- Most Americans cannot dream nor do they give a second
thought to the United States adding 100 million people within 25 years.
For some mysterious reason, few connect the dots on water shortages currently
manifesting in Florida, California and Arizona. Other states like Colorado
and Georgia find themselves in similar situations. Americans don't quite
'get' the accelerating ramifications of rising gasoline prices.
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- They will soon enough! Already in Great Britain and most
of Europe, gasoline costs $10.00 a gallon. For us, it's only a matter
of time. As a bicyclist, I sport a T-shirt that depicts a fully loaded
touring bicycle that reads, "SUV of the 21st century!"
You may buy one atwww.adventurecycling.org. It creates a conversation
wherever you go!
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- In his brilliantly written book, Too Many People,
Lindsey Grant addresses such things as our energy depletion, food crisis
and much more. You may find his book at www.sevenlockspress.com and www.amazon.com .
Grant is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment
and Population Affairs.
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- As a world traveler, Lindsey Grant witnessed overpopulation
on a deeply moving scale. It affected him. Very few people can venture
into third world countries without exiting-and not feel an intense if not
acute sense of distress.
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- Grant addresses our dwindling food supply. He focuses
on top soil, energy and fertilizers.
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- "Fertilizer: the world is caught in a trap,"
said Grant. "It produces more and more commercial fertilizer to grow
more food for more people. Worldwide fertilizer use rose six times from
25 million nutrient tons in 1960 to 150 million tons in 1990 and it may
rise to 225 million nutrient tons by 2020.
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- "Farmers face a diminishing response curve. They
get less and less output per pound of fertilizer as they use more of it,
so fertilizer use increases faster than food output until it doesn't produce
enough food to pay for itself."
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- Consequences to massive fertilizer use include nitrates
injected into underground water cisterns, but much worse, those chemicals
run-off into rivers to create 10,000 to as large as 27,000 square mile
dead zones (North Sea out of Europe).
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- "We know some of the immediate effects," said
Grant. "Health problems from nitrates in drinking water, leaching
of nutrients from forest soils, acidification of lakes, eutrophication
of lakes and bays, leading to oxygen starvation and catastrophic declines
in fishery, to "brown slime" in the Adriatic, the "dead
zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, [now at 10,000 square miles], and deadly
"mahogany tides" in the Chesapeake Bay, all the result of fertilizer
runoff."
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- TOPSOIL LOSS WORLDWIDE
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- Another imminent mind, Lester Brown, of www.earthpolicyinstitute.com,
determined that human agricultural activity destroys 26 billion tons of
topsoil annually. Thus, with every year of humans adding 77 million to
this planet net gain, that topsoil loss accelerates beyond comprehension.
Again, as the World Health Organization reports, over 18 million humans
die of starvation or starvation related diseases annually-thus, as we add
77 million each year-we find ourselves never able to catch up to the 'food
bank' for feeding such numbers.
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- Further, we don't really know what we're doing as we
tinker with the balancing systems of Mother Earth.
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- "We don't know the cumulative effect of our activity,
or the secondary and tertiary effects," said Grant. "We live
in an exquisitely balanced ecosystem. We are tampering with that balance
in the pursuit of more food production, and we do not know what we are
doing."
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- GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD: THE GREAT UNKNOWN DANGER
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- If you read any environmental and scientific journals,
you may notice that bees and other pollinators vanish from large areas
of the United States and the world. Why? We poison them to death! We
destroy their habitat. And, today, dramatically change the genetic structure
of plants. Insects, birds and other pollinators cannot deal with that
kind of abuse! I feel terrible for those tiny, delicate hummingbirds!
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- Grant addresses pesticides in his book with painful realization
that humans ignore such wholesale slaughter of the insect world at great
risk.
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- "To maximize yields, we use pesticides and herbicides
to eliminate the competition," said Grant. "Then we find that
the weeds and pests fight back; they develop resistance to chemicals.
We are not winning. By one estimate, about 50 percent of world crops are
still lost to pests and weeds. Meanwhile, those poisons poison their users.
They have been associated with neurological deterioration, skin problems,
reproductive disorders, and cancer. One study in Ecuador found 60 percent
of the farm workers showing symptoms of pesticide poisoning."
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- You can add that to cancer in the United States as it
remains our number one killer. When you deposit enough chemicals into
the body over time, it results in mutation or aberrant behavior at the
cellular level. Voila! Cancer! You may also notice that in the last 40
years, according to a recent report by NBC's Katie Couric, autism affected
one in 2,000 children. As of 2010, one in 160 children suffer from autism.
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- Just imagine that we jumped into the wholesale use of
fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides right after WWII. When you look
at Parts 1 and 2 of this series showing our military and chemical companies
dumping countless tons of radioactive waste , mustard gas, dioxins, DDT
and other poisons into our oceans, lakes and rivers, along with our soils,
well folks, everything that goes around comes back around.
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- OUR OCEANS BECOME THE FINAL TOILET
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- While our oceans suffer our misuse as the final toilet-as
you can see, when that 'toilet' backs up within the "web of life",
nobody enjoys a free pass. No wonder cancer continues as our number one
killer of human beings.
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- As Grant moves through his book, I am astounded that
none of our leaders has listened. None have investigated, but more and
more writers expose the details such as Rachel Carson in Silent Spring and
Sandra Steingraber in Living Down River. They addressed
poisoning our world.
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- Lindsey Grant exposes the grand scenario of our predicament.
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- Can you imagine what another 100 million people added
to the USA in 25 years will manifest across our civilization?
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- Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents
from the Arctic to the South Pole as well as six times across
the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from
the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents "The Coming
Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it" to civic
clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring
about sensible world population balance atwww.frostywooldridge.com He
is the author of: America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million
Americans. Copies available: 1 888 280 7715
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