SPECIAL REPORT #12: OVERPOPULATION IN AMERICA - 18 Part Series (#12)

SPECIAL REPORT: 

OVERPOPULATION IN AMERICA

(Part 12 of 18)
ARE YOU SURE?
 

Infinity Express #Flight2100
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ARE YOU SURE? 

Series on Overpopulation in America— Facing Our Civilization in the 21st Century

By Frosty Wooldridge

Part 12: Facing Our Civilization in the 21st the Century

In the final analysis, this series could continue into some very heavy, if not sobering material, but for now, it gives Americans an idea of what this civilization faces and what we must do to change course.

These final quotes give you an idea of our predicament from some of the finest minds in the world.

“The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability
is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of
nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is

sophistic.” Harvard scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.” David Suzuki

“Growth for the sake of yet more growth is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea. CASSE is the David fighting the Goliath of endless expansion, and we know how that one turned out.” ~ David Orr

The green revolution was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who,
while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a
temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a
breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for
sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human
reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be
ephemeral only.”

“The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much
longer than a human lifetime….so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap
and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous
population…that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward
non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that
population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It was a condition,
not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

“We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take
specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises – exploding
population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Over-
consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face
today.” Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer

“Upwards of two hundred species.. mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety.. are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth’s carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence.. thanks to technologies that most people, I’m afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.” Daniel Quinn – Nature – Life – People – World – Technology – Peace – Environmental

“We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.”

Daniel Quinn – Nature – World – Insanity – Greed – Problems – Environmental – Responsibility

“As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a renewable
energy resource economy, which we do this century, will the “civil” part of civilization
survive? As we both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply
the amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected
by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian
bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but sooner or
later the price has to be paid.” Walter Youngquist

“The U.S. will set a record in the rate of rise—and fall of an empire. Between wide
open borders and fall of the dollar and growing population against a declining resource
base, the US will be defeated from within. Mobs will rule the streets in the nation
that is now the third largest in the world and unable to support its population except
by taking resources from other countries.” Arnold Toynbee, historian


“A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse emissions indicates we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have put to our own head.” Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilization

“The ship is already starting to spin out of control. We may soon lose all chance of grabbing the wheel. Humanity faces a genuinely new situation. It is not an environmental crisis in the accepted sense. It is a crisis for the entire life-support system for our civilization and our species.” Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will take Her Revenge for Climate Change

“At this point, it’s almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed, which it clearly does not. Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall as so many others have followed before it. What likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.”

“We are strong and adaptable animals and can certainly make a new life on the hotter Earth, but there will only be a fraction of inhabitable land left. Soon we face the appalling question of whom can  we let aboard the lifeboats? And who must we reject? There will be great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food available. We will need a new set of rules for limiting the population in climate oases.” James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A final Warning

“Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken for granted planet, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. And inhospitable place. It needs a new name, Eaarth.” Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a life on a Tough new Planet

“If present growth trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime in the next 100 years.” The Club of Rome 1972

“The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Thomas Malthus 1798

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from
microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided,
assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or
globally.” Dr. Albert Bartlett www.albartlett.org

“All causes are lost causes without limiting human population,” Dr. Paul
Ehrlich, Stanford University

Frosty Wooldridge

All About Frosty  - "A Hero For Our Times"

If we do not change course - consider the possible consequences.

SPECIAL REPORT: #11 OVERPOPULATION IN AMERICA - 18 Part Series

SPECIAL REPORT: 

OVERPOPULATION IN AMERICA

(Part 11 of 18)
 

Series on overpopulation in America—killing bees in America and "Worldwide" will be the death of humanity 

By Frosty Wooldridge

Man’s devastation by poisoning of bees will be the death of all mankind

The world-famous Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson speculates: "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."


Each day, millions of middle class Americans across this country spray Roundup, Weed-Be-Gone, Termite Spray, Bug Killer, Wasp Spray and hundreds of other poisons onto their sidewalks, driveways, bushes, trees, flowers and onto their lawns.  They kill everything that pecks, slithers, crawls, flaps, bites and breathes.  Their mass slaughter includes bats, honey bees, flies, butterflies, mosquitoes, wasps, bumblebees and other pollinators.  Billions upon trillions of insects suffer death via poisons that disrupt their breathing or digestive tracks.

(Western honeybee pollinating a flower.)  Photography by Wikimedia Commons

As human life menacingly expands across the planet, it devours the natural world. It kills the balance of the natural world. It murders just about anything that flies, bites or burps.  According to a High Country News report years ago, Americans kill 1 vertebrate crossing our roads (road kill) every 11.1 seconds. That equals to one million deaths every day of the year.(www.HighCountryNews.com)  That equals 365 million creatures lose their lives to tires, boat propellers, fans, boats, jet intakes, aircraft propellers and other mechanical devices every single day of the year.  Humans kill everything that runs, leaps, flies or swims—by the billions and trillions.





But we shall pay for our transgressions when it comes to the pollinators: bees, bats, wasps, butterflies and other insects.


Consider the coming collapse of the $30 billion honey bee economy in the US.

“Since 2006 honey bees responsible for pollinating more than 100 crops—from apples to zucchini—have been dying by the tens of millions,” said a Huffington Post report. “As a new report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) details, scientists are still struggling to pinpoint the cause of so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and time is running out. Currently, the survivorship of honey bee colonies is too low for us to be confident in our ability to meet the pollination demands of U.S. agricultural crops.”

The report said, “CCD has wiped out some 10 million bee hives worth $2 billion over the past six years. The death rate for colonies has hit 30% annually in recent years and there are now about 2.5 million honey bee colonies in the US, down from 6 million in 1947 and 3 million in 1990. That downward spiral leaves “virtually no cushion of bees for pollination.”


With mounting information, it becomes downright frightening. For example: take almonds. California harvests more than 80 percent of the world’s almonds. But you can’t grow the nut without honey bees and it takes 60 percent of the US’s remaining colonies to pollinate that one $4 billion cash crop.”

“If the death toll continues at the present rate, that means there will soon be barely enough bees to pollinate almonds, let alone avocados, blueberries, pears or plums. “We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” USDA scientist Jeff Pettis said in the report.


Jacques Cousteau worried about what humans were doing to the ecosystem: "If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe to be replaced by the insect."


Scientists report several factors—from disease-carrying parasites to pesticides. What sickens me stems from the fact that we know our chemicals disrupt every living creature in a cornfield, wheat field, potato field, tomato patch and bean acre. Yet we pour, spray and inject more and more poisons.
A beekeeper said, “Bees are vital to our lives as they are among the primary pollinators of our food plants. It has been deduced that if our native bees were to die out the effect on crops and wild flowers would be utterly catastrophic. As these crops and flowers provide food for our wild and farm animals we could easily lose up to a third of our regular diet. This is a very real problem, and one that is not getting the attention it needs.”


Bees and other pollinators allow humanity to thrive.  Without them, we won’t survive the 21^st century.   I finding it particularly galling if not a whole new dimension of “stupid” for our species to continue expanding our numbers while we diminish insect numbers, rodent numbers, big beasts and avian numbers at a rate of one million daily via road kill in the USA alone.

But the wholesale poisoning via such insane herbicides like Roundup makes me sick to my stomach.  Those poisons  travel into the ground, into the angleworms, into the birds, into the bugs and finally into the water systems where they  ultimately poison each and every one of us. How can we be this stupid? 


We wonder why 1 out of 3 Americans suffers from the biggest killer in the USA: cancer.  How stupid can we prove ourselves?   How absolutely out of touch and in denial of reality can we be? What kind of intellectually and morally bankrupt greedy money-mongers make TV commercials parading Roundup to millions of really stupid, ignorant and uninformed Americans too fat and too lazy to bend down and pull out the weeds on their driveway with their hands?


To think that within another 37 years, our country will grow by 137 million Americans while the rest of the world adds another 3 billion people—all capable of using Roundup and hundreds of other poisons to kill the bees of the world.  We prove ourselves to be the smartest—dumbest species on this planet.  I’ll toss in arrogant, self-righteous and insanely dull of mind to boot.


Tama Janowitz puts the earthly competition between insects and humans this way: "Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches, will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars."

Frosty Wooldridge

All About Frosty  - "A Hero For Our Times"

If we do not change course - consider the possible consequences.