I recently noted in a personal Earth Meanders essay that "the population bomb has burst". In recent years there has been a frustrating dearth of discussion or action on the root cause of climate change and nearly every other environmental crises -- over-population [search] and inequitable over-consumption [search]. The Earth has already overshot its capacity to support current, much less future, populations; and grotesque opulence by the rich intensifies the impacts of total consumption upon the biosphere. To deny this is to be blind to the obvious, while ensuring a terrible conclusion of the human experiment.
There are a number of reasons for this. The original calamities of environmental collapse and terrible famine predicted by the seminal book the Population Bomb were put off...
Yet again we are warned that climate change and increasing population will cause massive starvation [more | search]. It is appalling how few people are aware that soil, land and even the atmosphere's waste absorptive potential are finite resources. The root cause of climate change and virtually all aspects of the global ecological crisis is too many people consuming beyond the carrying capacity of ecosystems to absorb and regenerate from their impact. The population bomb has exploded and some 6.5 billion people now live on a planet that can probably only support well one billion or less (the population about 125 years ago). How this grotesque overshooting of the biosphere's ecological system is unwound will have profound impacts upon the quality, and even possibility, of continued human...