Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

We need some contests for this pestilence!__How the Man Swarm Eats the Earth

by Dave Foreman – March 18, 2015

Overpopulation is killing the wild world

“Except for giant meteorite strikes or other such catastrophes, Earth has never experienced anything like the contemporary human juggernaut. We are in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption that could push half of Earth’s species to extinction in this century.” --— E. O. Wilson

It’s painfully straightforward. We have come on like a swarm of locusts, and now at over 7 billion and counting, there are too many of us for Earth to harbor. But it is much worse for the other Earthlings – that is, all other living things we share the Earth with – tamed and untamed. A key insight of Charles Darwin’s is that all lifekinds can track their beginnings back to a shared forebear. Biologists today call this forebear the Last Common Ancestor or LCA. We – plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms – are kin. We all share the name, “Earthling.”


Photo by Vivi Portela
Just another day at Times Square, New York City. Unless we can freeze and then make Man’s footprint on Earth smaller, we will have an Earth with fewer and fewer wild things.

For many years it has been the booming and spreading overflow of Man that has been the greatest threat to the life of other Earthlings. By Man I mean our species – Homo sapiens. (I use the word Man as a way to describe our kind that is not gender specific.)

Among we Earthlings are “wild things” – or all forms of untamed living things, from plants to wild animals. Aldo Leopold, a top conservation thinker of the twentieth century, wrote in the beginning of his wonderful book, A Sand County Almanac, “here are those who can live without wild things, and there are those who cannot.” Maybe you are like me; I’m one of those “cannots.” I don’t want to live in a world without wild things.

But unless we can freeze and then make Man’s footprint on Earth smaller, we will have an Earth with fewer and fewer wild things. I hope to show you that more of our kind means fewer wild things, that a stabilized human population means hope for wild things, and that a shrinking human population means a better world for wild things. As well as for men, women and children.

Here are some ideas I’d like you to understand:

1) The population explosion is ongoing both worldwide and in the United States;

2) The overpopulation of Man is the main driver of the extinction of many kinds of wildlife, the wrecking and taming of wildlands and wild waters, and the creation of pollution, including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases;

3) Those who do not see a population threat need to be challenged;

4) We will grow to as many as 12 billion in the next 100 years unless we do something – or unless something awful happens to us, which is likely unless we wake up;

5) There are many things we all can do to freeze and then lower population;

6) Overpopulation is solvable!

In its article “Owning Up to Overpopulation,” [ http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/publications/earth/newsletter_fall2009.pdf ] the Center for Biological Diversity [ http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/ ] says flatly: There are five stacks of woe that our Man swarm brings: (1) Landscalping, (2) Resource depletion, (3) Starvation, (4) Social, political upheaval, and (5) Ecological/Evolutionary wounds.

By landscalping, I literally mean the “scalping” of land. The scythe of civilization wipes out the homes of wildlife, wrecks watersheds, and thereby fouls streams, rivers, silts in lakes and ocean estuaries. It withers and shrivels ecosystems.

Depleting resources, or draining raw goods until there is little left, leads to scrambling to get whatever is left in still-wild places and then to ripping it out in hasty, careless ways. When gasoline prices shot up in the United States in 2008, polls showed growing backing for drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Chants of “drill, baby, drill” in the 2008 presidential campaign were hotheaded marks of feared resource scantiness. Wild things then pay with the blowout of BP’s deep-ocean well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Food shortages are the worst dearth for Man. Hungry women, children, and men become refugees crowding into wherever they think they might find food and thereby trampling and ransacking healthier lands. In a world of tabloid-television news, heartbreaking tales of starving mothers and children lead to calls to jump up food production elsewhere, which then leads to the stripping and withering of wildlands not good for long-time cropping. More irrigation dams throughout the world will be another upshot of starvation brought on, not by too little food, but by too many mouths.

Author and environmental analyst Lester Brown [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/civilization-food-shortages/ ] sees water shortages as one of the worst things over the hill. Some 70 percent of the world’s freshwater now goes into irrigating crops. Groundwater is being sucked out by irrigation wells and is dropping ever lower, so wells have to be drilled deeper. When this happens, springs dry up. Rivers and streams run to cracked mud and blowing dust. Without trusty old watering holes, wildlife of all kinds is shoved to the edge, has to leave, or dies. The freshwater upheaval rooted in the Man swarm is not only a threat to Man, it is even more of a threat to thousands of kinds of other Earthlings.

Brown brings up a spooky statistic: “175 million Indians consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will soon be exhausted.” What will those 175 million (or, perhaps, 275 million, given India’s ongoing growth) do when the water and the grain run out? What will they do to the land and to wildlife living nearby? Where will they go? How much weight will there be on the Indian government to “open” land now in national parks and other tiger havens?

Let’s look at how overpopulation is behind ecological and evolutionary woes.

Read further only if you can, WE are the biggest problem here. Everywhere. In every place and ever part of the world ... They go through the The Seven Ecological Wounds and if they wouldn't wake someone the fuck up . .nothing will. It's too late, I think ,.. Maybe Sox knows ... anyway, this article is tops. The culling needs to start with us ... We've already culled everything else.. . water will gone soon ..so .... let's get these assholes who sit their fat asses in chairs with tables outside blasting away and killing prairie dogs .. some REAL WORK! then hell, if they go to prison they can continue killing there ... why not? We're so inhumane I see no way to change any of it ...
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/how_the_man_swarm_eats_the_earth