Letter to the Editor
Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper
July 29, 2008

What purpose do bigger families serve?

We in the town of Chapel Hill are implicated in a daunting global threat, a colossal problem that appears to involve every citizen on the planet. No one is to blame for this human-driven predicament; yet all of us could be enjoined by the requirements of practical reality to humanely and voluntarily take responsible, self-limiting action to meet the challenge, I suppose.

Please note that annual birthrates of newborns in the human community are rising precipitously in the United States as well as in many other countries worldwide. For example, more than 4.3 million newborns joined the American family in 2007. That is more births than occurred in 1957 at the height of the post-WWII baby boom. Would someone please point out what advantages the American family derives from such rapid growth in its population numbers?

The total number of human births last year exceeded the highest annual number of births ever achieved in the United States. How much longer can the United States sustain the momentum bound up in the skyrocketing growth of the human population? How long can the frangible ecosystems and finite resources of Earth be reasonably expected to sustain the human species, given the determination of people in most countries, not to regulate the growth of human numbers?

Many capable scientists are validating the projection that the human population on Earth could increase from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in the next 42 years. That is a 40 percent increase in our global population. Given its current and anticipated growth, it appears to me that the human species may well ravage the Earth between now and 2050 unless meaningful individual and collective efforts are made to slow the growth of human numbers.

Perhaps someone will kindly explain how much longer a planet with the relatively small size and make-up of Earth can be sensibly expected to support the well-established and easily discernable over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation behaviors of the family of humanity.

-- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill

Sacrifice? Having your jobs moved somewhere it not a big sacrifice. When a husband goes out to try to find some food to bring home, and gives all of it to his wife and children, and eventually dies himself due to starvation, that’s a sacrifice.

If globally we do not address these issues, don’t kid yourself, we will be in those kind of conditions.

The western world *is* spoiled. Nothing that we have seen is a real hardship. The camps, now that was a hardship. The plague, that was a hardship. The great depression was not a hardship.

As for oil… the oil drilling/extraction companies are the growers, the refiners and local gas stations are the pushers, the car makers provide the needles, and we are the addicts. We let ourselves become addicts. We had a choice, just as an addict had a choice. Breaking a heroin addiction involves sacrifice.

Someone had to say what Al Gore is saying; someone has to be intellectually honest and willing to speak out and clearly as Al Gore is doing.

Emergent and convergent global challenges, ominously looming before the family of humanity on the far horizon, threaten the future of human civilizations, life as know it and the efficacy of Earth as a fit place for human habitation: 

the human overpopulation of Earth;

the pending loss of adequate fossil fuel reserves and other vital energy sources due to unrestrained international plundering;

the dissipation of limited resources due to reckless per-capita overconsumption;

the problems of global warming in particular and climate change more generally; and

the insufficiently bridled pollution of air, land and water as well as precipitating irreversible degradation of the planet’s frangible ecosystems services due to relentless industrialization and unregulated economic globalization.

Who knows, perhaps necessary change is in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

It seems that Mr. Gore has changed his marketing message.  While he still makes multiple claims that are a little hard to substantiate, he doesn’t seem to be making the wild claims he did in An Inconvenient Truth (see http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/2007/10/26/35-i nconvenient-truths-the-errors-in-al-gores-movie-part-1-of-5 /)

Now, Mr. Gore is taking the energy independence tactic. This is much more realistic and more people are likely to make “sacrifices” for the sake of energy independence if we state that we have to break away from the Mideast and destroy their power over us. He seems to put a lot of his reliance on solar energy though and we should probably include nuclear and hydrogen in that discussion.

Al - I suppose you think there’s money left in this country for anything other than endless war. If you do, I’d hate to break the news to you, WE’RE BROKE.