Fixing Humankind: Superpopulation

The readers who have been following this blog might have noticed by now that I have a certain criticism on our current societal values. Please, don't get me wrong. I know we are here only because of the path we took and, honestly, we have accomplished a lot of good things up until now. However, I still feel humankind has missed many important steps in its development as a civilized species.

In the last post I hinted about my personal desire for listing the changes I would make to the way we live if I had the power to do so. Well, this is going to be the first of many posts on that topic. This one is going to be an initial discussion about superpopulation. Nevertheless, because I haven't written in a while, the text is probably going to read a little sloppy. Hopefully, this will change as more posts come along.

If I could set a single goal for humankind to accomplish, it would be to drastically reduce its population size. The justification behind this idea is the following. Whatever we humans do, whether good or evil actions, their effect on what is around us is going to be much less significant if there are less of us in the world.

It is not fair that a single species should monopolize the biosphere and change it so dramatically that the biosphere itself is affected and threatened by such changes. Earth's ecosystems' future shouldn't  be dictated in its majority by a single species. Humans should occupy only a minute amount of the Earth's crust, so that other species have enough room to live and thrive.

The amount of damage we cause to the many bio-microcosms that surround us due to war, agriculture, and animal domestication is enormous. And if you consider how we manipulate and corrupt natural resources such as rivers and mountains to support the infra-structure necessary to maintain our current lifestyle, the picture of humankind as a civilized species then becomes pretty grim. Only a few ordinary natural resources we have not yet had full control over, such as sun light and air. But even those are already affected by consequences of human egotism and opulence through global warming.

I do not think having so many us imposing so much on nature and its limited resources is correct. I think we should learn from other species to let nature take its natural course. We should indeed, as some say, live in harmony with it. And, from my perspective, the first step towards achieving that goal is reducing our population. If we are in less numbers, we can cause less damage to the rest of the world. As technology progresses, however, the impact a of single man becomes ever larger, and, therefore this fact should be considered when deciding how much larger human population should be.

What I am going to say now is going to sound a little bit apocalyptic perhaps, but I guess it might be a good way to emphasize the point I want to make in this post. Let us reduce the number of humans so that the plague of humankind does not stifle all other species and as a consequence suffocates itself too. It is better for us to control our population our way than let nature impose that on us in its own catastrophic terms. If we keep growing haphazardly as we currently are, at some point there will not be enough resources for everyone, even if we manage to distribute it fairly, which is obviously not the case right now.

Look at the problems we are already having with drinkable water. What about crop space? The fish industry is also having a hard time dealing with the increasing demand of fish, which is leading them create their own way “fish domestication” processes by creating "marine cattle" farms, the so-called fish-farms. These, much like the standard crops, are very damaging to the surrounding marine biome and to the animals that are raised in it. At some point, we are going to have messed nature up so much that there will not be any real nature for us to talk about. And if we manage to survive and occupy the entire surface of the planet, by that time, nature will consist of men and their bioengineered high-yield fauna and flora, which will be some weird cyberpunk reality. What a great place this world is going to be! :)

Population growth should not be associated with economic growth. Economy can still grow if the same amount of people is better educated, well fed and more productive. What is the use in increasing population size if we cannot even manage the size of the population we have now. Let us first deal with the amount of people we currently have before we can even consider increasing our population.

In conclusion, if I could, I would likely limit human population by, let's say, at most 1 billion people. Then we could all live in a few smaller spots on the planet's crust and leave the rest of Earth's crust untouched and unaffected by the “creative” hand of men, available to the other uncountable amount of species to enjoy their freedom and natural habitat.