We'd be in a Mess

The planet we live on is our last refuge.

Earth dies, we die.

Earth, I guess I should point out, has a problem...It's mostly us.

There is only one real environmental problem and that is the number of humans is too large to live and let live, and there is no getting around it. I have never heard a rational argument for more humans, but that is the direction we have been heading in for hundreds of years. I've heard political rationalizations and religious rationalizations and just rationalizations for more of us, but if you stop and do the math, there simply has to be an end.

Religious factions and cults seem to be the biggest culprit, but illogical, though well intentioned, liberal initiatives can be tragic also. Sending all those medical supplies to the third world some decades back made everybody feel good, only we didn't compensate for the birthrate, which exploded as a result of not encouraging birth control, though that is somewhat over simplified. The birthrate was essentially the same, but lots of babies died. Maybe it should be called the childhood survival rate or something but the result was that now that we kept them from dying as babies, they died at incredible rates as young adults...Lots of times at one end or the other of a weapon. The legacy of antibiotics in the Third World seems to be environmental destruction and war.

As that little German guy in the funny hat wanders around letting folks kiss his ring, I wonder how many people think of the world wide damage and misery caused by one single tenet of the religion he espouses...the sin of not making babies.

And I don't want you to think I single out Catholicism for all the blame, though I think it deserves a good bit of it...many other conservative religions, including Islam and whatever form of Mormonism those pregnant 13 year old children are the victim of, also preach that their members are called by god to breed their way to dominance.

My third grade teacher at Wiley Elementary School in Winston Salem, North Carolina had it right on that one. Georgia Walton, Mizz Walton to me, always gave us a stern talking to when we had acted inappropriately..."What if everybody acted like that?" she'd say in that horrid voice that could crush the spirit out of a nine year old boy.

"Then where would we be?...We'd be in a mess," Mizz Walton would say, "And that's all there is to it!"

Well here we are, because way too many people ARE acting that way...And I don't care what any church says, the Earth simply is a certain size and can support a certain number of humans without them eating each other figuratively or literally, and that's all there is to it.

Any commodity loses value when there is too much of it...Human lives included, making war way too easy.

If we humans don't face up to the real crisis on this planet and start passing out condoms with our medical miracles, you know where we'll be?

Right where we are...In a mess.

Peace,

Steve


Planned Parenthood

ZPG

Grist