Too many people: an idyll changes to nightmare.
December 12, 2009 by Doug Kennedy
We visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford yesterday to see what it is like having been substantially rebuilt over past few years. It is now a modern and fascinating museum inside it’s lovely old Cotswold stone shell and well worth a visit. Entry is free too!
We focused on the modern and nineteenth century paintings on the 3rd floor on this occasion, which include a couple of rooms of Pre-Raphaelite works. One is a panoramic view from a hill over Jerusalem painted at the end of the 19th century, and it made me stop and think. The walled city of Jerusalem sits on it’s hill top surrounded only by countryside where sheep graze and olive groves quietly stand. Peace radiates from the painting and you want to join the painter and contemplate the history, significance and beauty of the scene laid out as it had been for thousands of years.
I pondered, with some horror, what it must look like now: the dreadful Isreali concrete wall, the settlements on stolen land, roads, fences, factories, cars, rubbish, building sites. An all the hidden tragedies of people being evicted from houses they have owned and occupied for generations because Israelis want to settle East Jerusalem and make it all their own, the poverty, the overcrowding and hatred, the guns and the politics.
It struck me strongly that all this ugliness results from the explosion in population and is as parable for the World. We have gained, many of us, prosperity, less manual labour, fast travel and better health but at a huge cost. As that cost begins to amount to destruction of the environment that we live in, humans must stop and work out what they actually want.
The global population has more than doubled in my lifetime (I’m 60) and we are trashing the planet – mass extinctions of whole species, vast destruction of forests, tons of trash floating in the oceans, coral reefs dying, and global warming. In a couple of generations we are also using up all the earth’s resources, oil gas and coal in particular, and what right do we have to do this? Future generations are going to inherit our nuclear and other waste but little of use.
And do we like a World with too many people? Do we like being in crowded places, competing for food, water and space? Do we welcome people into our land from places where there are not sufficient of these resources? Aren’t we all constantly trying to create ‘our own space’ and ‘get away from it all’? Are we happier or less happy with a higher popuplation? For the great majority, the answers are No, No, No, Yes and less happy.
We can’t return to the 19th century painter’s idyll of Jerusalem, but unless we are prepared to accept that the sort of conflict and competition for space and destruction that is going on there will be repeated thousands of times in bigger and bigger theatres around the World; unless we want our children and their children to live in a nightmare World, we need to start working out how to bring the global human population down.
If we don’t start work on this now, then chaos will result, either caused by humans or by the environment, or both.
I heard a business man say the other day that he knew about risk management, and that the risks of global chaos were too high to ignore: we need to act.