what WILL it take? the root of the problem
Most of us, who are environmentally conscious or environmentally conscientious are only aware of a part of the problem.
For a long time I used to believe that the root cause of the rapid pace at which the environment is going to hell is over-population.
Population is indeed the root cause, but it's not the only one. The real whammy comes in the form of consumption. The amount of environmental degradation is a function is a function of both the population and the level of consumption of the population. So my earlier notion of highly populated cities/countries being the worst offenders was actually wasn't entirely accurate. The US is by far the worst offending country in spite of the rather low population density. This is because the average American citizen consumes an alarmingly large amount of energy and processed resources than somebody from a developing country. Countries in Western Europe follow closely if one takes recognizance of their land mass size.
The human population of this world is increasing exponentially. What we have here is a time-bomb. The fuse will be lit when the 95% of the world's population, who have drastically lower levels of consumption, increase their consumption because of advances in science or any other reasons.
If all the people in the world were to consume as much as the average American citizen, the world would only be able to sustain a small fraction of the current population.
So what is the solution to the problem? We need to check the rate of population growth and slowly but surely steer it in the downward direction AND we need to lower our consumption. If we hope to increase our consumption level without drastically lowering our numbers, we doom our world to go to hell.
An ending thought - don't have kids. That way you'll be able to sustain your consumption level or maybe increase it. But people usually have kids and maintain their consumption levels because they want their kids to enjoy the same life, or a better life than they enjoy. But this action of your's is ruining our world, and so your kids will have a much worst life than you have anyway. So what's the point of having kids? So don't have kids. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, this will not help (because most of the morons in the world are too short-sighted to understand the truth of the words printed above). But medication is so much preferable to open surgery or to losing the organ for lack of treatment.
For a long time I used to believe that the root cause of the rapid pace at which the environment is going to hell is over-population.
Population is indeed the root cause, but it's not the only one. The real whammy comes in the form of consumption. The amount of environmental degradation is a function is a function of both the population and the level of consumption of the population. So my earlier notion of highly populated cities/countries being the worst offenders was actually wasn't entirely accurate. The US is by far the worst offending country in spite of the rather low population density. This is because the average American citizen consumes an alarmingly large amount of energy and processed resources than somebody from a developing country. Countries in Western Europe follow closely if one takes recognizance of their land mass size.
The human population of this world is increasing exponentially. What we have here is a time-bomb. The fuse will be lit when the 95% of the world's population, who have drastically lower levels of consumption, increase their consumption because of advances in science or any other reasons.
If all the people in the world were to consume as much as the average American citizen, the world would only be able to sustain a small fraction of the current population.
So what is the solution to the problem? We need to check the rate of population growth and slowly but surely steer it in the downward direction AND we need to lower our consumption. If we hope to increase our consumption level without drastically lowering our numbers, we doom our world to go to hell.
An ending thought - don't have kids. That way you'll be able to sustain your consumption level or maybe increase it. But people usually have kids and maintain their consumption levels because they want their kids to enjoy the same life, or a better life than they enjoy. But this action of your's is ruining our world, and so your kids will have a much worst life than you have anyway. So what's the point of having kids? So don't have kids. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, this will not help (because most of the morons in the world are too short-sighted to understand the truth of the words printed above). But medication is so much preferable to open surgery or to losing the organ for lack of treatment.
posted by the grim sleeper at 1:03 AM
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