When the moment of ‘throwing out life preservers’ occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that loom ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin’ while Earth’s ecology was destabilizing and its resources were being recklessly dissipated. Father Greed could be seen ravaging Mother Nature. Global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, but there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.

At bottom, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to humanity by the skyrocketing growth of human population numbers on Earth.

Despite the unfortunate, inhumane ways a “ONE CHILD PER FAMILY” policy was implemented in China, the policy could be vital for the future of humankind and life as we know it in our planetary home. The immediate, free, universal and compassionate implementation of a voluntary “one child per family” policy could decisively limit adverse, human-driven impacts on Earth’s body and its environs, and do so more powerfully than any other conceivable human intervention.

Given the visible, converging global threats to human and environmental health that were presented to the family of humanity, the humane implementation of one child per family could have been an indispensible centerpiece of a set of adequately designed, actionable programs that served to actually rescue a good enough future for the children and coming generations.

If a root cause of the global threats on humanity’s horizon, now and then, is the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers, our willful denial of this primary cause could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the children to reasonably address and sensibly overcome these threats. Then the children are likely being directed down a “primrose path” to confront some unimaginable kind of ecological wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen. When the life preservers have to be deployed, the children will not understand why the catastrophe is occurring. Because their elders refused to acknowledge the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth and, therewith, to “diagnose” adequately certain distinctly human-induced global dangers to human wellbeing and environmental health, the children will not know what hit them, why it is happening, and what is required of them so as not to commit the same mistakes made by the elders.

This is only a guess but please note the likelihood that history will not be kind to the woefully inadequate leadership provided by my not-so-great generation of arrogant, extremely foolish and avaricious elders.