters in the United States are moderately to severely degraded from factory farm nutrient pollution. This pollution creates oxygen-depleted dead zones, which are huge areas of ocean devoid of aquatic life.

Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.

"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and sub-division developments combined."

---Philip Fradkin, in Audubon, National Audubon Society, New York

Agricultural meat production generates air pollution. As manure decomposes, it releases over 400 volatile organic compounds, many of which are extremely harmful to human health. Nitrogen, a major by-product of animal wastes, changes to ammonia as it escapes into the air, and this is a major source of acid rain. Worldwide, livestock produce over 30 million tons of ammonia. Hydrogen sulfide, another chemical released from animal waste, can cause irreversible neurological damage, even at low levels.

The world Conservation Union lists over 1,000 different fish species that are threatened or endangered. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate, over 60 percent of the world's fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. Commercial fish populations of cod, hake, haddock, and flounder have fallen by as much as 95 percent in the north Atlantic.

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The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

The United States and Europe lose several billion tons of topsoil each year from cropland and grazing land, and 84 percent of this erosion is caused by livestock agriculture. While this soil is theoretically a renewable resource, we are losing soil at a much faster rate than we are able to replace it. It takes 100 to 500 years to produce one inch of topsoil, but due to livestock grazing and feeding, farming areas can lose up to six inches of topsoil a year.

Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects 3 percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world's land resources.

Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.

The United States government spends $10 million each year to kill an estimated 100,000 wild animals, including coyotes, foxes, bobcats, badgers, bears, and mountain lions just to placate ranchers who don't want these animals killing their livestock. The cost far outweighs the damage to livestock that these predators cause.

The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.

33 percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only 2 percent of our resources will go to the production of food.

"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."

---Jeremy Rifkin, author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

Lester Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.

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http://art-effects.blogspot.com/
2009/03/arthropods-will-rule-again.html

listen you guys,
this is the arthropods time
you've been a long time around
you've made a big mess
it's time for you to quit the planet
it's time for us to rule again
it’s time for the arthropods to rule again

ARTHROPODS WILL RULE AGAIN

you know,..
chicken is more clever than a fly, or an ant,
does this make chicken ..clever?
you know,..
human is more clever than a pig, or a horse,
does this make human ..clever?
you say humans destroy nature..
do chicken destroy nature?
do flies do that? or the ants?
do shells destroy nature?
you know, shells made the petroleum..
I'll tell you a story about a little species.
there was a tiny little species that lived on this planet some 5 billion years ago.
it was a funny little thing. no eyes, no feet, no brains.
the funniest thing though was that this funny little species used to "breath" (if one can say "breath") carbon dioxide.
then, while millions of years passed by, these little animals became so many.
try to imagine the whole of the oceans crowded by these animals. a thick animal-water. wouldn't like to swim in there...
I bet you can't imagine what happened then: they became so many that finally they breathed all the carbon dioxide while producing a killer poison. they produced so much of that poison-gas that they finally suffocated in it. they all had to die.
this poison gas we call.. oxygen. they suffocated in oxygen. they needed carbon dioxide but they had used it all.
come on now, don't be silly.
humans don't destroy nature. there is no such thing as pollution to nature.
what humans call pollution is simply nature.
like the human mind is nature.
like the pig mind is nature.
it's just nature.

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The primary reason why we are destroying ourselves and the planet is that we are controlled by religions, cultures and politicians who's ideas were perfectly valid 2,000 years ago.

But we have progressed dramatically over the last 100 years as a result of SCIENCE.

When I was a kid - I was brought up on 2001 a Space Odyssey and Americans Walking on the Moon.

The Future Looked incredibly Bright and Optomistic

We could fuck like mad and have absolutely loads of Children - because we were going to Populate the Universe.

That may at some point be possible - if we continue to develop our SCIENCE.

But because we are still controlled by completely out of date Religion's, Cultures and Politicians we will almost certainly Destroy Ourselves.

That is such a pity - because the Universe is an Incredibly Big Space.

Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)

We live in such an incredibly beautiful place but we are destroying it and ourselves because we are controlled by idiots who base their decisions on 2,000 year old Faith.

Basing decisions on Faith is like having a car with an intermittent fault that has stopped going. You haven't a clue why it has stopped because you are not a car mechanic.

So you all get outside of the car and get on your knees and pray that it will start working and get you home.

Tony

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Go to My Project Plan for America: http://jonalist.bravehost.com/articles/evfcf.html

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Here is an 8 part video about this very subject. It's all in the math...

http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=13
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=18
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=19
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=20
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=21
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=22
http://www.peakoil.tv/videos.php?id=23

I have been waiting for years for someone to bring up this subject. Now if we can just make everyone understand.

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Very sadly, my natural fears about giving birth and raising the children I was pregnant with were fanned by, among many sources, the promotions of the 'zero population growth' lobby.

My not having the children I was pregnant with is my own responsibility yet, I was most certainly influenced by considering the fears promoted by others.

Those sources were not limited only to organizations of questionable merit. My experience surely included one too many baby shower 'horror' stories told by mothers, young and old, vying to top each other in agonizing detail...too bad they only give prizes for the party games.

I'm now clear that my world, at least, would not have come to this point had I been willing to have a child when I was pregnant instead of allowing fears to shape my future.

God is very good at all aspects of making babies. Second-guessing Him is not wise.

In short: Love does NOT insist on its own way.

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It needs to be said over and over again, until we get the message. Hopefully, this will happen before we make ourselves extinct. The planet will survive...not so humans. This is the one BIG issue that NO ONE, left, right, religious or otherwise, will face.

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A number of the comments here seem to say that for "developing" nations, high birth rates are not really a concern, because the poorest people in the world don't consume nearly the resources that those in America, Europe, etc. do. It is absolutely true that they don't. Their carbon footprints are infinitesimal compared to mine. However, there are still negative impacts on the environment from extremely high population levels in these parts of the world. Look at water quality in these areas. Look at deforestation and its subsequent impacts in Haiti. Most of this deforestation was for producing charcoal in an area with limited geographic resources and increasing birthrate. The charcoal was/is used as an energy source for Haitians, not to fuel excess consumption of Americans, etc. I can hear some saying now that "As bad as the reduction of Haiti's forests from a level of about 60% land cover in 1923 to around 2% in 2006 is, it in no way comes as close to harming the planet and contributing to global warming as what the US has done." Again I agree. This viewpoint is correct. Even with massive deforestation like this, the impact is still not as bad as that done by Europeans, Americans, et al.

However, the point is that even when the overall impact to the planet might be somewhat small, high birth rates can have negative effects even in areas where people don't consume that much. Global warming is just one environmental problem - albeit a major (perhaps the major) problem. There can be very negative, more localized environmental impacts based on high human populations. We need to look at issues of population growth on macro and micro levels.

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"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook. "A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."

I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today. According to a recent United Nations report, "Livestock's Long Shadow," raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.

A 2007 journal published by the American Dietetic Association found "meat protein production required 26 times more water than vegetable protein on rain-fed lands." The journal further states that dieticians "can encourage eating that is both healthful and conserving of soil, water, and energy by emphasizing plant sources of protein and foods that have been produced with fewer agricultural inputs."

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."

---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association

A single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day, which is equivalent to that of 20 to 40 humans.

70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)

On average 990 liters of water are required to produce one liter of milk. (United Nations)

Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)

It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)

Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.

“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in a PETA interview, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”

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In 10 generations each having 2 children as offspring you will have:
1,024 in the last generation
each having 3 children:
59,049 in the last generation
each having 4 children:
1,048,576 in the last generation
each having 5 children:
9,765,625 in the last generation
each having 6 children:
60,466,176 in the last generation

Now imagine all of us competing for a finite renewable supply of the ocean's fish to eat.

It won't take long before the other family clans will be taking a larger and larger share of the pie compared to the responsible clan that only has 2 offspring per generation.

Yet every single person from any family clan would feel just as entitled to a single fish as anyone else.

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Many of the problems with trying to lower World population have been mentioned in these comments, along with many of the solutions. There are some things that make dealing with the problem more difficult.

First, there is a good reason people like Al Gore don't talk about over population - they are part of the problem - Gore has FOUR kids, RFK, Jr. has FOUR kids, Thom Hartmann has THREE kids; all born after the 1972 "Limits to Growth" report came out. Can you say hypocrites?

I realized the problem 30 years ago when I was in college and decided to remain child-free. That decision largely cost me getting married. I was never all that enamored of child-rearing anyway, so step-kids have no appeal either. Before the invention of the internet, meeting other happily child-free singles was really, really hard. Now, I'm just kind of old for the whole scene. Such is life.

Anyway, there is no way we can ever begin to address the problem if corporate media refuses to even allow any discussion of it in a serious way. Virtually every comment I have ever seen on the topic in the corporate media leads to a dismissive, unanswered response. I don't know if any serious effort to start a discussion with paid advertising has been tried, but I'd be willing to bet that the major TV and radio media would be unwilling to ever take our money for such ads. Nothing changes without a way to begin the discussion in the public arena, and as long as our corporate masters continue the big lie of the Ponzi scheme called "economic growth" (which is really another way of saying resource depletion), then we are going to be lemmings headed for the cliff.

There is no good reason in this country, other than for the control of the media by those who benefit from the status quo, that everyone of near, or reproductive age should not be told of the problems we face, the ways to keep from contributing to it, the option and desirability of being child-free, and the means to keep from breeding. Everyone of procreating years should have FREE access to effective pregnancy prevention devices, sterilization and abortion services, within a reasonable distance of their homes. Eighty percent of counties in the U. S. currently do not have any abortion, or unbiased crisis pregnancy services available, just the Trojan horse religious ones that force women to carry undesired pregnancies to term.

I will greatly agree with those above who place a large share of the blame for our population problems on wacked religious beliefs. "Go forth and multiply" was written when human population was well under 100 million. Mission accomplished idiots!

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population control is concerned, the plains Indian culture had it right. Only raise the food in quantities to feed your tribal population. The numbers were controlled by that method. Voluntary control was my choice, when the world population reached 4 billion, I decided the world needed none from me, vasectomy. I have no misgivings about my decision, I was 28. The author is wrong about the issue of population being addressed in "An inconvenient truth", the estimate given is 9.1 to 9.5 billion when stabilization starts to occur. Gore also states that the most effective form of birth control in the poorer nations is the knowledge your children will survive.
I agree there are too many people, hell, we can't even feed what we have. Make a voluntary choice, for the survival of the species, and the planet. Lets take care of succeeding generations, and clean up our mess!

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Are we reduced to getting out information from something called 'truthdig' now? Is that really the best we can do?

We are not breeding ourselves to extinction. Not yet anyway. It would be good if those cultures who allow their religion to deprive them of family planning were to institute some reforms, yes. But those reforms will have to come from within. Sooner would be better, but population is not the problem.

Evironmental pillaging is a problem, yes. Big Oil and their buddies Big Chem, Big Pharma and Big Ag need to be stepped on, and hard. Coincidentally, those three industries are dependent on oil production, and it would be nice if their predations could be curbed before the bottom falls out of oil production and the price makes everything they touch completely impractical, because though that would reduce their habit, it would be too little too late.

We need to force them to clean up after themselves now, not when they get around to it, for starters. Big Pharma has categorically refused to accept unused prescriptions for disposal, for example. And amazingly, no one seems to be outraged about it. Chemical and agricultural businesses need to do the same, and somehow they, and the oil companies have to be got out of government.

No, we don't need petrochemicals and Big Ag to insure that people are fed. In point of fact, the more food production and delivery we hand over to Big Ag, the greater the risk of more famine, because centralized food production is the least possibly secure food delivery system we could invent. It just begs sabotage, not only from Mother Nature, but from hostile agencies of all sorts. Big Ag has ruined more land in a shorter time than is believable by anyone who hasn't been around watching for the last forty or fifty years. Big Ag can ruin the land in only a few seasons. And it then takes decades to recover it, if it can be recovered at all.

So if you are concerned about feeding the world, campaign for local food production by local individuals. Get corporate interests out of food production. Go back to eating locally and seasonally.

We need to start NOW, because farmers are being ruined almost as fast as the land. And FYI, farming education isn't got primarily from books, it comes from experience with the land and the stock. So when the farmers are gone, we will be pretty much starting from scratch when we are forced to go back to local production.

We will, eventually. The only question is whether that time will come before or after the corporate food delivery caused famines.

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Bravo! It is about time somebody got us back on track on the issue of population control. It appeared to have slipped off the map of hot topics given all the other problems in the world. You'd think nobody but China pays any mind to what Malthus told us lo these many 200+ years back. When you stop to think of the exponential rate of growth, I'd be in favor of putting that "octymoron," Nadya Suleman in prison were it not for the fact that her FOURTEEN children need a mother. No, on second thought, put her doctor in prison!

Let's see, if the 14 marry and have just one child, and then those children have.... Well, you get the idea.

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The key to ending overpopulation and reducing population, is to fight for gay rights, including gay marriage. The pressure for males to play hetero and breed and multiply is only exacerbated to the extreme by homophobia, a prerequisite for machismo braggadocio.

End homophobia, respect homosexuals, and you not only begin to make significant inroads towards curving overpopulation: you also begin to snuff out all major wars...which do have their roots in this same, vulgar and violent heterocentric patriarchy.

The recent event of the octuplet expose marks the beginning of the end of uncontrolled, unlicensed hetero breeding. It will soon become de rigeur to show disgust and outrage against selfish heteros who bring new people into this world, when so many who alread exist, are without parents.

--
Let's secede from those who breed,
Make it a sin to NOT waste seed!
http://www.gay-bible.org

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The second definition of "breeding" is the selection of certain traits in generation after generation, so as to amplify those traits. Well, let's look at who has the babies and see which traits we are amplifying.

First off, the Pill has a 1% per year failure rate. A couple of friends had this problem. Can we selectively breed people like flies versus DDT to get a 2% per year failure rate? The same goes with the IUD failure rate. A couple of friends had this problem too. We live in a society where absolutely no high school or college kid consciously wants a baby immediately, so the possession of enhanced unintentional pregnancy genes carries a high Darwinian survival/propagation factor.

Can we have intelligence in the classroom and sheer stupidity on Saturday Night? Why not?

The Irish (among others) have a gene that enables them to drink when they're not feeling thirsty. Talk about the luck of the Irish!

In general we are unconsciously breeding people who really, really think babies are cute, who would die for love, and all that. We're also breeding a race of people who really enjoy/can't stop getting drunk on booze or wired on meth.

Humans are having more pairs of twins these days. I don't know what kind of genes OctoMom has, but try to keep your kids 500 miles away from any of her kids.

Ten generations down the road, who will we be? We'll be mostly highly intelligent fools who can barely remember to use birth control especially when blasted out of our minds, who release lots and lots of eggs at all different times of the month, who successfully implant more of their fertilized eggs, who pop outtriplets when they can, and who love babies.

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1. BIRTH CONTROL FOR BEEFCATTLE

Vasumurti (Mar 11, 2009 11:25 AM, above) has it right: "overconsumption is the problem, not "overpopulation". Worldwide the bovine herd currently numbers something like 1.2 billion. (Everyone knows 90% of these animals are "owned" by the wealthiest 10% of humans, but that's another subject.)


Considering the weight of an average animal, reducing that herd to, say, under 100 million would release land and resources for another 3 billion humans, solving our 2050 problem. Besides, red meat shortens life, folks.

Let's prioretize developing intelligence tests for unborn bovine fetuses so we know which ones to neuter or slaughter (99%). The survivors could earn their living hauling the recycling truck around town, piloted by 6-year-old human apprentices operating a computer hook-up.

2. GM HUMAN DOWNSIZING

Institute tax breaks for families who agree to have children guaranteed to reach an adult weight of 50, 25, or (by year 3000) 7 pounds (by which time a population of 90 billion might be sustainable-- more souls for religion to send to heaven after they finish 600-year life span).

3. EUNUCHS

Lifelong tax breaks, job security and respect for children sterilized at birth.

4. SHMEAT

Test-tube protein food products to use in quiche, pesto, guacamole etc. Vegetarianism is good but should not be compulsory.

5. TERMITES

We can learn something from chimpanzees, they aren't stupid. Chimps wet a small stick with their saliva, poke it into a termite nest, wait for termites to crawl on it, pull it up and eat. The US, Australia and other countries have a colossal biofuels problem worsened by recent droughts, costing $billions a year. Hire refugees, immigrants, ex-offenders, teachers, children, interns, volunteers etc. to clip, hack, gather, bundle trillions of dead sticks; shred and pulverize, and raise trillions of termites for quiche, pesto etc.

6. THE SUPERPRIMATE FAMILY

How did we get where there are 1.2 billion beefcattle and 200,000 chimpanzees, 25,000 bonobos, 75,000 gorillas and 17,000 orangutans? With their extra two chromosomes and opposable-thumb hind feet, they can climb up a 100-ft. high tree and clip branches (with anvil pruner, ratchet pruner, saw and hatchet worn on a tool belt) many timers faster than a human can. Using psychological techniques dreamed of in a perverse way by Orwell, we shall train and integrate these brethren into our society and increase their numbers while the slave meat animals are being reduced.

7. SPECIFIC REFORESTATION PROGRAM

By the year 2222 (in honor of Pete Rose and Al Capone) we shall have 200-foot tree canopy on 95% of all land in the tropics, 100-foot tree canopy on 95% of all land in the temperate zones, millions of one-window greenhouses at the poles, and 75% of the ocean waters covered by recycled crate-and-pallet-wood-based islands with 50-foot tree canopy. A few desert ("sand traps") and grassland ("fairways") canals for golf-playing families will run where today's superhighways are located.

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artificial insemination, in virto fertilization, and surrogate motherhood. Get rid of Viagra and all the male-enhancement products too.

I think every birth after the first should be taxed, and breaks should be given to those who are childless. Vasectomies and tubal ligations should be available on demand and at no charge.

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People scoff at me when I say space exploration is important, but building colonies in space is the only way you'll get people off of Earth. Or we'll nuke each other or starve each other or something. But space colonization is much less painful, in my opinion.

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Here is What It Is Like in Manchester, England - Well London Actually

Oasis - Waiting for the rapture (live) - Wembley 16.10.08

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road to legalization. Check it out.

http://www.votehemp.com/alerts/us_action_alert_20090311.html

At least let's give hemp a chance and quit complaining about over population.

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I have to quit before my computer seizes up. How about some more forums on this subject, very soon!

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I've been vegetarian since 1982. I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985, as anti-apartheid demonstrations rocked the UC San Diego campus. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.

Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes 3 times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the U.S.

Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:

"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...

"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...

"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.

"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."

Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"

Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:

"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry

"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience

"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline

"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"

When I first read Diet for a New America, I thought it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.

John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.

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You are just reading someone elses view of the World.

How do you know whether or not it is true?

How do you know what Muslim People, and South American People are Actually Like - unless you travel and meet them in Peace as an Equal

You Can't Discover The World Behind The Barrel of a Gun. You Might Find The Geography Before You Bomb It To Shit.

But You Can't Discover All The Lovely People That Live In This World

So Why Are You Trying To Control It When You Haven't Got a FUCKING CLUE?

You haven't Actually Been There and Lived IT?

You Have Just Been There And Blown The Fucking Place To Bits

Tony

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All creatures breed, to the maximum of their ability. -- That's entirely natural. -- What is NOT natural is that we have defeated all of our natural controls, such as predation, disease, starvation, and all the other things nature has devised to keep control over the numbers of her children. -- We obviously will not use proper birth controls. -- It would not be enough in any case. -- We are going to pay a very high price for our inventiveness, our medical expertise. -- Curing all ills is about to cost us a world of grief. -- Mother Nature has more bullets than we do, in this little war we are waging with her.

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In Europe Well Over 50% Of The Population Travel And meet people from different Cultures with Different Languages and Religions

In England the Figure is Much Higher than 50% - Probably Over 90%

It is Normal For Virtually All Of Us To Travel to Other Countries and Meet People Who Have Totally Different Cultures To Us

And We Realise That We Are All The Fucking Same

You Really KNOW when you meet someone who doesn't understand more than a couple of words of English - and you don't understand any words of their Language
and You Communicate BRILLIANTLY

And You make signs and you do things together and eat and drink together and you hug and cuddle and SEE

Its completely Fucking Amazing

Learning Language From Square One

Tony

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Call me a gloomy Gus if you will, but I think the population bomb is going to blow up in our faces, big time. Our big brains aren't much good if we don't use them, and, let's face it; we're suffering from a major case of STUPID, right now. If resource wars don't drastically reduce our population, then mass starvation will. It will most likely be a combination of both. The Earth will certainly survive even if humanity doesn't, and another species will gain ascendency over the rest. Picture roaches, rats, coyotes, buzzards, flies, and other opportunistic scavengers feasting on giant heaps of decomposing human corpses. That's the ultimate gross-out, and it's entirely possible, unless we get over the stupidity.

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Just a land map doesn't tell the whole story. You really ought to look at Rhode Island on the globe, to see what a speck on the earth it is.

In round numbers:

25 million: Square feet in one square mile.

25 billion: Square feet in 1000 square miles.

30 billion: Square feet in 1200 square miles.

1200 square miles: about the size of Rhode Island's 1214 square mile area.

5 square feet - sitting room for one human being.

6 billion: number of persons who can sit together in the State of Rhode Island. Also, total number of persons on this earth.


Some concepts that need review: The world is overpopulated. When icebergs melt in the middle of a freezing winter, it is caused by global warming, not nuclear underwater testing. Osama bin Laden did it with five box cutters to a jumbo jet.

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MALTHUSIAN THINKING PROVIDES NO SECURITY

In a briefing paper, the UK-based CornerHouse Research and Solidarity Group notes that Malthusian thinking is providing an enduring argument for the prevention of social and economic change and to obscure, in both academic and popular thinking, the real roots of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.

by Chakravarthi Raghavan

Geneva, 31 July 2000 -- A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of the Cold War and the triumph of the capitalist market, Malthusian thinking is being enlisted to counter land claims, opposition to free trade policies and emigration to seek work.

In a briefing paper, “Poverty, Politics and Population,” the UK-based CornerHouse Research and Solidarity Group notes that Malthusian thinking is providing an enduring argument for the prevention of social and economic change and to obscure, in both academic and popular thinking, the real roots of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.

The briefing paper is an edited extract of ‘The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development’ by Eric B Ross, published by Zed Books, London. Ross is an anthropologist at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands.

Thomas Malthus was a late 18th century Church of England cleric, an originator of the theory about human population - its doubling every 25 years, thus growing at a geometric proportion while food production increases at just an arithmetic rate, and hence population always outstripping food supply. This Malthusian assumption persists even today as a common explanation for poverty and environmental degradation. This theory continues to produce in the West and among Western-influenced elites an unremitting anxiety about ‘over-population’, and has been providing an enduring argument for prevention of social and economic change and obscuring the real roots of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.

“As such, no other ideological framework has so effectively legitimised Western interests, development theories and strategies, especially the Green Revolution and, now, genetic engineering in agriculture. This argument has consistently overwhelmed other explanations of poverty. Malthusian famine scenarios have systematically distracted attention from the fact that it is not people’s reproductive habits that are the principal source of most of the misuse or waste of the world’s resources, but the contradictions and motives of capitalist development.”

In his first Essay on the Principles of Population, population pressure is treated as a ‘law of nature’ making poverty natural and inevitable, and the ‘positive checks’ of disease and starvation regarded as chief routes through which population pressure can (and should be) alleviated. By suggesting that the fertility of the poor - rather than chronic or periodic unemployment, the fencing of common lands, or high food prices—was the main source of their poverty and implying that the poor’s fertility cannot be significantly influenced by human intervention, Malthus acquitted the property-owning class and the political economic system of accountability for poverty. Malthus insisted that anything that humans might do through their own social and political efforts to redress inequalities or to mitigate suffering would be counter-productive since it would only increase population and place more pressure on productive resources. A system of common ownership capable of supporting greater populations was, moreover, an affront to the ‘natural’ order of things. Capitalism was the only admissible system.

Google above title for entire article

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So here it is

I think it was about Man Made Earthquakes or Something

Keep you Pants On If You Want To Do This

Banned Episode MythBusters

I reckon the second was definitely faked and probably the first - there are far more convincing Real examples on the Web if you look.

Tony

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the Communist Party of China has the only solution.......'One Family - One Child'.

We should let their system flourish in Africa and Asia to save ourselves.

A logical solution, and we don't have to be involved.

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An excellent summary of humanity's most basic desperate dilemma. Overpopulaton supercedes all environmental degradaton concerns; without limits to growth, it is only a matter of time before the life of humankind once again becomes 'poor, nasty, brutish and short'.

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So agree - I think we are a little like yeast, chomping away on the sugars, producing alcohol (which some humans so like), but just before we can complete the task we choke ourselves in our own waste products - poor yeast, poor humans.

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DUH !!!!!!

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JUST WHO THE HELL ARE YOU THAT YOU THINK YOU ARE SO IMPORTANT THAT YOU CAN POLLUTE THE WORLD WITH MORE PEOPLE UNLESS YOU HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO GUARANTEE THEIR FUTURES AND A PLACE FOR THEM!

I WASN'T SO FORTUNATE BUT I MADE DAMN SURE I DID NOT HAVE ANY CHILDREN! EVER!

THE FLUCTATIONS IN THE ECONOMY ARE TOO UNCERTAIN AND THE COMPETITION TOO NUMEROUS AND UNFAIR TO EVER HAVE ANY CHILD OF MINE SUFFER WHAT I HAVE HAD TO GO THROUGH.

I BARELY WAS ABLE TO HOLD ENOUGH JOBS LONG ENOUGH TO QUALIFY FOR SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS. I ONLY HAD ONE JOB IN MY ENTIRE LIFE WHERE I HAD BENEFITS AND THEN I DID NOT MAKE IT THROUGH THE PROBATION PERIOD BECAUSE THEY REORGANIZED AND LAID US OFF.

THERE WAS ALSO GENDER AND ETHNIC AND AGE BIAS IN A RIGHT TO WORK STATE AND ALL OF THE PATERNALISM AND POLITICAL PATRONAGE THAT WENT WITH IT--NOT TO MENTION CRONYISM AND NEPOTISM.

THE BABY BOOM DEMOGRAPHIC WAS WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE WAY TOO SOON AND THE SOCIETY JUST COULD NEVER AZSSIUMLATE THAT MANY PEOPLE.

AND THIS BABY BOOM HAS APPARENTLY CONTINUED UNABATED SINCE THEN.

KISSINGER'S REMARKS ABOUT "USELESS EATERS" THAT HE OBTAINED FROM AN SS OFFICER WHO SAID IT FIRST, A GUY NAMED OHLENSORF, I BELIEVE MIGHT HAVE SOME TRUTH IN THEM BUT...

WHO DETERMINES WHO ARE THE USELESS EATERS AND HOW WILL THEY DISPOSED OF AND BY WHO

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Since this entire argument has been proven to be so much bullshit... who really cares? One can only wish that the alarmists who lap up Algore's absurdities would stop breeding. In a the space of a single generation, we could lower the hot air factor on the planet by tens of degrees, brighten the outlook for all free thinking persons, and rid our national conscience of the embarrassment of that waste of respiration.

So- it's up to YOU. Stop breeding NOW!!

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Population growth is actually falling in some places. Why? Because of the endocrine disrupting chemicals in everything from baby bottles to toys to cosmetics - and many more products. (Bisphenol-A, the baby bottle chem, also in food can liners, was developed as a synthetic estrogen. Phthalates are another endocrine disrupting plasticizer and is found in fragrance as well.) These affect kids reproductive systems - especially those of baby boys. So, testosterone levels are dropping along with sperm counts. Give it a few years and the birth rate will be dropping everywhere.

Not the solution I would have chosen - but the stuff is now ubiquitous - in all our bodies, the water, the food, the air. So, watch all that fecundity going down in the years to come.

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Survival of the Fittest
My neighbors, Doctor and wife, have 5 children, all kids are highly intelligent and compassionate.
I am a foster parent (I’m agnostic), the children I care for were produced by stupid people who can’t care for themselves and abused and neglected their children. One bitch had 8 kids by 8 different men and they are all in foster care. The kids are so screwed up by the time the get to foster care that they will probably not make much of their lives either. And they will produce more kids and abuse and neglect them and the cycle continues.
I would rather see people like the doctor have a dozen kids than one of these stupid bitches have one.
We must spay and neuter the feral dogs that pray on our society.

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I have 7 kids and it's none of your business. I am respondsible for them and have never needed a government hand out. So for all you who don't want kids don't worry about it I have you covered.

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I know that many others in this comment thread have brought it up, but I just want to drive a stake through the heart of this utterly vapid argument against the urgency of addresssing population issues: “In fact, demographers tend to be more concerned these days about declining population growth and population aging than they are about too many people.”

The concerns of these demographers are rooted exclusively in an economic model that requires exponential growth. It is mathematically trivial to show that exponential growth in a finite world is unsustainable. Here, unsustainable should be clearly understood as a euphemism for willfully stupid beyond description.

These demographers have conveniently chosen to ignore the elephant in the room as the Hubbert peak passes, as ocean fish stocks collapse, as fresh water becomes a battleground, as media and corporate interests design, spread and buttress a culture of consumption even for the impoverished, as ugly anitbiotic resistant strains of microrganisms multiply, as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations relentlessly exponentiate, as the global arms market continues to boom, as extinctions accelerate, as the economics of global food supplies continue to undermine the meager foundation that has kept many millions just this side of starvation (not to mention the many millions it has abandoned to that horrific fate).

As the most extraordinarily successful large life form that has ever existed on the planet, we had better start asking a very painful question: whether it is possible to be too successful. I remember what I observed many years ago in a little jar of nematodes and pablum with a tight fitting lid, a failed science fair project, over the course of a few days: the problem with biological systems and finite resources is that they always ask that question about success – and then answer it - if someone else doesn’t ask it first.

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by John Brunner, 1968. Read it and weep. And figure out that no amount of redistribution of resources or reducing carbon footprints in "developed" countries, can compensate for the simple fact that the earth is far past her maximum carrying capacity, for the human species.
I'm not saying don't make the effort to reduce consumption, just don't be so delusional as to believe that any amount of reduced consumption will compensate for overpopulation.

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It's wrong about where this is headed - long before the biological wasteland stage is reached, mega-plagues will reduce the human population.

Think about it - sea level rise and droughts caused by global warming will produce mass migrations of vast populations. Refugee camps larger and more numerous than the world has ever seen will spring up - and nothing is a better breeding ground for disease than a refugee camp.

With pathogens being transported along with migrating populations, then being mixed together and incubated in these huge, crowded, dirty, underfed camps, pandemics will be unstoppable.

The countries most environmental refugees of the third world will be able to reach will be only slightly better-off than where they came from, and won't possess the resources to do much.They won't even be able to contain disease outbreaks to the camps.

The industrialized nations, with problems of their own, won't be able to provide enough assistance to do much good, and may resort to quarantining whole regions in a desperate effort to keep the plagues away. Whether they can succeed is questionable.

Perhaps this grim scenario can be avoided by all-out efforts against global warming and overpopulation - or it may already be too late. We can only do our damnedest, and hope it's enough.

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America is psychotic when it comes to consuming resources. But population is still the issue here. The idea that when one looks out of the window of a plane and sees vast areas of sparsely populated land, that this means we have land and redistribution of population is the answer is naive. America built its cities around the best farming land. Suburban sprawl ate up the best farm land. In many areas, such as the Washington, DC area, sprawl has connected rural areas so far out that Winchester, Virginia, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland are considered to be suburbs of Washington, DC - complete with vast numbers of commuters each day (most, of course, driving their private SUVs to and from, with only one driver per car). Rural America has water issues in many parts of the country. The land needs to be left alone. We need to clean up the water we have polluted, but not so that we can continue to increase human population. We must get back to a clean, sustainable environment and REDUCE human population (not through wars, mass sterilization or other horrific things, but through education, and yes, at this point, LAWS, because it is too late to wait for entire philosophies and religious notions to be gently persuaded to change. There should be laws created to stop humans from having more than one child per family, and adoption should be encouraged when people wish for larger families. God knows there are enough orphans on this planet. Instead of having tax subsidies for having more children, we can have tax penalties for having more children, and subsidies for adoptions.) There is no such thing as a "depopulation mess." Our American economy is based on perpetual growth, and that needs to change. Herman Daly's "Steady-State Economics" is an excellent alternative model. The idea that if we just turn ourselves into pretzels, we can happily continue to increase human population is psychotic. There comes a time when the house is full - no matter how very responsibly people are behaving. The people who say we all have a right to breed as many kids as we want aren't thinking. The earth can't sustain this level of humans, more would be even more devastating to the environment. When we demand that everyone has the right to breed as many children as they want, we are turning a blind eye to the massive suffering that this brings, mainly to the children - especially in impoverished areas, where the child is born, then slowly starves to death, or lives in abject poverty and only gets just enough to live long enough to breed more children. Quality of life needs to be factored into the equation. But even in wealthy nations, over-population is an issue, and needs to be addressed. No matter where on the planet we are talking about, we need to be mindful not to overrun the planet with humans. We can certainly spread more poverty all around if we keep breeding more than the earth can sustain.

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Like most articles on the Alternet environmental pages, this article is full of misleading and inaccurate comments. The population bomb exploded decades ago and is winding down while running its course. The population bomb can't be 'put back in its bottle'. All projections are that world population will level off and start declining in another 50 years or so. How will humanity arrange itself once population growth has stopped?

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Duh!

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...and the Church of the Divine Pedophile forbids its members, under the threat of eternal damnation, from using birth control. The extinction of homo sapiens would be a blessing to ever other species on this dying planet.

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