President Barack Obama is in Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a moment for rejoicing and listening to the words of a great person. He is deserving of a Nobel Prize because he is a beacon of light and hope in an awakening world that has suffered grievously through the past 8 long, dark years with leadership known mostly for its disasterous decisonmaking, disinformation, delay, denial, duplicity and dunderheadedness.

If “people want to know,” can someone explain how so many well-intentioned people are failing so miserably to share a common understanding of what is happening in our planetary home in these early years of Century XXI?

There are moments like this one when it appears to me that we in the family of humanity must be living within some huge manmade construction reminiscent of the ancient Tower of Babel. Whatever the reasons for our spectacular failure to communicate meaningfully and sensibly about what somehow could be real about the workings of the Earth and the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things, these circumstances are incredible and present the human family with a potentially colossal, human-induced threat to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

As an example, let us look at the growth of absolute global human population numbers. In 2008 there are more people literally existing on Earth on resources valued at less than $2 per day than the total human population in the year of my birth. Our population numbers have been skyrocketing in our time and are projected to continue skyrocketing to the middle of this century when our numbers are anticipated to reach 9+/- billion and then somehow, magically I believe, automatically stabilize. The is no unchallenged scientific evidence to indicate how this “demographic transition to population stabilization” can possibly occur. This has not kept many so-called experts from continuing to say that the preternatural ’science’ on which they rely is outdated and fatally flawed. A mere 108 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th Century, human numbers worldwide were between 1 and 2 billion. Most people can agree, I believe, on these numbers.

Now let us look at the relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet we inhabit. Many experts have asked the question, “How many people can the Earth support?”

No reasonable and sensible person would say that an unlimited number of people can exist in a limited world. That cannot be. It also follows that the size and make-up of Earth naturally limits the growth of human production and per human consumption activities worldwide. The growth of these activities are subject to certain biophysical limitations of Earth. Endless growth cannot occur in a finite world.

What do you expect will happen if human propagation, production and consumption activities continue to grow, given their current scale and expected annual rate of increase? Please know that comments are welcome.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001

No offense was intended. My problem is this. We appear to be ignoring one cause of the things that threaten the human community in our earthly home.

Based upon what we can see now, and understand from so many discussions in the Earth & Sky Blog, would it be correct to say unequivocally that an increasing food supply for the human species is the essential factor producing the recent skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers?

Until this relationship is seen (ie, food is the independent variable and human population numbers is the dependent variable), and its implications understood and accepted, the human community cannot respond ably to the global challenges that are looming ominously on the far horizon, I believe. The family of humanity will continue its necessary but insufficient projects at “symptom mitigation” of the global threats without ever taking hold of what is actually causing our difficulties and threatening our very existence. We can identify the problem. We are it.

If the skyrocketing growth of human numbers worldwide is THE number one problem to be confronted by the human community in our time, then ideas for humanely reducing human population numbers makes good sense, I suppose.

To have continuously denied the seminal work of Thomas Malthus and to have castigated the great scientists who have extended his thinking and improved our understanding; to have adamantly demanded that the relationship between food and human population numbers be seen conversely, will be acknowledged as the greatest failure of human perception in human history. At least to me, the implications of this potentially catastrophic perceptual error (ie, human population numbers is the independent variable and food supply the dependent variable) appear to be profound and could have something to do with the existence of the culturally derived functional insanity in the thinking of the leaders of the global political economy and their manipulation of many minions in the mass media who are mainstreaming this primary misperception and other economically expedient and politcally convenient mistaken impressions to people everywhere.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

Yours are the saddest and most unfortunate of comments.

You say,

“this is an article about the next telescope… not about economy, ecology……”

We need telescopes, that is for sure. What is surprising is how often devices like the telescope are being used to divert our attention from global threats directly in front of us…… on the surface of Earth.

Can you please tell where and when is the appropriate place and time to talk about real global issues that are presenting themselves to the family of humanity in the world we inhabit?

Al Gore spoke about them this week. Where were you? For that matter, where were our leaders at Earth & Sky?

Evidently, we have telescopes and eyes to see; but we choose willfully and selfishly to see what we want to see. We have agreed among ourselves to speak only about what we wish to see, and to do repetitiously and often, as if we are truth-telling.

When these kinds deceptions occur on a grand scale, as is happening in our time, it becomes easier to understand how perverse leadership gains the support of a single, not-so-great generation, that chooses to march their children down a “primrose path” in pursuit of a fool’s errand.

I am at a loss for words to express my dismay and disappointment in these woeful circumstances.

Sincerely,

Steve

PS: Cissko, I am not yet willing to allow myself to become distracted from what is happening on Earth’s wondrous surface by other admitted delights of God’s Creation that are seen with a telescope.

The family of humanity is only now starting to learn unexpectedly and painfully about certain human-induced global threats that could soon be presented to the human community by the seemingly endless growth of per human consumption and unbridled production activities increasing exponentially and overspreading the surface of Earth in our time.

Let us the consider the way many too many economists, politicians and their super-rich benefactors who primarily govern the workings of the news media, report to us that Earth can indefinitely sustain people conspicuously consuming its limited resources the way millions of fortunate people worldwide are doing; but I fear these intelligent ‘dreamers’ have lost their reality-orientation with regard to human biological limits and the limitations of the bounded physical world we inhabit. The Earth is relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible; it is neither an eternal provider like a mother’s teat nor is it an endlessly overflowing cornucopia. Unlimited expansion of the global economy without regard to limits to its growth that are inevitably imposed by a finite world is an end-all strategy, I suppose.

A planet with the limitations and the make-up of Earth cannot realistically be expected to much longer maintain profligate over-consumption and adamantine hoarding of limited resources as well as seemingly endless expansion of production capabilities by millions of people, mostly in the overdeveloped world, that we see occurring as a result of actions by a tiny minority of selfish people who possess the wealth and power needed to behave in this ostentatious way.

Obscene displays of consumption by self-seeking people with great wealth could be directly undermining the biophysical integrity of Earth as well as precipitating deleterious effects upon its environs. Please consider how scarce resources are being recklessly dissipated and global ecosystems relentlessly degraded at a much faster rate than the Earth can restore its resources and ecological services for human benefit. Unintended, pernicious challenges resulting from the unrestrained increase of per capita over-consumption of Earth’s finite resources and the unbridled growth of economic globalization appear to be threatening to ravage our planetary home.

Perhaps the current scale as well the anticipated growth of per human over-consumption and the global economy could become unsustainable well before the year 2050.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

The evidence of climate change is so abundant and clear but people everywhere are not seeing it and, tberefore, not insisting upon adequate action. But why?

There are likely other causes for this failure of human perception, intellectual integrity and moral courage, but I would like to ask the Earth & Sky community to consider one rather obvious failing. Many too many of the “talking heads” in the mass media are part of this problem, not the solution. These commentators seem to be smart and clever but not intellectually honest; they get paid large sums of money to report news, whatever that is. On the whole, the public appears to think of these opinion-makers as objective commentators and worthy leaders, but they are neither objective nor are they leaders. Please forgive me for saying that many of them behave as professional prostitutes who are paid by wealthy benefactors to say whatsoever is economically expedient, politically convenient and supportive of the status quo for the conspicuously consuming rich and powerful people among us.

Perhaps we need objective leaders in the mass media as desperately as we require a new kind of leadership in politics.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001