Economic Growth: A Cancer On All Earthly Life

By Donald A. Collins | 6 May 2023
Church and State

(Photo: Dreamstime.com)

What’s the most feared word in any language? Cancer? Why? Once you get it, doctors cut it out, they constrict blood flow to it, they turn your immune system against it, otherwise it grows and spreads and takes over your critical organs rendering them useless, so you die a horrible and painful death.

Take it from me as a 27-year cancer survivor, you don’t want it. I hope you have good genetics or a healthy lifestyle, whatever those things mean. How else do you fight it? You lose. You die.

Even though much natural beauty remains on our planet, all life on earth, including humanity, is in a similar battle for survival. Humanity’s economy defined by a minimum of 2.5% growth per quarter is a cancer to all life on earth including us. Scientists tell us earth, its seas and lands and us are in stage T4.

The most comprehensive film on the status of our plundered planet’s environment can be viewed on YouTube under the title “Ice on Fire”. The film dramatically chronicles that in the 250 years of the Industrial Age we have dumped 1.4 trillion tons of carbon into our atmosphere, the most spewed out in our lifetimes.

If you are curious about the prior 5 major mass extinctions which have occurred, a brief excellent summary can be read here.

This cancer in part derives partly from our failure to use what already exists in the way of family planning methods often unapproved due to bureaucratic malfeasance such as QS was unjustly demonized by the USFDA despite it proven safety and its effectiveness.

You can read about this promising method here.

Better distribution of long approved family planning methods such as IUDs, the Pill, condoms and mifepristone and its companion misoprostol with better distribution sans ideological enemies of women’s rights could have beginning in the mid-20th Century when Earth’s human population was 3.5 billion. Now at 8 billion human numbers and much of our flora and fauna are in trouble and unsustainable.

As the attached definition of cancer describes there are many types of cancer all varying degrees of danger to treat and solve.

Read the American Cancer Society definitions here.

That the growth of human numbers has acted like an aggressive cancer can easily be demonstrated.

With every problem sector of climate, environment, war, disease, and seemingly unsolvable human disputes the impact of too many of us has become evident!

Many mindlessly thought and still think the growth of one species completely out of balance with all the other flora and fauna on our tiny orb can go on forever.

As I noted before, such unsustainable economic growth, human greed, the imposed fantasies of religious autocracies, and the vast racism of competing cultures have been the engines of excess as our industrial age produced extraordinary progress and wealth for many as never before believed possible.

Medical advances have extended lifespans so again our failure to offer full birth control options has not slowed the cancerous impact of human numbers.

Few of the many solutions now offered to save our sick patient planet include reducing our numbers, but the result of the current crisis will surely reduce our numbers if the initial phase of the predicted 6th Extinction accelerates in this century as scientists widely predict.

So, my analogy that humans have provided cancer like growth which is the impetus to all the other problems now widely cited has been fully explained and proven by scientists for decades.

Will we await the Grim Reaper or go for full blown efforts worldwide to add safe, reliable, inexpensive methods of fertility control with better distribution of the many promising ways now available to stem the earth’s environmental problems?

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?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?” and “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”.

Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists | 60 Minutes

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Sir David Attenborough on overpopulation

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