Global warming
The on-going debate about whether there is/is-no global warming and whether it is/is-not caused by humans is boring in the extreme. The debate ‘rages’ on and the decades pass – and nothing is done – because hey, the environment is in tip-top shape, not so?
Not so! The environment is in a perilous state, actually. The right tends to deny there is a problem as its main/only concern in life seems to be business and money, leaving the left free to appropriate the topic, quite often for its own political ends.
It is true that our model of broken-cycle consumerism is unsustainable and has already caused great damage
Why am I not convinced of the left’s true environmental credentials?
Because while they go on about the environment and seem to seek solutions that put further tax burden on western countries without the apparent need to address the rest of the world, they don’t seem to equate huge population growth and mass immigration with the degradation of nature.
Why? Because 1) they are champions of unlimited, unending immigration, and 2) because to criticise the massive population explosion that has occurred in the third world since WWII would be tantamount to racism. It’s not – it’s simply being honest. Equality is NOT furthered by making one group of people untouchable!
But overpopulation and unprecedented urban sprawl in the Third World since WW2 are the root of many of the world’s problems today
Population growth
Predictably, the left blames environmental destruction on western industry and consumerism, and while these are indeed important causes, it totally absolves the rest of the world for the destruction of natural habitats caused by rampant population explosion – as well as the general practises of third world countries in relation to nature and the environment.
Pollution and natural degradation are staggering in the Third World
Many of the world’s core problems can be distilled down to one root cause: Population Growth. In other words, population growth is the root cause of many of the problems the world is witnessing today, including:
- Degradation of the environment through pollution, habitat loss, over-farming and the out-of-control spread of cities and urban conurbations
- Large-scale pollution of the air, water, land and seas through the dumping of untold quantities of litter
- Uncontrolled population growth in rural areas together with poor farming practises leads to overpopulation, over-farming, the depletion of resources such as soil and water, and produces uncontrolled migration to urban centres
- Urban sprawl that stretches cities beyond their limits to populations of 10-30 million – with little or no infrastructure for the vast majority of them
- The lack of jobs, opportunities, care, housing, infrastructure and education creates poverty on a huge and concentrated scale, leading in turn to virtually uncontrollable, warped ‘societies’ where crime, violence, political alienation and maltreatment of children and women are rampant
- Such broken societies where the authority of the state can only be exerted through brutal force, and where discontentment seethes among those who suffer without any hope in sight, are fertile ground for extremism. In the past this took the form of Communist revolutionary movements, and now either membership of ruthless crime organisations or Muslim fundamentalist factions
Ultimately, any lasting solution to the world’s main environmental problems – and let’s just call that pollution and the overexploitation and degradation of the natural world as well as the human living environment – has to tackle the demographic time bomb ticking away.
This produces massive, unending waves of immigration that are changing and destabilising the developed world too
Fortunately, in most of the world birth rates are dropping below replacement level, but it will take decades for the impact of this to be felt, and in the Middle East and Africa the population continues to explode, and sprawl forth its excess humans as the vanguard of a migrating/invading force that has the potential to destroy those few parts of the world that still function, i.e. Europe, North America and Australasia.
For now, the Far East does not share this particular problem, but every part of the world has its own social, economic, political and environmental challenges, and in the long run we need to move to a stable population level in which quality of human life over sheer quantity of humans overcrowding in city and country alike becomes the goal.
If both pollution/over-consumption and overpopulation are not dealt with, the future looks bleak and the quality of life on earth will diminish beyond recognitionNaturally this does not take anything away from the fact that we need to bridge the gap between haves and have nots, both between the world’s regions and within them, and that we need to move away from a world obsessed with commercialism, greed and consumerism towards one with a higher value and human moral. In this, not Saudi Arabia or Nigeria but Denmark and Switzerland seem to be examples to follow, but only if combined with the joie de vivre that other communities are famous for. To achieve a sustainable balance rather than the upheaval we’re going through right now, we need a quantum change in how we interpret and pursue happiness across this beautiful planet.
