By Donald A. Collins | 5 January 2023
Church and State
When I moved to California in 1975 its population was about 20 million. It is now 40 million and my San Francisco based son, a commercial salmon and dungeness crab fisherman for most of those interim years, tells me water shortages due to agricultural expansion has drained key spawning routes for salmon, so their future numbers are going to be seriously threatened.
The reported threats to planetary flora and fauna are daily told through our media, many using carefully documented scientific data.
My January 3rd Op Ed agreed fully with predictions on the January 1 CBS program “60 Minutes” by Paul Ehrlich and others that the time grows dangerously short until our human consumption will massively affect our habitability on earth.
“The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Biologist Paul Erlich says that our current way of life is unsustainable. https://t.co/AwaKLZFGsj pic.twitter.com/MU1jHpuMwI
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 2, 2023
Consequently, as I read the January 4th editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Paul Ehrlich Apocalypse Is Back, I cringed at its reasons based on greed, ignorance, and arrogance. It even engages in ageism by calling Ehrlich a spray 90 years old.
Read this embarrassing dismissal of facts here.
"Paul Ehrlich [age 90} is living proof that we are living through what his intellectual nemesis, Julian Simon, liked to call an 'epidemic of life.' We’d say that’s a cause for celebration." https://t.co/LeYbpYmTCa via @WSJ
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) January 4, 2023
It cites the fact people are now living longer (and you can see we are consuming more than we can sustainably produce) while noting Ehrlich was wrong his 1968 book The Population Bomb about widespread famine.
In 2015 Paul Ehrlich told Retro Report, "I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today." https://t.co/VBPsZygCct
— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) January 3, 2023
Ehrlich lost his famous bet with Julian Simon (see below) and now admits he was wrong about his worldwide famine prediction because of the introduction of miracle wheat which greatly increased food supply. Its inventor Norman Borlaug subsequently noted that those increases in food supply was not going to stop the demand for more food as human population reached higher and higher numbers. We can’t find more land without more dramatic harm to our environment.
The famous bet: Per Wikipedia: “He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance. Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade.” Trade metal supply for a rain forest?
Then the rise of industrialized farming has affected my son’s salmon catches and fish harvests worldwide.
Read about the poisonous effect of industrial agricultural farming here:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agriculture
https://civileats.com/2021/03/25/new-study-shows-the-growing-risks-of-pesticide-poisoning
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09939-0
https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/land-use
"Anything that we can't do forever is by definition unsustainable."
– David Attenborough
We need #permaculture and #regenerativeagriculture to build alternatives.https://t.co/DbrZ8qhvgn— Nick Steiner (@permanick) October 4, 2020
WSJ’s happy talk raves about all these wonderful extra people now living longer and eating better as we decimate more and more land for food production, including precious rain forests which so affect our climate as do the melting ice caps.
Big commercial interests will not apparently modify their behavior that has brought earth to a crisis point in the near term.
The failure to meet the goals set forth in the UN COP conferences gives Ehrlich and most reputable scientists provable credibility to their dire forecasts.
Read the attached articles by those who dismiss Ehrlich, and you will note they offer no arguments dismissing the destruction of renewable and unrenewable resources which will soon not meet the needs of our growing population!
Some including the WSJ embrace the position of the late Julian Simon who believed more people make the world better and citing less famine, longer lives and no problems with unsustainable growth please the rich who own the WSJ but infinite growth on a finite planet will not occur.
Simon was not a research scientist as you can read here. He was an economist who ignored the degradation of the assets that sustain us long term. A bean counter: Did he ask how many profits are earned from irreplaceable flora and fauna?
— Frank Fuhrig (@FrankFuhrig) November 4, 2022
By 2100 population at present growth world population could reach 11 billion, but long before a huge price will be paid as we homo sapiens choose suicide as the 6th Extinction looms.
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?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?” and “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”.“What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”: https://t.co/fHuh0CG6JD
“We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”: https://t.co/TA4j7cp1tE
“From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”: https://t.co/lkC2t3E1A9 pic.twitter.com/bQsL2mLBcO— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) November 1, 2021
Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists | 60 Minutes
Paul Ehrlich – The Population Bomb & Beyond
Al Bartlett on Julian Simon
Sir David Attenborough on overpopulation
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