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Are we the victims or the villains?


Road Runner

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Just wondering...

Suppose we consider the earth as this huge living organism.  Like most living beings, at times, it plays host to many types of bacteria and viruses.  Normally, if the bacteria is contained to certain areas and acceptable levels, the organism in question thrives and is relatively healthy.  But if the bacteria is unchecked and grows to infect every part of the host organism, the result will most likely be a massive infection.  In the case of the organism known as earth, the current bacterial infection is the human race.  Human population (HP) growth is out of control and is affecting the earth in a very adverse way.  One of the first signs of a sick earth is the presence of a fever.  The earth’s temperature is rising, due almost entirely, directly or indirectly, to the excessive growth of the bacteria known as human beings.

So the earth got smart and developed a method (or a vaccine, if you will) for reducing the bacteria levels throughout its body.  This vaccine or controlling agent is called Covid-19 by the humans for whom it was designed to control.  But this vaccine is far from being sufficiently effective to control HP growth.  In addition, the bacteria (humans) keep modifying their actions and changing their biological makeup to counteract the effects of C-19 and their susceptibility to it.  To counter that, the earth is devising new variants of its toxic human bacteria vaccine (Covid-19).  In turn, the human bacteria will then devise additional counteractions to fight the new HP growth vaccine variants.  

And round and round we go.

One way or the other, if the earth and its humans are going to survive, human population growth needs to be adequately controlled.       
 

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3 hours ago, Road Runner said:

Just wondering...

Suppose we consider the earth as this huge living organism.  Like most living beings, at times, it plays host to many types of bacteria and viruses.  Normally, if the bacteria is contained to certain areas and acceptable levels, the organism in question thrives and is relatively healthy.  But if the bacteria is unchecked and grows to infect every part of the host organism, the result will most likely be a massive infection.  In the case of the organism known as earth, the current bacterial infection is the human race.  Human population (HP) growth is out of control and is affecting the earth in a very adverse way.  One of the first signs of a sick earth is the presence of a fever.  The earth’s temperature is rising, due almost entirely, directly or indirectly, to the excessive growth of the bacteria known as human beings.

So the earth got smart and developed a method (or a vaccine, if you will) for reducing the bacteria levels throughout its body.  This vaccine or controlling agent is called Covid-19 by the humans for whom it was designed to control.  But this vaccine is far from being sufficiently effective to control HP growth.  In addition, the bacteria (humans) keep modifying their actions and changing their biological makeup to counteract the effects of C-19 and their susceptibility to it.  To counter that, the earth is devising new variants of its toxic human bacteria vaccine (Covid-19).  In turn, the human bacteria will then devise additional counteractions to fight the new HP growth vaccine variants.  

And round and round we go.

One way or the other, if the earth and its humans are going to survive, human population growth needs to be adequately controlled.       
 

When I was in college around 1970, the "Zero Population Growth" movement was popular and the "Z-Poppers" were preaching everywhere about limiting population growth.  A biology text for a course called "Biology and Human Affairs" that I took claimed that a sustainable human population is around 1 billion people.  The world population was around 4.5 billion then and is around 8 billion now.

That course used an example of a population using up resources as it grows.  One of the Aleutian Islands was once populated with 16 deer who, with no predators, exploded to over 100 after some years.  But a few years later, the population was 8.  The deer had eaten so much vegetation that there eventually wasn't enough left to sustain the large population.

We have the ability to find ways to increase farm yields, etc. but we have been having problems finding enough fresh water, wood, certain minerals, etc. Changes in American policy in the early 2000's led to the Atlantic Tuna Fishery to become tremendously depleted.  As old oil wells give out, new ones are being created in more and more difficult to work places.

Since it's clear that we're not going to do much to limit Climate Change, we should be doing research on cheap desalination of water and better methods of irrigation: 75% of American freshwater use is for irrigation and 50% of that evaporates before it gets into the ground.

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