John Feeney formerly of the Growth is Madness! blog has done something special in organizing the Global Population Speak Out which will take place during February 2009. Read the letter and note the stellar group who have signed on. It’s a brilliant idea and I will being doing my part to support it in my local community. Maybe you can too.
As noted by the Global Sensemaking community there is no one isolated issue facing us with the status of “most important” but rather an interlocking set of global wicked problems. We hear about climate change and issues around oil and energy in the mainstream media, but rarely about population pressure and not much regarding
- poverty
- water and food supply sustainability
- the destructive aspects economic growth
- declining biodiversity
- equal access to basic education and medical care for all
- equal rights for women world wide
- the production of and market for weapons
My sense is we need a label for this, a word that conveys that the number one problem we face as a global community is really this entanglement of several imporant issues all of which need attention but each of which can only be addressed effectively by understanding the interwoven nature of the collection. “Global wicked problems” has been suggested and I’ll use it until a more compelling one comes to mind.
So if population is but one of a rats nest of difficult problems, why am I going to the trouble of organizing a local event in support of the Global Population Speak Out? Because it is one of the wicked problems and John is exactly right when he says
…there exists today a taboo of sorts against public discussion of the population issue.
Several of us have written about that taboo and I want to use the GPSO in February to address it explicitly by acknowledging the rational (and irrational) concerns that give the taboo life and show that in spite of these fears we need to open up the discussion of wicked problems to include population pressure. By their nature, wicked problems must be solved as a system. Leaving out population issues will ensure we don’t solve any of them.
More to come as I get my material pulled together. Meanwhile check out the wealth of resources John has pulled together. The venue I have in mind is in Bethesda, MD, so if you are interested and in the Washington DC area please get in touch.
Dr. Feeney is to be commended for initiating and leading 2009’s Global Population Speak Out.
One key “misperception” that prevents too many policymakers and world leaders from appreciating the true dangers of our current demographic tidal wave might be called “the open space hypothesis.”
This erroneous hypothesis, which is largely held unconsciously, causes many to suppose that human population growth and overpopulation cannot really be a very severe problem so long as “vast amounts of open space remain.”
This breathtaking and dangerously-erroneous hypothesis is formally addressed at “Humanity’s Population Train Wreck” which is posted at http://rocky.xviii.tripod.com
Given the imminent arrival of our 7th, 8th, and 9th billions between now and mid-century, a continuation of today’s current demographic tidal wave may constitute the greatest single risk that our species has ever undertaken.
Many thank to Trinifar and John Feeney for speaking out loudly, clearly and often. Millions of voices are needed now more than ever before to support your efforts.
A jeremiad follows concerning wasting time and keeping silent while woefully inadequate leaders of the human community promulgate policies and initiate large-scale corporate activities that recklessly overheat and relentlessly ravage Earth and its environs.
My not-so-great generation of elders will likely be remembered as the perpetrators of the most perverse, self-serving silence in human history. No other generation has taken so much from this good Earth, threatened the very future of its own children and given so little of themselves to preserve life for coming generations. Photographs of us will disclose both our corpulence and hollowness.
Although the disclosure of truth is unsettling, hiding the truth from the human community could be a monstrous example of human-driven foolery, one that could soon lead to a colossal ecological wreckage.
To suppress the truth by conscientiously substituting whatsoever could somehow be true with willful silence is tantamount to the commission of a pernicious lie.
A widely shared and consensually validated determination among people with knowledge to maintain their silence, when remaining silent betrays intellectual honesty, conceals the truth and thwarts courageous action, is the most dangerous of all global threats to the family of humanity, life as we know it and the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
From this perspective, perhaps we can begin to apprehend the actual, most formidable enemy of future human wellbeing and environmental health.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
Population growth is the most important of the “global wicked problems”, as it is the immediate cause of many of the others.
Where I live in southern Brazil, I see more and more people walking along the roads carrying bundles of firewood on their shoulders for their wood-burning stoves. The local woods are being felled to supply this.
This is but one simple example of how population pressure leads to deforestation and consequent reduction in biodiversity and supplies of fresh water, among other problems. And this is happening in most developing countries in the world.
Without addressing the problem of over-population, no long-term solution can be found for the global wicked problems.
Thomas Malthus saw it coming. We have managed to hold it off for some 200 years with technology. But does anyone think that the Earth´s capacity for sustaining humans is infinite?
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Population growth simply cannot be considered the most important problem, at least not in isolation. What are we seriously going to do to change the size of the population in order to control the problems?
What is your guess about how over populated we are? Are you advocating that we simply eliminate some number of people to reduce the population to what you believe is OK? Of course not (or I certainly hope not)! Can we reduce the population fast enough to address the problems soon enough simply by having less people?
With a worldwide average lifespan of over 60 years (you may be surprised by that) if we all stop having babies we could only reduce the population by at most 1/2 in 60 years, but then the remaining population would be over 60 and unable to make more babies. So we can not slow down that fast – maybe we could achieve a 25% reduction with drastic controls. But in fact, since 1980 we have been slowing our growth, and most of the world is moving to a replacement rate of 2 children per family.
If we were to continue with the same non-sustainable habits, reducing the population will only delay the inevitable. Changing to a sustainable life style is what we really need to do, and once we do that, once we achieve a zero footprint with enough extra renewable energy to clean up the mess we have been making, the size of the population will no longer matter.
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