My Yale 1953 Classmates Are Mostly Dead But I’m Still Alive And Still Proclaiming! Is War Obsolete?

By Donald A. Collins | 4 January 2022
Church and State

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When I started writing Op Ed’s in 1994 right after my wife died of cancer, I was 63 years old and had a set of political views, which I now have changed many of, except for one, the fact that the 4 times growth human numbers in my 90 year lifetime on a finite planet can’t be sustainable.

As the outstanding article on a web site I now write for tells us, there are many reasons (this expert names 12) for concern but relatively puny efforts are underway to address the problem. Read the entire article here.

Meantime, since worldwide political leaders ignore the problem, there are constant chances for humans stumbling into war, as now in the Ukraine. Using nukes must now be understood as obviously suicidal even by Kim and Chi.

Far more serious opportunities for war are emerging from China under Chi who is rapidly emulating Hitler’s aggression ambitions and includes his racism toward ethnic minorities which you can read here.

Just one problem emerges to everyone who admits to the validity of this following statement or not: War on Planet Earth should now be understood as unable to be useful and should now be declared and universally treated as obsolete!

No, war is certainly not gone as an obvious possibility, and certainly not as a fix for the surfeit of human numbers and the allocation of resources to sustain peaceful human habitability on Earth.

Time is not on our side, as the effects of climate disasters compound.

Efforts to convert from fossil fuels to EVs for cars are laudable but laughable in the face of human numbers and the daily perceivable behavior of ignoramuses like the leaders and Trumpian adherents to the non-governing Republican Party.

But sadly they are not alone in their blindness.

Further the continuing opinions from some experts about the likely fall in human numbers have proved wrong!

Why? Well, right now roughly half of US births are unintended and net planetary human numbers grow by 80 million annually.

Noted recent UN Climate Conference attendee Sir David Attenborough, who is 95, has long predicted that on present trends we could have 11 billion humans by 2100 versus nearly 8 billion now.

Another of my heroes, E.O Wilson, who died on December 26th at 92, agreed with Sir David on the population issue. You can read his important contributions here.

But like Sir David, Professor Wilson was convinced that the major problem the world faces is a surfeit of humans, whose effect on our Earth he bemoaned in this 2019 interview, which you can read in full here.

In part this is what Wilson said in the above interview for Population Connection’s magazine:

Modest as he was, Wilson had a lot to say about human pressures on the environment, and how we should be trying to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve made. After I described the mission and programs of Population Connection, he responded:

“I think the epicenter of all of our problems in the environment is runaway population growth. I know I’ve been optimistic, particularly in the book Half-Earth, that the population problem could solve itself, but nonetheless, there’s a residual problem that comes from too many children and too many demands by people wanting to move up economically in too many countries for the world to come out in the condition it should be aiming for.”

He apologized in advance for sounding like a lecturing Harvard professor, and then identified which environmental challenges he sees as the most critical today (after first saying, “We’ve already determined that [human population growth] is, environmentally, possibly the central and most important part of the modern environmental movement.”) The three major challenges, in his view, are climate change, water shortages, and species extinction.

All of [these crises] have as one of the primal causes human over-reproduction. Climate change is just one of three major environmental crises facing us. After climate change is shortage of fresh water. Something like 4% of water in the world is in lakes and rivers, and it’s running out fast, and it’s a primary cause in several parts of the world of major migration. The third one is the mass extinction of species. We don’t know how ecosystems are formed, what makes them stable, or how they equilibrate, and we can’t say what happens when some obscure little species is taken out. We have no way of guessing.

When I depart this life shortly, I expect to see no real immediate action by world leadership except continuing non-population crisis recognition, but despite their blindness, certain environmental pressures to make life less habitable, could spark more and more women to fear birthing babies into such chaos. Thus, access to safe, inexpensive, legal birth control remains the only urgently logical trend forward.

I paraphrase below the Latin Roman gladiator admission, Morituri Te Salutant, which was what gladiators in Rome would say to the emperor before they engaged in deathly combat. If below in my interpretation, I substitute for “emperor” the word “population” and for the word “gladiator” the word “us”, my admonition seems apt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Are_About_to_Die_Salute_You\

We, who are hopefully not about to die if we recognize and repair our feckless behavior, pray for you and all the wondrous living things on our beautiful planet!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 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?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?” and “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?: Leaders Commit to Reduce Human Population”.

Remembering the life of renowned biologist and Alabama native E.O. Wilson

Sir David Attenborough on overpopulation

Attenborough tells COP26 conference delegates: ‘The world is looking to you’ – BBC News

Overpopulation & Climate Change: A Seat at the Table

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