Do Animals And Plants Understand Birth Planning Better Than Humans? Of Course!

By Donald A. Collins | 4 October 2021
Church and State

(Image by Jim Cooper from Pixabay)

Sitting in our breakfast room here in suburban Washington, DC, my wife and I watch the birds, mostly sparrows, using the several birth nest boxes to succor and raise their fledglings, who eventually poke out their little heads and fly away to begin their adult lives.

Now that Fall is upon us, these activities cease as we also notice the foxes which foster kits under a shed in the back of our property no longer do so.

Of course, nothing is perfect. The deer, mostly female in our yard, are seldom seen after leaves fall, perhaps in hiding, not wishing to get pregnant in Winter? I recall when I was living in Pennsylvania, the not perfect birth control among deer populations which in some areas were sometimes too numerous to survive Winters, and the Pennsylvania Game Commission made sure that deer were subjected to human culling by hunters, including offering limited doe hunting.

We don’t know about our rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks but we see no evidence that their birth control behaviors are adjusted with environmental conditions.

We know birthing seasons for mammals are regular and dependent on availability of water and food, something humans often ignore, as our mating habits and our means of preventing pregnancies are either unavailable, ignored or thought immoral by their religions.

Again, as Fall approaches the plants in our yard are going to rest for the coming Winter.

Oh, come on, you cry, at my comparison, but facts, something now eschewed by too many of us, speak otherwise, as we daily watch the playing out around the planet in scenes of human distress due to lack of sustainable resources.

Lacking resources, animals and plants rapidly adjust their reproductive behavior.

The consequences of human restraint as to their growth in numbers is not shared by our other planetary residents. We seem to have no concept of limits.

Their numbers are trimmed automatically by natural changes in their environments. We are so stupid to believe the same thing won’t happen to us!

And the timetable is loaded for disaster.

The many earlier urgent calls from expert environmental observers, who have been chronicled on this powerful web site, for limitation of our numbers has not stopped human numbers from burgeoning to nearly 8 billion, growing 4 times in my 90 year lifetime with 3 billion more predicted by 2100.

The present numbers are unsustainable. We already see the effects of destroying our renewable and unrenewable natural resources to meet human demands.

This growth will either be curtailed by human consensus or by brutal reactions from climate change or other certain forces beyond our ability to control.

As Albert Einstein opined, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity and I am not certain about the universe.”

Choice about reproductive behavior, observed instinctively by others in our magical, magnificent Earth, cannot be ignored by us humans without cataclysmic consequences certainly within the lifetimes of my grandchildren.

As noted, those consequences are already starkly evident to anyone with eyes, yet unaddressed by world leadership enough effective action to change the dire trends now unfolding.

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, Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive? and We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?.

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