Bali Climate Change Conference: A global contest

Dear Friends of the Bali Climate Change Conference,

I like everything about what you are thinking, proposing and doing. Let me add here that your views and plans for action appear to be ones that many people will soon come to understand and appreciate.

What worries me is how much time it takes for people to share long-range views like yours and to adopt farsighted proposals like the ones you are putting forward because the necessary changes that are in store for “the masters of the universe” — the leaders who rule the global political economy in its current, patently unsustainable form — will find such changes categorically unacceptable. The masters of the universe among us have made it quite clear through their primary positive regard and relentless protection of unbridled global economic growth, now rampantly overspreading the surface of Earth, that they would rather see life as we know it obliterated than limit, as well as share with others, their wealth, power and privileges, I suppose.

Always,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

From my vantage point, perhaps now is an occasion to discuss the human overpopulation of Earth and how a population of 6.63 billion people now can SUSTAINABLY GROW to a projected 9.2 billion people in 2050. That is a 40% increase in the global human population in the next 43 years.

Let’s look at what is happening now. We have millions of people who are conspicuously over-consuming Earth’s limited resources and becoming obese; on the other hand, billions of people do not have substantial sustenance, are going hungry, living in poverty and many are emaciated.

How on this good Earth are we going to manage 2 1/2 billion additional people to our current numbers by 2050 and improve life for the family of humanity? Is such a goal realistic? If so, how? If not, then what can be done to move forward in a humane, more reality-oriented way, thereby preserving life as we know it and the integrity of Earth?

Skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers could soon threaten life as we know it; and obscence per human over-consumption of resources, at a rate that dissipates Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored for human benefit, could irreversibly degrade our planetary home.

Scientific research, reason and common sense fail to provide good evidence of how “proper management” and “improvement in human wellbeing and environmental health” are realistically accomplished between now and 2050. I am supposing that we cannot keep doing what we are doing now: that is, over-consuming and overpopulating the planet we inhabit. Ideas of “staying the current course” remind me of magical thinking and such a strategy looks like a prescription for disaster.

For example, the seemingly endless growth of the global economy, or of any other human construction, for that matter, is bound to become patently unsustainable at some point in time in a finite world, will it not? Whatsoever is is, is it not…..regardless of human wishes and intentions to the contrary?

Is it reasonable and sensible to consider alternatives? Let us examine the probability that in 2050, we will have millions more people over-consuming resources, just as we are doing now. We will also have billions more people going without substantial sustenance by 2050.

If such an unsustainable situation was somehow likely to occur in first half of Century XXI, then we could begin now to protectively and ably respond by putting forward a humane and more reality-oriented “action plan” both for limiting per-capita over-consumption of finite resources and rapidly reducing absolute global human population numbers.

Always,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001