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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Missionary's Position---Population


So National Geographic comes out with a front cover article on the great news of 7 billion people being on the earth. It is not to say they were excited in glee, because like anybody who has ever thought about this never-ending-exponentially-expanding population issue, they are obviously beginning to have some questions about its feasibility.

While they didn't mention it in these terms, the earths population every four years is growing at an amount that is equivalent of the US population today! ----all of our population in good old America, that would be close to 320 million. One just has to wonder, is this really a good idea?

What can interestingly be seen on the cover of the issue is not a photo of some seething mass of humanity, but instead a photo of some monster city (Shanghai 14 million) with all its lights blazing. My first thought is, why this picture and not one of some God-forsaken slum in India where people are starving in the streets or beggars in Pakistan, or dead bodies in Haiti?


But the more I looked at the photo, I realized it was showing a massive consumption of energy, blurring autos, lights on everything blazing away, just a throbbing mega city hell bent on consumption of a resource that is definitely finite. What does this mean for all the striving masses, those hell-bent on living like Americans? Can they too dream of having all this stuff, this energy driven economy, this movement of people and goods? 80 million more on the earth every year all wanting this? To top it off there are 3 million or more Americans every year, these are the same Americans that consume 25% of the world's resources. No wonder Nat. Geo is going to have an article a month on this issue.




Have we been dumb, or what?

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