Hi, I just found this website and forum and it looks pretty good with a lot of information. However, I don't see anything mentioned about the main reason that we're having environmental problems: Too many damn people on the planet.
About two years ago I was wondering why gasoline was getting so expensive and did some digging on the web. I found several sites like http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net http://www.peakoil.com http://theoildrum.com and more. All very interesting, and I've become somewhat of an amateur expert on oil and other energy sources, both conventional and alternative. Suffice it to say, in my humble opinion we're cooked (pardon the global warming pun) and we're all going to be forced into a power-down fairly soon, and it's not going to be pretty. And no, there's no alternatives, singly or in combination, that will allow us to live at anything near the current standard of living. As a matter of fact, an 1850s standard of living might be an attainable goal by 2050, if you're lucky and start preparing now!.
Along the way, I was re-introduced to the main cause of peak oil, peak natural gas, peak fish, peak grain, global warming and all the other problems seemingly ready to come to a head in the near future: human overpopulation. I say re-introduced because I had read The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich way back when, and pretty much forgot about it, like most people. My first re-introduction was a version of , a talk by Dr. Albert Bartlett in which he talks about the dangers of constant growth in a finite environment. Next I read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. One day someone pointed me to http://dieoff.com which is a pretty scary website, and then the real kicker, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R. Catton, Jr. Right now I'm reading Limits to Growth: A 30 Year Update after having re-read (25 years later) Limits to Growth.
All this information pretty much convinces me that we're headed for a population crash within the next couple of decades, and perhaps doing something today about this constantly growing population issue might be the first step toward making that crash somewhat less severe than it needs to be. Certainly continuing our constant growth will make it worse. Along the way, alleviating population pressure can also help animal and plant populations to rebound, or at least stop shrinking since one of the main causes of extinction today is habitat loss from human encroachment.
What say you all, is human population control/reduction a goal of this forum/website, or am I going to hear all about that oxymoron "sustainable development"?
|