Human Population and Animal Rights - A Guest Blog

Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken.
The extinction crisis is escalating. But how is this crisis related to human overpopulation?

Too many human beings doing so many destructive things on the planet is the cause of the 6th mass extinction. THIS IS AN ANIMAL RIGHTS ISSUE - THE ULTIMATE ONE.

Reviewing the global destruction of ecosystems, plummeting wild populations and species losses makes it obvious our industrial consumer culture has to stop the destruction NOW.
All life on the planet is going and going fast.

We have got to this point because we (people in our culture) think we are the only life deserving rights. People have to decide: Do they want all animals on Earth to die out? Right now they are deciding: Yes.

There are 4 things that have to happen NOW if animal life on Earth is to survive. (And I'm using the lay -- not scientific -- meaning of animals. Many people forget, ironically, that humans are animals.)

1. STOP EATING FLESH - animal and fish and fowl
2. STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS
3. STOP CUTTING DOWN and BURNING FORESTS\
4. STOP INCREASING the HUMAN POPULATION

It is very clear that it's too late to think just doing less of these destructive activities will prevent the extinction of life. The Earth is already in ecological melt down. Action must be DRASTIC and it must be NOW to stop the destruction of life from becoming irreversible.

Our industrial consumer economy is converting the Earth into an uninhabitable planet at breakneck speed. We are already beyond some planetary tipping points. If we don't give the organic living Earth a space to recover and replenish, the entire biosphere will crash in a matter of decades and all animal life will die out over the next century.

To stop these insanely destructive activities, we must stop denying any life but our own the right to live. This means:

• OTHER ANIMALS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE.


• FUTURE HUMAN GENERATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE.


• CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO INHERIT A HABITABLE PLANET.

So, what do you think? Is it time to start reducing human populations to ensure that the rest of nature survives?

For the Earth, the Children (of All Species), and the Future,
Peter D. Carter, MD


Thank you to Voices in the Wilderness: A Prayer for Wild Things for their beautiful mosaic.

Technology has Advanced but Social Development has Regressed

Approaching seven billion (they say the world's population hit 6,666,666,666 people yesterday, May 10/08), human numbers are finally pushing into the territory of which Malthus so direly warned. Oil production has passed its peak and the price has soared over $100/barrel. World grain production is decreasing and the prices of rice and wheat have skyrocketed, even setting off riots. The ocean's fisheries are being depleted, global temperature is rising grimly, and I could go on in this vein for a long while.

It's all about the tragedy of the commons. Live for the moment. Grasp as much as you can, and to hell with the others. We just don't care about the common good and, hence, about the future.

A century ago, thinkers felt that with a new era of cheap energy and mass production, a golden age of enlightenment would surely follow. Those dreams quickly ran onto a reef.

Today our society is characterized by conspicuous consumption, superficiality, vanity, materialism and mindless entertainment. Those are the icons we worship. Instead of kindness, we have apathy. Instead of charity, we have greed. Instead of planning, we have instant gratification. Instead of caring, we are self-absorbed. Instead of sharing, we grasp for more. Instead of consideration, we have vanity and narcissism. Instead of ethics, everything is condoned. Instead of honour, we have "who cares."

Technology has made astonishing advances over the past 100 years. But we humans have not progressed one iota in improving society and how we interact with each other. We should be ashamed. Our outlook needs to change, for without that we will not be able to grapple with the huge problems we face; the Malthusian Devil will swallow us.

(Thanks to Rick Audet for his photo, posted at Flickr.com.)

More Food Leads to More Hunger

Just read Steven Earl Salmony's take on some recent population research in Environmental Health Perspectives. This research shows something that not many of us have the stomach to contemplate.

"According to the empirical research (Hopfenberg 2003), human population growth is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this growth in human numbers gives rise to the mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more."

The more we increase food production, the more the population grows, and the more hungry people there are. So we increase food production, which leads to an increase in population, and again there are those who go hungry.

In other words, if the population grows, then the population of hungry people grows, too.

"The evidence suggests that the remarkably successful efforts of humankind to increase food production to feed a growing population results in even greater increase in population numbers."

According to Salmony, the researchers call the perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population "a misperception, a denial of the physical reality of the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment in time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing, and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane — the produced food arrives too late."

But this does not mean that human starvation is inevitable, says Salmony. Living within the Earth's carrying capacity is the secret.

"We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many civilized human communities today, because these nonhuman species are not annually increasing their own production of food.

"Among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like nonhuman species, 'primitive' human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and other ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.

"Before the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment's physical capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily a function of food availability (Hopfenberg 2003; Hopfenberg and Pimentel 2001)."

I'm not sure I've wrapped my head around the ramifications of this research, but it certainly says something about unintended consequences.

One-Child Families

It's well recognized that environmental degradation is not just dependent on the number of human beings, but also the amount they consume. In searching for ways to lessen humanity's footprint, it's commonly argued that developed countries should decrease their relentless consumption of resources by toning down their materialistic lifestyles. At the same time, poor nations should curb their high population growth rates.

A very important factor is lost in this polemic. Unappreciated is that the United States is not only the most affluent country in the world, but it is also the third most populous with over 300 million souls and growing robustly at 1% per year. Thus, America needs to address both sides of the equation by cutting consumption and curbing its population growth.

US politicians are unaware of the population issue, and wouldn't touch it if they were. A few local groups, however, are beginning to recognize the importance of smaller family sizes. The e-zine "onlychild.typepad.com" is an excellent resource that not only encourages one-child families but also offers advice, information and links for only children and their family and friends.

Having a smaller family can be a difficult decision, but an enormously important one.

Surviving Converging Catastrophes

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) makes a spell-binding — and frightening — read.

He convincingly postulates that the enormous surge in human population to almost seven billion people has only been possible because of oil, which allowed humans to far exceed the Earth's carrying capacity.

Now that peak oil has been reached he bleakly predicts a breakdown of civilization. Because nothing, not solar, wind nor any other energy source, can replace the convenience, the versatility, the energy content of oil.

Less and less oil will be produced each year, as the population continues to grow robustly. Agricultural output will decrease, for the Green Revolution is based primarily on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and oil-powered irrigation.

Society will retreat from globalization and become more localized. Diseases will spread rampantly to reduce the population to what Kunstler calls the "solar capacity" level.

The Long Emergency is fascinating, and very compellingly urges us to take action. Will we?

Human Population Decline? Not Fast Enough

According to David Reher, a population historian at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, "historically, a 'large and well-nourished population' has always been considered the sign of a successful society and a successful economy. The very idea of decline and of population shortage is largely foreign to our society, mostly because for several centuries there has been no experience of shrinking population."

But, he says, there are several signs that global human population is heading into decline, after two hundred years of unstoppable growth. National fertility rates are dropping nearly everywhere in the world. Women's roles are changing. The processes of modernization have tipped the cost-benefit ratio of having large families, making them uneconomic, especially in urban settings.



"Times of flux are not times that are conducive to optimism about the future," Reher says. "Having children is ultimately an expression of confidence in the future; in the security of the life you can expect your children to be able to lead."

"For our children, and especially our grandchildren, persistent population decline — and possibly lower living standards — will likely be the only reality they will ever experience and the times of runaway population growth so prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be but a distant memory of the past."

"Periods of decline," Reher explains, "have been equated to decadence and to societies that were somehow unable to function properly." He goes on to say that this is "a time of deepening concern about the sustainability of society as we know it."

But global population decline isn't happening fast enough to make a difference in our negative impact on the planet.

In 1989, Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, a renowned French demographer, suggested that "… l’humanité part de zéro, il y a quelque 600 000 ans, et y retourne vers l’an 2400" (humanity started from nothing 600,000 years ago, and will return to nothing around the year 2400). Perhaps Bourgeois-Pichat was factoring global warming into his population projections?

It will be sooner now, however, with the latest climate change research added in. If global overheating is left unchecked (because we don't make the necessary transition to a renewable energy economy fast enough), by 2100 most species on Earth will be condemned to eventual extinction — homo sapiens being no exception.


[Reher's paper, Long-term population decline, past and future, was presented at the 2005 International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Conference in Tours, France.

Darkness and Light and Overpopulation Per Capita

What does NASA's shot of the Earth at night tell us about overpopulation? Check out Europe, Japan, and especially the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Toronto to Montreal corridor in Canada.

Are we that afraid of the dark in the West, or are we just too over-electrified for the size of our populations — and using more power than we deserve to? Sometimes, population issues aren't simply about numbers of people.

Chinese Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, points out that his country's per capita emissions of greenhouse gases are still much lower than those of developed countries. "It's like there is one person who eats three slices of bread for breakfast, and there are three people, each of whom eats only one slice. Who should be on a diet?" he asked.

"If per capita energy consumption is viewed in the context of the fundamental principle that people are all born equal, then I don't think some people are justified in talking about the large emissions of China, as if they have the moral high ground."

Hmm. Not sure about that moral high ground, but we sure do have the ground well lit up for us at night.