Global Warming is not the problem….
January 7, 2010 by Doug Kennedy
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.
Canute The Optimist?
September 28, 2009 by Doug Kennedy
I’m not sure that King Canute was being an optimist when he commanded the tide not to rise and dampen his feet: in fact, he was being a pessimist and proving to his people that he was not infallible, and that the tide would not obey his command. He has become legendary because of that bit of wisdom.
We could do with that wisdom today: to know the limits our power and when to exercise our optimism.
We complain about immigration, and our legislators bulldoze half-empty refugee camps; but the tide of migration from south to north, from poor to rich grows rapidly. Now the systems in Greece, Italy and Spain are under strain, and a wall between the USA and Mexico won’t stop the tide.
Why? Do people who live in nice warm countries really want to live in cold damp, overcrowded, foreign lands such as England? Probably not: the reasons are conflict, bad governance and lack of work and food: circumstances that make it impossible for people to better themselves.
But at the root, what is driving people to go through horrendous, life-threatening hardship, deserting all that is familiar, is over-population: the more people there are, the more competition there is for resources. The general result is poverty, starvation, environmental destruction (eg chop trees down around Manilla and the city floods) and conflict at local, regional and national levels. And as each person on this Earth adds to the environmental burden, especially whilst our behaviour is so out of control and we pay so little heed to what is sustainable, the drives to migrate are only increasing.
The tide is coming in and, whilst there is the pressure of growing population behind it, we are as powerless to stop south-north migration and the conflict that will result as old King Canute was to stop the sea. But there are two differences: the first is that, unlike Canute, we are glad-eyed optimists who seem to believe that things will sort themselves out, or some technology will come along to do it for us; and second that Canute could do nothing about the sea and the moon, whereas humanity could tackle the problem of exploding population.
The Optimum Population Trust is a UK think tank that is trying to find some answers. www.optimumpopulation.org