Devastation. Destruction. Extinction. Oblivious to the end the human plague marches boldly forward covering the planet and consuming all that stands before it. Rising from near extermination it’s a powerful epic struggle for survival whose heroic success has unfortunately sown the seeds of our own demise. As Pogo has astutely observed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

You think I’m unduly pessimistic. Well, perhaps so but it’s happened so many times before. History is littered with the remnants of failed civilizations. A failure so comprehensive that these civilization are now defunct and their populations have ceased to exist.

There’s Norse Greenland, Easter Island, The Anasazi, Vinland, Mangareva, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands ( Southeast Polynesia ), and of course the Ancient Maya among others. A sobering record of ultimate human failure. The difference between these failures and our current predicament is that these earlier failures were local in nature while a failure now involves the entire planet. In short if we screw up now there’s nowhere left to start over!

Fortunately it hasn’t been a failure everywhere. There are a few successes for those willing and able to pay the price. Unfortunately the price is often very high but maybe we can learn some lessons from the Iceland, Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe Islands, New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and Japan (Tokugawa) success stories. This is precisely what Jared Diamond attempted in his book Collapse (a tour de force in my opinion). The result is sobering to say the least.

My take on all this? The potential consequences are so devastating that it’s only prudent to take precautions. I know the history of such predictions has been atrocious. From Malthus to Limits to Growth (30 year update) the predictions have been uniformly pathetic. So pathetic in fact that people tend to dismiss these Cassandra type warnings as crying wolf. That is, the predictions no longer seem credible to many people. The tragedy is that the wolf eventually came, ate the flock and ruined the village livelihood. It appears to me that a similar scenario with respect to these types of predictions is occurring except on a massive (i.e., global) scale and the stakes are no less than the survival of humans.

Ultimately I don’t think you can deny the logic of the Malthusian argument. We’ve been given a reprieve by technology but the relief is, at best, temporary . While Malthus limited himself to just considering the effects of overpopulation with a limited food supply our modern civilizations are somewhat more vulnerable. In fact in some ways technology has exacerbated the problems. For example modern medicine has dramatically reduced infant mortality. However human cultures have not adapted to this change resulting in the human population explosion which now plagues the Earth. [The majority of people who have ever lived during the entire existence of mankind are actually alive today! edit: see comments, this statement is in dispute.] In short the Earth’s human population is the densest it has ever been creating unprecedented human stress on the planet

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Tags: overpopulation, politics, Science

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 6:27 pm and is filed under overpopulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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