Human Blind Arrogance and Overpopulation

By Donald A. Collins | 12 August 2020
Church and State

The Covid 19 news blends sharply into daily escalating violence in many of our major cities while our national government cannot seem to come to agreement on the obvious human needs occasioned by the virus!

No one of course wants to take the blame for the root problem which my numerous op ed pieces on this site have denoted—over population on our limited planet.

The world as we know has added 6 billion net new humans compared to the 2 billion number of people at my birth in 1931. This despite constant lauding of the great value of more growth by many has led to the dangerous unraveling of life on earth now daily reported in all our mass media WITHOUT attribution credit except from those same far seeing experts I have quoted in my many op ed pieces on this subject.

But repetition may be the only way to finally get the action and attention the population growth issue must soon obtain or the price to be paid could well be planetary death or tyranny for all of those who survive.

The myriad of books on Earth’s possible end such as Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach” or “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy take on more and more credence as we read the daily news in our mass media.

Page one of the 8/11/20 Wall Street Journal’s headlined stories begins to make my point about the adverse trend in human livability now. These articles tell of looting on Chicago’s Miracle Mile where the rich buy luxury goods, the resignations of Lebanon’s government after its failure to anticipate the threat of the chemical storage in the center of Beirut which exploded and decimated that capital, and how China has tightened its tyranny over Hong Kong by arresting it’s pro-democracy media Barron Jimmy Lao or how our Coronavirus crisis continues to impede school openings.

We get this kind of news mix from all our major media daily. One small NGO that consistently “gets it” is Population Media Center (PMC) founded and led by Bill Ryerson and his team of visionaries.

In its most recent newsletter, PMC’s editor, Joe Bish, mentioned an example from one of those experts who call our concern unwarranted. The article entitled “Overpopulation Myth: New Study Predicts Population Decline This Century”, appeared in apparent support of the recent Lancet paper on the rise and fall to population to only 8.8 billion by 2100.

Overpopulation Myth: New Study Predicts Population Decline This Century | American Council on Science and Health https://t.co/L7diGEaPlz
— Darrell Bricker (@darrellbricker) August 6, 2020

By that time humans may well have stripped our fragile planet of many irreplaceable nonrenewable resources and caused many world governments to offer far less democracy, perhaps none!

The article is by Alex Berezow, PhD, “who is a PhD microbiologist, science writer, and public speaker who specializes in the debunking of junk science for the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)”.

You can read for yourself his article’s thesis of unconcern here. We can only hope our major world leaders will see that willingness to ignore the proven endless past human greed and the hypocrisy that by omission his view advocates.

While we can’t be perfect predictors of the future, the past behavior of mankind toward our environment has given us a track record upon which to raise legitimate concerns, which can’t be erased by any comments in this ACSH article.

Again, PMC recommends how taking the moderate actions that it recommends now can allow us to avoid the ends that human growth could easily take us to by 2100 or far sooner.

After reading the above, take a few minutes to see what the moderate and immediate actions which PMC recommends could accomplish. populationmedia.org

Bill Ryerson Founder of PMC and Steve Mumford, Chair of International Services Assistance Fund arranged for my wife, Sarah Gamble Epstein, daughter of Clarence James Gamble, founder of Pathfinder International, and me to meet the founders and editors of a London web site presided over by an enlightened couple named Declan and Lola Heavey about 10 years ago in London. Since then this brave, dynamic couple have leavened their small site into a powerful international voice for verity on a variety of contentious issues which the major media often feel uncomfortable addressing truthfully for fear of being politically unsettling and/or perhaps limiting access to sources. Go there and reap the benefit of its incisive writing on issues we all need to be concerned about. churchandstate.org.uk

Consider how rampant global population growth impacts the related crises of climate change, the rights of women and girls, and environmental degradation: https://t.co/MBqkACe8wh
— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) August 12, 2020

Meantime, many of our leaders and pundits fantasize about the benefits of establishing a station on Mars which would occur even now as we slash and burn our beautiful earth. While I am not at all adverse of the kind of wonderful improvements in our lives that science has made possible, there are limits to growth on a finite planet. As the Lancet article acknowledged, large amounts of human population growth continues so that many more humans than now could end up in dictatorial purgatory overseen by future dictators like the current ones such Putin, Chi or Kim only worse!

Restraint on population growth is far from being taken seriously yet as the above “no population problem” article and as the recent Lancet article’s projections tell us. We can’t take proper care of many of the almost 8 billion people here now, but continuing failure to heed the wise advice of PMC and other pioneers certainly could and likely will be cited by my great grandchildren or even my grandchildren as something they wished we had acted upon and didn’t.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013