As we move into the 21st century, it’s become increasingly clear that our planet is in a dire state. What can be done about it?
In the 1970s, many people recognized that we were overpopulating Earth and that we needed to take action quickly to save the planet for future generations. But who cares about future generations? Who is going to do anything to take care of them now? Only a small percentage of the population will care enough to do anything about our current environmental problems.
The overwhelming number of people will not even change their lifestyle for the slightest environmental impact (including me).
It is a concern worldwide and there are only a few solutions: implement contraception policy worldwide; stop consuming meat; reduce birth rate; reduce the human population or burn down cities etc. All these solutions are controversial and would require a lot of politics to implement.
This year I have read a book from 70s – https://ziurkes.group.lt/book/27847/s/project-survival
Short book, gathered some essays and articles on environmental crisis as they have seen in back then and I have realized two things:
1. the solution is in the minds back then was that we have too many people on earth
2. there is nothing to be done about it as no politician in his mind would (openly) push such agenda – you will not win a lot of voters if your party line is to get rid of them.
People had recognized in the 1970s that we had taken our population past its carrying capacity and that we were heading for disaster unless we changed something. The difficulty was that most people believed that the problem was too big to solve and that nothing could be done about it anyway. So everyone just went about their own business and didn’t worry about it.
So, what changed? Well, believe it or not, there was a man called Paul Ehrlich who told everybody they needed to start worrying about overpopulation and stop breeding like rabbits. And nobody believed him. As a matter of fact, they hated him for trying to scare them!
In the year 1968 Robert Malthus wrote an essay titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in which he argued that population growth tended to outrun advances in agricultural technology and that natural checks on population, such as disease and famine, were insufficient to prevent mankind from reaching a point where there would be too many human beings to sustain life on earth. Even Covid did not help much.
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
