LIMITS LIVE HERE TOO

Poets note: In our polarized world of either being for justice or against justice, we must realize that when it comes to immigration and our policies there is a third way. The third way is to understand in every country, especially one hard wired for high consumption, is limited. It is limited in open space, limited in room for more cars, limited in water resources, limited in jobs and representation in our halls of congress. The pandemic has shown us that trying to get everyone a vaccine or hospital bed is exacerbated by our now 331,000,000. The earth and each country within it operates in a closed system. Policies creating more growth fly in the face of that reality. I hope this poem opens some eyes to an issue which is NOT at its core about anything other exceeding ecological limits.

Limits Live Here Too

 by Karen I. Shragg

Do them a favor

Turn them away

with an abundance of grace and dignity

for the pain they will endure

Don't let them in

Out of love for their future

Out of fear for our own

If our wildlife had a vote 

they would concur.

We are overflowing

Overpowered 

Overdone

Well-baked

Our patriotic goose is cooked 

in the oven with the temperature set on climate chaos

a bit more afloat than others, perhaps

But sinking none the less

and more will never allow 

any to fully achieve 

the kind of life we all seek.

We can no longer be the release valve

for the suffering peoples of the world

or for those who just seek a bit better life

It's all and only about limits 

Set by nature, disobeyed by man.

Know we must never use numbers as an excuse for racist intentions

while reaching for the chalk

to draw our responsible line in the sand. 

 

Why We Need to Change Our Core Stories

This past December 2020, I had my second book published by Freethought House Press. Change Our Stories, Change Our World, is all about what is at the heart of our countless problems in the world today. My book demands that we quit erecting walls and start erecting mirrors, the kind that allow for much needed soul searching. As a society, as a world, we need to go deep and see that what we believe about our world is not serving us. There are many examples from which to chose. When we believe that green lawns of manicured Kentucky blue grass will make our property values soar and keep our neighbors and lawmakers happy we end up with more cancers , decimated species of pollinators and polluted ponds, rivers and streams. Laws are often our go-to fix, with limited results. People will fight for their unexamined beliefs, and new laws might make it on the books but acts of defiance will continue. There would be no need for laws to keep us from poisoning ourselves with pesticides if health and ecology were embedded in our dominant story. The enemies of doing the right thing by humans and nature of course are those who stand to gain from the purchase of these poisons. Multi-national corporations have but one god, and it is the bottom line at the end of their fiscal year. Show no profit and the CEO’s will be sailing on their golden parachute to the next opportunity to destroy.

In my book I make the argument that we must make the switch: from worship to wonder, from greed to need, from limitless to limited, from synthetic to natural and from mindless to mindful. So why is it so hard to fill our world with wonder, live within our limits, eliminate greed and become more natural and mindful? For one thing these values do not serve a society hooked on growth and converting the biosphere and all its inhabitants into a place that serves only us. Ironically, to serve only humans and our endless appetite and need for goods and services is to eventually serve none of us at all. Between overpopulation inspired scarcity and climate change nature will bat last no matter how many attempts we make putting all of our eggs in the technology basket.

We should be teaching practical things in our schools. On my list would be basic car mechanics, how to prepare your taxes, home maintenance and civics. But none of those suggestions will matter without a deep understanding of how ecology works and our role in it. Ecology needs to be taught in the context of natural history, geography, resources and socio-political infrastructure. If that were understood I doubt if multiple high-rises would be appearing in the suburbs where I live, because someone would have measured the amount of water needed to serve them after looking at the water supply. Someone would have looked at the traffic and the cement needed to support more humans. Someone would have surveyed the wildlife in the area and put a stop to more development. If the laws of physics were understood, because they were taught as a subject starting in elementary school, we would have to reexamine all of the ways we transgress them with our indefensible stories. We would realize that over half of our land in the US is unfit for growing crops and also realize the intrinsic value in keeping those open lands untouched by human activity. We would have to conclude that it is self destructive to continue policies which look at opening more doors to immigration into a country already overwhelming its resources at a bloated 331,000,000 top of the food chain consumers. It is also very humane to obey these laws, for to disobey them is to succumb the pain and suffering of exceeding these limits.

We push the envelopes without measuring that every invention creates destruction of something in its wake. Our story of limitlessness is perhaps the most harmful story we adhere to, for the only things without limits are creativity and love. Everything else is limited. Everything modern humans do effects the rest of nature in a negative way. Bottled water saves us from poisoned wells but what about the plastic? Cell phones may make our lives more connected but they also create more pollution and a need for more mines of lithium and rare minerals.

Changing our stories must be done at a deep level. We can’t say we love wildlife by visiting zoos and watching the National Geographic channel. We must recognize that our numbers and activities are creating the sixth mass extinction which will include us someday. Only then can we work to reverse our myopia by releasing our old and tired stories and replacing them with sustainable ones.

Conservation Was Easier Back Then

This is a love letter to a woman is responsible for preserving a beautiful oasis near the home where I grew up. Eloise Butler lived at the turn of the last century. She worked hard, trying to preserve and protect an area which has ended up being an iconic wildflower oasis in my hometown. I have always identified with this school teacher and her conservation journey. I too taught school and wanted out of the noise of the classroom so that I could work in and protect my beloved world of nature.

In the 1980’s I found myself burnt out from teaching which led me to seek healing and direction for my life as a volunteer in the Martha Crone Shelter in the Eloise Butler Wildflower garden near my home. I loved photographing wildflowers and talking to visitors. It was an experience which led to my career as a naturalist and nature center director.

 To pay homage to the goals of this woman, who in spite of the unfair treatment of woman in careers at the turn of the last century, was able to achieve so much, we owe her memory and life’s work a new discussion.

 This new discussion is about the forces that work against conservation. Often framed as a fight between greedy developers and conservationists, there is one more player involved. This player is best introduced by looking at the world in 1907 when Eloise was fighting for the garden which was named after her. The United States had just reached the 87 million mark in population and the global population was 1.75 billion. In Minneapolis where the garden is located, just next to the suburb of Golden Valley where I grew up,  the population was just over 200,000. The state of Minnesota had not yet reached 2 million. If those numbers had stayed the same, life would be immensely different and conservationists would be on easy street.

If we can for a moment,  divorce ourselves from any unkind and often undeserved implications, the very fact that Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden now exists in a world of 429,000+ Minneapolis residents, 5.68 million Minnesotans, 331 million Americans and nearly 8 billion people globally is a game changer.

Eloise Butler did not have it easy. There was much to be learned about conservation in her day, after all the once abundant Passenger pigeon became extinct during her day, with no hunting regulations in place. But conservation is so much harder when pressures from population growth force compromises which never favor the natural world on which we all depend.

The first lessons we learn and teach as naturalists are all about the food chain and how the plants as producers are the foundations of life. As one travels up the food chain those dependent on these food and oxygen makers must be less in numbers. Much of what we are experiencing in our failures to protect the natural world can surely be attributable to greed and lack of land ethics, but we cannot keep ignoring the sheer force of our numbers perched precariously as we are on top of this rigid structure. We act as if adding over 244 million Americans since this visionary conservationist lived, had little impact on wildflowers and wildlife. Even worse we act like overpopulation is an overseas problem, when our growth in the US is also out of control and fueling the way development destroys our flora and fauna. Those who might consider it as an issue, often choose to focus on encouraging people to use cloth bags, avoid pesticides and ride bicycles. Although all good suggestions, we must remember we are apex predators and just our water demand, our use of sanitation and energy and our need for food and shelter acts as a giant bulldozer locally and globally. Even a 1000 Eloise Butlers could not stop this stampede.  

I doubt whether the destructive force of overpopulation was ever on Eloise Butler’s mind, but she was smart and courageous, and I would bet if she were alive today, she would be taking up the reins on this issue like so many of my colleagues have done. She would not stand for green-washing nor would she stand down on tough issues. Nothing would honor her legacy more than to find ways to bring overpopulation back to the conservation table before it’s too late.

 

From Aristotle to the Dalai Lama : Happiness as a precious, threatened resource.

I was taught in some long forgotten high school class that the Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that happiness was the driver behind all of mankind’s activities. If indeed that is true, then perhaps it behooves us to unpack what it would take to make 331 million Americans happy. Indeed, what would it take to make nearly 8 billion humans happy and do we have enough resources to do that? Perhaps in addition to looking at copper, oil, water, lithium, titanium and others as limited resources, we should start looking at happiness as a limited resource as well. Eudaimonia, Greek for happiness ,was Aristotle’s answer to the question: What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? Aristotle believed that in order to achieve happiness one needed to have both the physical goods to live and time for intellectual contemplation. One’s needs had to be met and they also had to be virtuous. According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life.

 Modern day Buddhist leader and philosopher the 14th Dalai Lama would concur. He also has said that the purpose of life is to seek happiness the common era. The highly respected Dali Lama, referred to as his Holiness, is a present-day leader and yet they landed in a similar philosophical place.

 Aristotle realized that our enrichment was attached to virtue as well as tangible goods. Once someone had enough, he could contemplate the more perplexing issues of the day. Where Aristotle uses the word virtuous, the Dalai Lama uses compassion. Essentially, they are in agreement that our actions towards others is attached to our happiness. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” At the time Aristotle promoted his ideas the world, I doubt he comprehended the hurdles to happiness presented by numbers of humans that we are experiencing in a world bulging at nearly 8 billion. At the time this Greek philosopher walked the earth, the whole planet had 162 million people on it.

For reference, that is the same amount of people that were in the US when I was born in 1954. Not only has the world experienced incredible modernization between the time of Aristotle to Dalai Lama, it has experienced the kind of growth only computers can comprehend. While humans are biologically the same as they were 2363 years ago, we now live in a world where we have to share the resources on which we depend with nearly  8 billion more people.

 Assuming Aristotle, and the Dali Lama are on to something here, it just may behoove us to treat happiness as a precious resource that is at risk in an overpopulated world. I propose that access to happiness is just as much at risk as our non-renewable resources. Our deficits can be measured, and Ecological footprint network does a great job letting the world know what is happening with our natural resources. They describe this deficit as a bio-capacity deficit. “if a population’s Ecological Footprint exceeds the region’s bio-capacity that runs a bio-capacity deficit. Its demand for goods and services that its land and seas can provide….exceeds what the region can regenerate

 We are also experiencing a happiness deficit. The two go hand in hand, even though happiness is difficult to measure. It’s hard to be happy when you run out of water and you are scratching for food. Long ago an experiment was done with rats. Given adequate food and water, the rats exhibited all kinds of mental illness when they began to live in overcrowded conditions. We share ¼ of our genes with rats, so we may be subject to the same consequences of loss of happiness in our overpopulated state.

Growth based capitalism is based on the narrative that to be happy we have to have lots of material things. One can never be happy without the newest car, the biggest boat and a larger home. We literally buy into the system that demands our throw away habits. From built in obsolescence to fiscal year pressures, this unsustainable economic system is making the planet wither under our feet.

 Now anyone who has watched the series, “Behind the Music” knows, extreme wealth and fame are recipes for disaster not happiness. Biographies of poor musicians who became wealthy with their hits, more often than not, discovered how unhappy fame and wealth got them. Many ended up leaving us too soon at the end of a needle. Why bring this up? Because many will say that you do not need money to be happy ala the riches some accumulate. But Aristotle wasn’t talking about needing 5 Rolls Royces that Maurice Gibbs of the Bee Gees once owned, he was talking about enough wealth so one didn’t need to worry about one’s basic needs and have the luxury of time for contemplation. Besides, he lived 2218 years before the internal combustion engine was invented .Happiness is not available to everyone now and will be in even less supply in the future. Why? Because the very basics all humans are challenged by our overwhelming demand and out of control global greedy systems.

 Could we distribute our resources more equitably? Colonialism and its sister sinister force, globalization, are still in operation around the world. Many try to fight a world in which the rich and powerful take from the poor and vulnerable. In theory we could do a better job, but that too is threatened by overpopulation as we wake up in a world with over 200,000 more people in it every day, and those all of those people need resources.

 According to Habitat for Humanity, 1.6 billion people live without adequate shelter, 1 in people currently live in a slum, and they also predict that 1 in every 4 people will live in a slum by 2030. Living with adequate housing and food is not a guarantee of happiness but it sure is a prerequisite for the opportunity to become happier.

Growth of slums is directly tied to growth of our numbers as resources will keep falling short in a closed system. Nobel efforts exist to make the world a happier place. A quick Internet search finds that there are 45 main NGO’s devoted to ridding the world of poverty. While this is an impressive effort to end global poverty, the billions who still suffer remain higher than anyone would desire due over-demand of limited resources caused by overpopulation. It is of course is also the way the irrational accumulation of money rules the world instead of the laws of physics and ecological principles. Corporations have globalized their neo-capitalistic earth gobbling ways and the continual growth of 80 million new passengers to the closed system every year contributes to keeping poverty a growing problem.

The access is to happiness is crippled when we continue in our rigidity and keep acting as if the earth and its biosphere were limitless. To continue to fuel growth in a closed system is beyond foolish, it is suicidal. Happiness does not flourish when the earth and its life-giving biosphere is ignored. According to the World Wildlife Fund, “Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use. As a result, some 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year. Inadequate sanitation is also a problem for 2.4 billion people—they are exposed to diseases, such as cholera and typhoid fever, and other water-borne illnesses. Two million people, mostly children, die each year from diarrheal diseases alone.” It is impossible to be happy in a water scarce world.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (born 1935) has been around the world witnessing both our progress and our population growth. He teaches that to be happy is to have compassion, but unlike Aristotle he has also witnessed the earth warming in his homeland of Tibet and the earth gaining 6 billion people in his lifetime. The way those additional people take away from the possibility of happiness is not lost on him. He said, “One of the great challenges today is the population explosion. Unless we are able to tackle this issue effectively, we will be confronted with the problem of the natural resources being inadequate for all the human beings on this Earth.”

Though he did not go as far as saying that happiness dwindles as overpopulation overwhelms the earth, he did say, “The growth in population is very much bound up with poverty, and in turn poverty plunders the Earth. When human groups are dying of hunger, they eat everything: grass, insects, everything. They cut down the trees, they leave the land dry and bare. All other concerns vanish. That’s why in the next 30 years the problems we call ‘environmental’ will be the hardest that humanity has to face.”

We need to start to see happiness and the opportunity to contemplate a more virtuous life, as a precious and dwindling resource. It is just like water, oil, copper, tin, lithium and the rest. Realizing this, we just might understand at a deeper level the change that is needed. We need to change our story. Tell someone we are about to run out of silica and they may not understand the implications. But tell them they are going to run out of happiness now and for generations to come and a whole new audience may awaken to the thief that is overpopulation.

 To quote novelist James Baldwin,” Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

 

 

Egypt's Ironic Past and Uncertain Future

There is much irony in the newest information that the population of Egypt is skyrocketing. Mostly a Sunni Islam nation, birth control is a touchy subject as babies are seen as a gift from god, and sex is strictly forbidden outside the institution of marriage. Boys are favored in the culture adding to the birth rate. Egypt is mostly a desert with its growing population dependent on the richness of the ever-diminishing Nile river valley. Egypt is a relatively poor country. Unlike much of the Arab world, Egypt’s landscape is not dotted with oil fields.The deck is stacked against a prosperous future for Egyptians as they continue to grow with a fertility rate of 3.1 per woman (2018) on average in an already water-stressed environment.

The irony comes in because Cairo was the scene for an unprecedented effort to discuss and debate the impact of population and its projected rapid growth on the countries of the world. In 1994 the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Egypt’s ancient capital. It brought together 11,000 representatives from governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international agencies, and citizen activists. But those various activists had different agendas. At the end, the conclusions had shifted focus away from the original mission of the conference. “The long international document from Cairo made no mention of the connections between population growth and the environmental ills of countries with growing populations” 1

It’s very unfortunate that the broader discussion of policies and education which could be implemented to flatten the hockey stick human growth curve, was sidelined at the conference. Feminist activists were successful in hijacking the mission of this massive effort and made the conference all about women’s empowerment. This was a downstream shift from the bigger upstream issue of how population’s rapid escalation negatively impacts the economy and the environment, to issues surrounding maternal health. Women’s issues are great to champion, but Cairo failed to address the broader issue of the pressure placed on countries when there are excessive demands on infrastructure and resources.

Looking back now in 2020, those activists who wrestled away the upstream mission of the Cairo conference cannot say with any honesty that this was a successful move. If their strategy was a good move, we would have seen better results. Using the conference host country as an example, in 1994, Egypt had 61.1 million people, and it has now reached 101 million with the last million being added in just the last 8 months. Now a country twice the size of California, has to manage 40 million more people and provide them with housing, clothing, education and jobs. How’s that decision to dodge the broader overpopulation challenge working? Not well at all. There is nothing empowering about overshoot. According to the United Nations,(Sept 2018), Egypt is facing an annual water deficit of around seven billion cubic meters and the country could run out of water by 2025. We have failed those who are now suffering under the weight of the menace of overpopulation. Ironically, we have failed the women those activists set out to protect.

Comprehensive governmental and non-governmental groups paired with religious leaders needed to come together 26 years ago to create a better future for all Egyptians. They were trying to do just that. If that had succeeded, we wouldn’t be witnessing such despair created by those who took up all the air in the room for what they thought was most important. I wonder how many of those activists have looked back to honestly reassess what they did. Imagine what could have been done instead of gambling away the future of the people of who live in the “cradle of civilization.” Political correctness cannot continue leading us around by the nose. It started long ago and continues to pile up its victims. We need to be less afraid of the implications of possible solutions, and worry more about the consequences of doing nothing, something we are really good at. Policies which encourage sustainable populations are easy to write but harder, much harder to pass. That is because like the activists at Cairo nearly three decades ago, we keep our focus downstream and away from the bigger issue.

This is not a problem exclusive to Egypt. Our failure to address overpopulation in a comprehensive way is an international crisis. Doing the right thing means listening to the earth, not the latest flavor of the month issue which squeezes out other voices in its arrogant misdirection. Ecological realism needs to be the new force guiding our way out of this ever-increasing mess in countries around the world, including and especially our own.

1 Beck, Kolankiewicz, The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History Journal of Political History 2000.

The Moral Imperative of Being An Overpopulation Activist

In his book, “The Moral Arc:  How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom(2015),” Michael Shermer makes a well-supported argument for how the secular world has done more good for the world than the world of religion. He believes that, “The scientific revolution led to the Age of Reason and to the Enlightenment and that changed everything.” He further states that,”…these changes reversed our species historical trend downward and that we can do more to elevate humanity, extend the arc and bend it forever upward.”

Not so fast, I say to the founder of the Skeptic society, I am skeptical. The moral arc of humanity cannot continue to go upward when the trend of the human population arc is also going upward.

As a science writer, Shermer knows the earth is a limited place and that humans are at a trophic level that is meant to be inhabited by a very limited number of individuals. As our numbers continue to climb in a hockey stick -like upward curve, our resources decline, our density increases and along with it an increase in scarcity. This is hardly a situation where our collective morality will be incubated well.

Morality which includes an equal treatment under just laws, equal job opportunity, equal access to healthy food, etc, are all threatened by the far-reaching tentacles of overpopulation. Simply put, when demand exceeds supply there is an immoral scramble for getting one’s fair share.

Why are water wars a concern in the not too distant future? Because humanity has done a most superb job using up the fresh water supply faster than it can renew due to our ever-growing numbers. As our population grows so does how much water we consume for us, our livestock, manufacturing and transportation.

I am a fan of Shermer and his work in the field of skepticism and secularism. He refers to many examples of how science has contributed to an improvement in our morality. But science is not benign, it has contributed to both sides of the overpopulation predicament. It has contributed both to increasing our numbers and the increasingly scary ways in which we die. Science has increased our longevity with medical procedures and drugs and also made birth control available. Science has made the nuclear war possible and created carcinogenic chemicals and created a whole scientific field around solving infertility. At the end of the day the birth side has won, putting unrelenting pressure on the biosphere as we continue to add over 1 million in less than a week on the planet.

I am not naïve enough to think that the world would be instantly more moral if our numbers were suddenly in line with the finite supply of our minerals, energy, water and soil. Furthermore, I know that in immoral hands, a doctrine with overpopulation as its main storyline would be disastrous.

What I am saying is that overpopulation itself is a roadblock to any kind of moral progress. Extending the moral arc of humanity, no matter how secular and scientific we become, is impossible in a world of nearly 8 billion growing by 80+ million a year.

Each country has a moral obligation to its citizens and resources to assess its own limits. Science and reason must be used to determine what the ecosystem can sustainably afford to offer each person. The scientists at the global footprint network,

( www.globalfootprintnetwork.org) have already done the homework for us, and it doesn’t look good for the moral arc. I am making the argument that the moral arc will continue go down, and even crash as the population of our country and the world goes up.

If you accept my premise that scarcity, brought on by too much demand on a limited planet, is a petri dish for disorder and immorality, then opposing growth is our collective moral duty. My colleagues and I come from a place of wanting to prevent chaos and helping the biosphere. We have taken on the ever more treacherous mantle of screaming about overpopulation because we see the big picture. I have asked people why they work on this issue and they all say basically the same thing, they want to save the biosphere that supports us and the wildlife and open spaces they love.

 As “8 Billion Angel” filmmaker and overpopulation activist Terry Spahr says,

“Global warming, food and water shortages, catastrophic storms, extinction of species, plant and animal habitat loss…. The list of environmental, social and economic catastrophes affecting our planet with greater frequency and severity goes on and on. If there was a simple root cause and a fundamental solution, wouldn’t you want to know?” The answer he goes on to say, is unsustainable human population.

I would add that if you are dedicated to stopping those catastrophes, that you exhibit some pretty hefty moral chops. 

Indeed, overpopulation activists are the ones holding on to the reins of morality and justice. The world that Shermer discusses can certainly benefit from more rational thought, but that must include thought and work on overpopulation.

Unless we start see working on this critically important issue as a moral imperative, then morality itself will be rendered irrelevant, for it will be flattened by the thundering feet of billions of desperate people.

Salt in the Wound: Why Thinking Bigger about US Population Growth is Con

It seems that we have three general responses for the deep wounds which need to be healed in our country: 1) find a politically acceptable band aid which won’t fix the problem long term but makes those involved look good 2) Find a suitable cure involving the proper gauze/tourniquet in the way of public policy or whatever is truly required to begin the long-term healing and 3) con-artists who rub salt in the wounds and make them worse while claiming that this snake oil will bring a quick reliable fix.

The latest in the line of rubbing salt in the wound is gobsmacking in its premise. In the US where we are already destroying rivers, draining aquifers, killing off our remaining wildlife and shortening our lives while stuck ever denser housing and freeway construction, there is an excruciatingly horrid proposal on the table to accelerate population growth.

Apparently, author Matt Yglesias has never been stuck in gridlock on an LA freeway, or had to drink the water from a tap in Flint Michigan. He has never seen tents and cardboard boxes of our country’s over 550,000 homeless or seen the news showing how the US is suffering from the effects of climate change with larger, more powerful floods and devastating wildfires. He must be sociologically tone deaf about the millions who have lost their jobs due to automation, the shipping of jobs overseas, all exacerbated by the current pandemic. Against this backdrop of overpopulation-driven pain and suffering, he wants to welcome hundreds of millions more American consumers. According to his upcoming book, I am loathe to mention, he thinks we should think bigger and welcome more population growth until we reach 1 billion Americans -- jobs, wildlife, open space, fresh water, clean air and traffic be damned.

I am hoping he is secretly doing this to start a conversation about a truly sustainable population for the US, which the scientifically sane calculate to be about a third to half of our current 330 million. That could indeed have positive results, but right now it just feels like he is enjoying finding a niche to exploit by rubbing salt in the wound of our over-consuming, overpopulated country. 

There is great risk that he will be successful in making this salty con stick to the public discourse so averse to paying any real attention to the whole idea of sustainable US numbers. Based on an older salt- in-the-wound idea, I still hear people say that we could fit the world’s population into the state of Texas as if that has any ecological relevance. I could fit 1,000 rats in my cupboard, but they would be dead by the time the sun rose the next day.

Due to intellectual laziness, lack of ecological education, and a paucity of those predisposed to critical thinking, we have a population full of people who can be susceptible to con-artists, even when their ideas are ridiculous. Thankfully there is already a great deal of pushback on Yglesias’s preposterous pro-growth proposals, consider this one more.

 

If Trees Could Vote

I want to send a bill to Washington  

That will allow trees to vote

And birds to cast their ballots

The fine print will allow bees

their choice for insect justice;

a world with enough poison-free flowers.

Let the wild rivers splash

and the clouds rain down on the proper box to check

So they too can live uninterrupted lives

While the wild and not so free four-leggeds

Head to their voting booths

To scratch in their favorite choice

For a leader who will take into consideration

Their rights for a change.

Everyday is Overshoot Day

My informal survey of friends revealed that few have heard of Earth Overshoot Day.

 I explain it this way: It’s a calculation.. It’s basically what the earth can produce in terms of bio-capacity minus what we consume. According to the smart folks at Global Footprint Network, “Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth can renew during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 60% more than what can be renewed – or as much as if we lived on 1.6 planet. From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity grows the ecological deficit which has been increasing steadily since the world fell in ecological overshoot in the early 1970s..”

 This day is designed to shed a light on how we are taking more from the Earth in the course of a year than it can produce. Kudos to GFN for trying yet another creative way to innovate a much needed soapbox from which to pontificate that indeed the well is running dry. Earth Overshoot Day has a bit of good news to report, commemorated on August 22 in 2020, it is three weeks later than 2019, due to the economic slowdown caused by the corona virus pandemic.  However, we are still running way too short due to both our overpopulation and its evil twin; overconsumption.

 The problem is that Earth Overshoot Day is a model and essentially an abstraction as most models are. On the surface it seems like we are better off at the beginning of the calendar year than we are on some pre-determined date, when really every day is overshoot day and has been for a very long time. The earth’s cycles do not follow some human determined schedule. Its cycles are mostly very slow moving and over billions of years has stored much of what it has produced in the form of minerals, soil and fresh water.

 Humans were defined by the author Daniel Quinn Ishmael series as either Takers or Leavers. The leavers were the hunter gatherers who left something for the future generations and the takers do just that, they just keep taking and taking from the earth. I think that all humans are essentially takers, not because we are intrinsically evil, but because that is our niche in the food web. Long before elitists were promoting neo-capitalism during their martini-laced power lunches, humans were altering the earth with slash and burn agriculture. Centuries before industrialization darkened the skies and polluted our lakes and rivers, we were pushing some of the greatest species ever to evolve into the abyss of extinction. The Dodo bird’s extinction happened before the first plastics arrived on the scene, it succumbed to the way human livestock overtook their habitats. The passenger pigeon which once darkened the skies in its migration was last on anyone’s menu in the early part of the 20th century due to overhunting.

 Humans must rely on the plants to photosynthesize as producers, and the first and second level consumers of plants make up the protein we then consume for our nourishment. Some of us can rely on mostly plants to produce our food but in no way does this mean that we can pardon ourselves from our position as takers of the planet. We are a needy bunch, from our perch as an apex predator, and our needs have now been exponentially exacerbated by an incredible increase in the production of highly processed products which are both toxic and carbon producing in their production and problematic in their disposal.

Every week or so, I take an informal survey of the products I own and use. I ask myself which of them was made or shipped to me without the use of fossil fuels? I also ask myself what is their ultimate destiny?  From the dental floss in our bathroom, to my framed photographs on our walls, from the bananas on our counter to the hairbrush on my nightstand, the answers are always the same. Everything I buy, own and use, no matter if it was bought used or not, came from the earth and will go back to the earth. In between carbon gases were burned in their production and transportation and trapped in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gas effects, which are now altering weather patterns, and with it altering our ability to grow food, come from all of these not-so-innocent products. Landfills are multi-colored with non-biodegradable plastics, wires, batteries and other leftovers from our infamously throw-away society. Early hunter gatherers may have altered landscapes, but they left mostly bones behind.

 We modern humans have become the most egregious takers for we leave behind products that the earth has no idea how to accommodate, while carving up our biosphere in the pursuit of our insatiable appetites for more. Even if we were to wake up and stop the merry go round of ridiculous consumption, for which there are too many examples to mention, our numbers would have to calm down too, to an extraordinary degree.

 So why is everyday overshoot day? Why should the word overshoot be on our lips and in our public discourse and in our news coverage? Because we are on a highway to hell, paved with the actions of limitless demands of a planet with limited capacity. Because at populations which have grown by millions in the ever-consuming US and billions in the world, we have been too successful and nature always punishes the animals who step out of their ecological boundaries.

 We need to put on the brakes, (reduce our population in every country especially those with ‘guilty ‘on their consumption scorecards) wear a seatbelt ( stop our love affair with economic growth) and have airbags installed (learn and value the way we depend on healthy ecosystems ) in a mission to reverse the trajectory of crashing into the earth’s limit to support a specie that is busy creating its own epitaph: Here lies a specie smart enough to know it was headed off a cliff, but not wise enough to turn itself around.