- In his landmark book, Breeding Ourselves to Death, Lawrence
Lader opened the discussion 40 years ago, but again, no one took a stand!
The Sierra Club avoided it. Every environmental group out to save animals,
land, water, air and bio-life-avoided a word about human overpopulation.
-
- As Paul Ehrlich said, "All causes are lost causes
without limiting human population. In more than three decades after Lader's
book, the drop among rich nations has been welcome, since it has lessened
their already disastrous impact on Earth's life support systems. On the
negative side, world population has soared from 3.0 billion to 6.8 billion,
and the United States has clearly claimed the title of 'most populated
nation'. It's now in third place in brute numbers, and with its high level
of per capita consumption, it is responsible for, by far, the greatest
national share of global environmental destruction."
-
- Ironically, as Brian Williams, Katie Couric and Diane
Sawyer report on water shortages, gridlock, climate change and starving
people, they never 'touch' the population issue. It's like a sacred cow.
-
- In India 'sacred' cows roam everywhere, dropping their
waste and creating a mess-but as long as their religion makes the cows
'sacred', no one can complain or take action. In America, the 'population
issue' remains our sacred cow. No matter how much environmental destruction,
Americans never connect the population numbers as the root cause. Call
it mass denial or selective stupidity.
-
- Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "Overpopulation
is one of the most critical world problems of our time that endangers economic
progress and peace."
-
- If you look at the Iraq and Afghanistan war, it's not
about 'terror' but about 'oil'. If you look at the "War on Poverty"
in the United States started by President Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Great
Society", over 45 years later, 13.4 million American children live
below the poverty level and another 41.8 million Americans subsit on food
stamps. A mind-numbing 72 percent of black mothers remain single while
living on taxpayer welfare. Similar numbers apply to Hispanic single mothers
and a growing number of white single mothers. All the while, the USA adds
3.1 million immigrants annually-with no end in sight.
-
- Even President Johnson in 1967 said, "I will seek
new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world
population and the growing scarcity in world resources."
-
- At that time, the U.S. housed 195 million people. Since
then, we added 115 million to the USA from desperate immigrants fleeing
their own overloaded countries. The PEW Center Report, Fogel/Martin "U.S.
Population Projections and U.S. Census Bureau show us adding another 100
million by 2035-a scant 25 years from 2010.
-
- While we race toward "Peak Oil", we continue
racing toward maximum population loading of America-to exhaust our major
energy source that drives and feeds our civilization-even faster!
-
- What's behind massive population growth? Ancient religions
like the Catholic Church, Islam, Hindu and others! The Catholic Church
represents one of the greatest obstacles for birth control and family planning
in the world. It's highly organized and controls the levers of power in
all countries it dominates as well as the United States.
-
- The Catholic Church rants against birth control while
18 million humans starve to death annually. (Source: www.WorldHealthOrganization.com)
-
- Amazingly enough, church groups in the U.S. pitch their
painful 'Save the Children' TV commercials, "You can save a child
for only .88 cents a day." But they never tell you that the more
children you save, the more will starve in the future. Each year, another
80 million children show up on the planet, net gain. And, another 18 million
starve to death. Thus, years down the road, the starvation rates will
become magnified into the millions while today, over 3.1 billion humans
subsist on $2.00 per day.
-
- Ironically, the "Father of the Vietnam War",
Robert S. McNamara said, "A humane but massive reduction in the world
rate of population growth must be made."
-
- Even President Nixon said, "Population growth is
a world problem which no country can ignore. The United Nations and other
international bodies should take leadership in responding fully."
-
- As to my world travels on six continents since those
epic pronouncements in the late 60s and 70s, I find it troubling that the
United States steered completely away from any mention of overpopulation.
While American women utilized birth control to bring down the birth rate
to 2.03 per woman on average, the world continued on its net gain of 1.0
billion every 13 years.
-
- While the USA continues accepting a mind-numbing 3.1
million immigrants annually, the line grows by 80 million annually.
-
- In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video,
"Immigration, Poverty, and Gum balls", Roy Beck, director of
www.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.
Take five minutes to see for yourself:
-
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE&feature=player_embedded
-
- While I interviewed on a radio show yesterday for 90
minutes in Baltimore, a woman wrote me that, "Overpopulation is not
a problem in the United States." She said it emphatically, with total
self-assuredness to the point that she could not be swayed with facts,
figures or other realities. Millions of Americans share her total misunderstanding
of her own situation-and that of her kids and grandkids when this population
"monster" really hits the USA.
-
- They watch, listen and read about water shortages, gridlocked
traffic, species extinction, air pollution, diseases and multiple symptoms,
but refuse to connect the dots as to their and our predicament in the United
States. Thus, none of our Congress or this president addresses it.
-
- Therefore, we continue racing toward an added 100 million,
and after that, another 100 million and again, another 100 million to double
U.S. population to 600 million by 2060, give or take a few years.
-
- "We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex
garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners.
We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles
of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves,
in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic
war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child
chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year,
all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion, cutting down forests
and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities
- water - with industrial filth and all the time we are breeding with the
ferocity of the Brown Rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to
go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This
has always been a dangerous supposition."-Gerald Durrell (1966)
-
-
- _________
-
- 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 at www.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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