Blog Action Day on Climate Change: Human Overpopulation

BLOG ACTION DAY

A powerful guest post by blogger Not Honey

No one likes to talk about human overpopulation as the number one crisis facing our planet. Environmentalists and wildlife protectors may not like to talk about it because they likely have children, and there’s the idea that having as many kids as you want is a God-given right and mentioning that “right” as a cause for climate change and planetary destruction won’t bring in the donations.

That silence is deadly. Here the world waits for the U.S. to take the lead on climate change and the best we can do is a useless cap-and-trade bill that has no chance of actually limiting greenhouse gas emissions. There are too many loopholes, including the “offsets” that industry insists they must have, and no clear plan for just how many credits for emissions the big polluters can buy.

Not included at all in this bill are greenhouse gases from farms, which emit 35-40 percent of all methane emissions, “(which have 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide), 65 percent of nitrous oxide (which is 320 times as warming as carbon dioxide) and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes to acid rain” according to the 2006 UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”

Food production for an exploding human population is a major source of global warming pollution. There is talk now among wildlife protectors about designating more wildlife parks and reserves for agriculture and animal farming.

Dr. Richard Leakey, noted anthropologist, wildlife protector, and head of Wildlife Direct in an interview for “Kenya Imagine” the following:
“Population growth is, as far as I am concerned, is probably the single most worrying factor for the planet. We can look at a farm, we can look at a national park – we can say the carrying capacity of that area is “x.” If we look at the planet, the carrying capacity for our planet has been exceeded. This planet has too many people on it. How we address this I don’t know. But I am certain if we don’t address it, many of the good efforts being made to cut carbon dioxide emissions and to find alternative sources of energy won’t have the desired effect. It has got to be linked and conceptualised in a way that stabilises the human population and ultimately brings the numbers down.”

Iregi Mwenja, a researcher on Wildlife Direct, has posted more than once about the threat to wildlife from a growing human population. Recently, he posted: “With the population of the world at 9 billion in 2050, we may have 70 million people facing famine worldwide. FAO says more land is needed to increase food production by 70 percent in 2050. In a country like Kenya where land is scarce now and famine is the order of the day, the situation will be grave in 40 years time when human population will have grown to over 60 million people. We may be forced to sacrifice some land in our protected areas to feed this overblown human population! If you don’t want to contribute to this catastrophe, let us limit the number of kids per couple to 2. Please read this BBC NEWS article for more details on the FAO report.”

To reiterate: Food production must increase 70 percent over the next 40 years to feed the growing human population.

What does that mean?

More factory farms and far more greenhouse gas emissions promoting global climate change than can be regulated or capped-and-traded. The BBC story states that “Climate change, involving floods and droughts, will affect food production.” Climate change is already having a devastating affect on food production and vice versa. Thousands of farmers in India have committed suicide because of crop failures due to drought.

Deforestation in the Amazon to make room for cattle farms and soybean farms to FEED THE CATTLE has caused the loss of more than 150,000 square kilometers of rainforest in Brazil between 2000-2008.

Loss of forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo is putting gorillas at risk of extinction, which will put humans at risk of extinction, too.

How’s that? How can the loss of a fellow Great Ape species have anything to do with human survival? Turns out that gorilla dung is a major component in forest growth. We need rainforests to turn carbon dioxide into clean air and to deter the greenhouse effect. Gorillas, according to Ian Redmond, the UN ambassador for the Year of the Gorilla, “are herbivores, feeding on fruit and plants. The digested food, as it passes through their systems, helps seeds to germinate. … The full extent of the gorillas’ role in propagation is unclear. But Redmond said a number of plant species could not flourish without them, or wild elephants, the other large mammal crucial in germination.” The gorillas “caught up in the region’s civil wars, preyed on by poachers, and crowded out of their homes by mining and logging industries – are already endangered across Africa. …But Redmond’s argument could help give the animals a new level of protection.” Economists have suggested spending $15 billion on reforestation as a “cheap” way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Redmond said gorillas were crucial in maintaining the lifecycle of the rainforests in the Congo basin. The forests themselves suck up more than 1bn tonnes of carbon every year.”

“This is what the species are for. They are not ornaments. They are not just interesting things to study. They are part of an ecosystem,” he said.”

We are the only species of Great Apes on this planet who seem not to know their place in an ecosystem. If we continue to allow human populations to grow and crowd out all the wildlife until they’re all extinct, and use up all the forests until they’re gone … what will we have left? A planet full of nothing but humans and a ruined environment that can no longer support life.

“It is only if you bring numbers down that we will be able to find a way for resource utilisation per capita to increase. It is the only way you are going to deal with poverty and unless you deal with poverty, the situation can only spiral downwards. This is a massive problem and the solutions are not simply condoms versus draconian measures such as one child per family. It has to be looked at in different countries in different ways. I think there has to be a commitment everywhere to slow and stop population growth. I do believe that we have been set back a long way by the opposition to family planning that is being shown by some of the religious groups and by some of the more conservative governments such as the current US administration.” – Richard Leakey, in an interview published during the Bush Administration.

Resources

• Catholic Church calls upon Christians to give birth to more children
• Catholic Church Expects Defeat Of Philippines Family Planning Bill, Drafts Alternate Measure
• “Do Offsets Really Help Reduce Emissions?”
• Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
• Wildlife Direct
• Kenya Imagine – Leakey on Climate Change in Kenya
• Bushmeat East Africa blog
• BBC News, “Food Production Must Rise 70 Percent”
• Independent, “1500 Farmers Commit Mass Suicide In India”
• Mongabay.com,”Future Threats to the Amazon Rainforest”
• Guardian UK, “Wildlife expert claims gorilla dung is critical to containing climate change”
• Population Connection: Education and Action for a Better World