Virus

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. -- Agent Smith

Well, good thing that's settled then. Christ on a cracker, where do these fucking people come from? Normally actual scientists, who spend their lives studying logical thought and tested hypotheses, don't resort to this magical, providential thinking, which in this case boils down to "something will come along, because something always does."

The world population is now estimated at 7.2 billion. But with current industrial technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that the more than nine billion people expected by 2050 as the population nears its peak could be supported as long as necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies are in place.

Oh, the food wing of a borderline-useless relief organization has estimated. Shit, no need to worry anymore, I guess. Nothing to see here, folks, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated. The same people who spent five years thumbing their dicks while Syria's record drought morphed into a civil war. One does wonder where some people find pants large enough to contain their enormous balls. Because of course all of those "necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies" will be "in place" tout de fucking suite, n'est-ce pas? Sure, and if my aunt had balls, why, she'd be my uncle. Cool story, bro.

Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

It's almost as if it was cribbed from some tech wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. We can have infinite energy, so long as we don't mind removing mountaintops, turning water tables into flammable vats of poisonous slurry, and the occasional bursting pipeline inundating some backwater with a few thousand barrels of crude. Hey, that's why we have media blackouts and airspace closures. What you don't know hurts someone else, amirite people?

We "transform ecosystems" by damaging their long-term sustainability in a variety of ways, from pollution and desertification to more vicious and mendacious means, such as habitat destruction and poaching. Yes, the magic beans Monsanto is forcing us to buy may indeed make it possible for 20 billion people to stack on top of each other and feed heartily, in a world with smartphones but without tigers, or coastlines, or potable water. Awesome. Where do you sign up?

There is so much more to the impending overpopulation catastrophe than merely being able to produce enough food for everyone to eat. The most overcrowded places are also the most poverty-stricken; surely this is not a coincidence.

Which makes one wonder, what was even the impetus for this op-ed in the first place? What the hell is wrong with acknowledging that there are very serious environmental and sociopolitical ramifications inherent with overcrowding? Why do some persist in whistling past the graveyard and presuming that infinite growth is possible and/or desirable, without any serious environmental and quality-of-life impacts?

How does better food tech help, for example, Bangladesh, where 160 million people are crammed into an area about the size of Iowa, that is mostly underwater, and will be almost completely submerged by 2100? Who gets to handle all the refugees, one of the other overcrowded backwaters surrounding it? Don't worry folks, the UNFAO has estimated. It's all good.

Just as Paul Ehrlich might have jumped the gun a bit (at least as far as the Oceania and Eurasia nations are concerned), so might Malthus have presumed too much, so might we yet (depending on who "we" is, 1 in every 3 people lives in China or India, 1 in 2 in Asia, so....) innovate a way out of this. But maybe not; there are a multitude of serious issues looming in relation to overcrowding, and there is much work to be done just to alleviate the almost certain impact for many millions right now, not to mention those yet to be born.