Thursday, September 21, 2006

Earth Too Crowded?

In his article titled "Earth Too Crowded for Utopia", Rapley suggests that illiminating the human being illiminates the global warming issue.

"So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed."

{clearing throat} Excuse my sarcasm but this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. The over-population myth has been used for years to prevent families from having multiple children. Moms of mutiple children have tolerated comments when found to be pregnant again like "Don't you know what causes that?" or "When are you going to stop having children?" Some families have had their own siblings and parents turn on them because they chose to have a large family. Lets follow that argument for a minute.

If a family has 4 children, which is now considered a "large" family, the parents have replaced themselves and added only 2. ONLY 2. If you do not have atleast 2 children, you have not even replaced you and your husband/wife/significant other. So how is having a family of 2,3 or more children contributing to over-population? The era of having 10 children is gone, and those born into those families are 65 or older. In another 20 years, at the rate of children being born today, we will decrease in population. So explain again to me how we are over-populated and how is that contributing to the Global Warming affect when large families date back thousands of years but we are just now seeing it??? Nope. I don't buy it.

Let's get real. Global Warming did not become an issue until we became over-industrialized. Everything sends up smoke signals in the environment: our deoderant, cooking spray, hair spray, cars, and the BIGGGEST offender, manufacturing plants. If we want to make a GIANT impact on Globla Warming, turn off the lights on the 24 hour manufacturing facilities. Can we afford to take a step back in our industrialized society? We'd better. Our health, our environment, our world is suffering. If we don't, we will continue to kill ourselves through toxicity in the air and water and food, and we will continue to burn up the place we live in.

I am not a tree hugger. I am not an environmental activist by any stretch of the imagination. But I do know truth when I read it, and the notion that we need to illiminate the number of humans to control the Global Warming situation is just dumb. Over population is a myth. Try again Rapley.