The overpopulation myth MYTH

Friday, March 15, 2013 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: overpopulation myth, ecological footprint, population collapse

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(NaturalNews) I keep hearing, even among some in the alternative media, that the overpopulation of humans on our planet is a myth because "all the people in the world could fit in the state of Texas."

Sure they can, but then where would they pee?

This is not an idle question. The argument that the world isn't overpopulated merely because they could theoretically all be squeezed into one large land mass is an utterly fallacious argument, and I need to urge my friends in the alternative media to stop making this argument because it doesn't fly.

The question of overpopulation is not -- and has never been -- how many humans the planet can physically hold in terms of cubic meters and physical volume. The question is how many humans the biosphere can support in terms of sustainable life.

This isn't a complicated thing to understand: Your physical body could fit in a box that's 24 x 24 x 80 inches. It's called a coffin. But your biological needs require a far larger footprint on the planet. You need water, for starters. Where does it come from? I guarantee you use far more water each day than falls on a 24" x 24" piece of land. The water needs of a single person vastly outpace the physical space that person occupies. The entire population of Los Angeles, for example, needs literally thousands of square miles of water basin space to capture all the water that's pumped into their artificial city.

You need food. Where does the food come from? Vast tracts of land that need sunshine, water and soil. It's not hard to imagine that the food needs of a single person on our planet probably exceed one thousand square meters of land. If we really squeezed the entire global population into the state of Texas, where would they grow their food?

You produce biological waste. Where does all your waste go? Processing that waste and "recycling" it back into the ecosystem requires huge amounts of land space. Nature needs a large, functioning ecosystem to dilute, process and transform the waste products of humanity, and in fact nature isn't even keeping up.

All told, the amount of land space required to support one human life is immensely larger than the amount of physical space occupied by one human body. This is classically called the "ecological footprint" of a human being. It's not a conspiracy theory and it's not something fabricated by Al Gore: We really do need a LOT of space to meet the demands of food, water, energy, resources, waste processing and so on.

Thus, the argument that "the entire population of the world could fit inside the state of Texas" is complete nonsense. You can fit a dozen people in a phone booth, but if you leave them in there for too long, they will die. If you cut off Los Angeles from the rest of the world, it will die. If you cut off New York City from the rest of the country, it will die. To support life, people need far more land mass on the planet than their physical bodies occupy.

"Carrying capacity" is a real concept

The Earth obviously has a finite amount of any given resource. The water volume is finite (but reusable if cleaned by nature). Oxygen production is finite. The amount of sunlight radiation reaching the surface of the planet is finite. Soil is finite. Rare earth minerals are finite. Oil is finite at any given moment in time, even if the Earth does produce more oil over long periods of time.

Given that all these things are finite -- and therefore not unlimited -- the global population that depends on these things for sustenance must obviously be finite as well. Anyone who argues that the human population can be "unlimited" even while depending on finite resources is being ridiculous.

Clearly, by all foundations of logic, there is a limited "carrying capacity" of the planet, meaning there is a finite number of human beings who can be supported by the biosphere.

It's not rocket science to realize this, yet I still hear people arguing that overpopulation is a "myth" because the Earth has no limits. That's absurd. Of course the Earth has limits. If the Earth had no limits, it would be larger than the solar system, larger than the Milky Way, and larger than the entire galaxy. Because infinite is greater than any integer. If you give me a really, really large number, like 1.2 to the power of 10 to the power of one trillion, infinity is still larger than that. So to argue that the Earth's resources are "infinite" is to admit you are mathematically retarded.

The real question is this: Have we already exceeded the carrying capacity of this planet with finite resources, or is it still far off?

Those who say overpopulation is a myth insist that the current human population -- over 7 billion people -- is nowhere near the carrying capacity of the planet and that we can continue to double our population every few decades for the foreseeable future. If that were true, then the current population would need to be living in harmony with the planet, with an excess buffer of fresh water, food, topsoil, ocean life, watershed areas and so on.

And yet, when I look around I do not see a civilization living in harmony with the ecosystem. In fact, I see a civilization living on borrowed time, having already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet to the point where a population collapse is inevitable.

Human civilization is living on borrowed time

What are the signs that we are living on borrowed time? Let me name just a few:

• In America, India and China, underground water aquifers that produce the food that feeds the population is plummeting rapidly. Many aquifers will be dry by 2040, including the Ogallala Aquifer that stretches from Texas to South Dakota and provides irrigation for the breadbasket agricultural hub of America.

• The pollution produced by the current population is murdering every ecosystem imaginable. Oceans are dying, coral reefs are dying, rivers are dying and rainforests are dying. If the human population were small compared to the total carrying capacity, we shouldn't see the natural ecosystems dying all around us.

• Soils are disappearing across the world's agricultural centers. We are losing topsoil at a record pace around the world, and once those top soils are gone, food production yields plummet. (You can't feed the world by growing food in sand.)

• Humanity's voracious appetite for energy has led to the global proliferation of "Earth-killing" technologies such as nuclear power plants. The Fukushima disaster proved that demand for power has caused energy industries to risk the viability of human life across the planet in order to produce more power for humanity's artificial cities.

• Hydrocarbons continue to drive the world economy, yet there's very good evidence that oil supplies in the Middle East are drying up (production is falling). While the planet can produce more hydrocarbons over millions of years, it cannot double its oil supply in a few decades. Thus, the demand for oil vastly outstrips the ability of the planet to produce it.

• Look at the outrageous crowding in cities like New York and Los Angeles. The highways exist in a seemingly endless logjam, and there's hardly a public open space left remaining anywhere in these cities, with New York's Central Park being the rare exception. Housing shortages and housing building materials shortages (wood, concrete, steel) are all very, very real. This is why building homes has become ridiculously expensive over the last few years. China is buying concrete and steel from the USA and shipping it overseas on large sea freighters.

• The depletion of ocean fisheries is also very real. As the human population over-fishes the oceans in search of food, ocean life is experiencing an unprecedented die-off. Many species have plummeted to "red alert" levels due to over-fishing.

I could go on, but the point is that when I look around, I do not see a world functioning with excess capacity. I see a world that seems to be over-tapped, over-exploited, over-farmed and over-populated. Nearly every river that empties into the oceans creates a massive "dead zone" of chemicals, heavy metals and pharmaceutical runoff. Chemical contamination has become so alarmingly bad that every person reading this carries 250+ synthetic chemicals in their bodies that don't belong there. Autism is skyrocketing, cancer is striking younger and younger children, and the food is increasingly tainted with pollutants caused by humankind.

This is not the description of a planet with excess carrying capacity. This is a description of a planet that is DYING.

Another fallacious argument about the overpopulation myth

Yet another poorly-conceived argument used by the "overpopulation myth" supporters goes like this:

The world isn't overpopulated because populations are actually falling in many developed nations like Japan.

Yes, that's the entire logic of the argument. But the logic forgets to take into account that populations are falling in selected areas precisely because they are already overpopulated there.

Tokyo, by any stretch of the imagination, is wildly overpopulated. The population of Tokyo, in fact, has vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the entire island nation of Japan, requiring vast inputs of resources and food from other land masses around the globe. If Japan halted all imports, the population of Tokyo would starve to death in a matter of weeks.

The primary reason why Japan's population is in decline is because intelligent young Japanese couples look around and see skyrocketing costs for housing (caused by overpopulation), skyrocketing costs to feed a new baby (caused by overpopulation), skyrocketing costs for home construction, clothing, education and other things... all caused by overpopulation (i.e. too many people and not enough resources or open space).

The decline in Japan's population is a classic example of a self-regulating population that sees the overcrowding (and all the economic penalties which accompany it) and make a conscious decision to not reproduce.

Yet, somehow, the overpopulation myth people say Japan's declining population is proof that it's not overpopulated!

Wow, that's the complete opposite of reality.

But beware of population control eugenicists

All this does not mean, by the way, that I support the globalist population control agenda. Governments and global controllers are seizing upon the overpopulation problem and using it to justify mass murder.

The population control agenda is being run right now, right under your nose, through programs like toxic vaccines, free abortions, geoengineering pollution (chemtrails) and GMOs. The point of all this is to collapse the human population and get it "closer to zero," as Bill Gates often explains.

People like Gates and Ted Turner openly admit they are pursuing population control measures, but they call it safe-sounding things like "reproductive health." In no way do I support their death agendas for the human race, and I do not support their contention that the global population should be reduced by 90% or so (depending on who you ask). Ted Turner wants the population to be no more than 1 billion people. That means somehow six billion people have to die.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, frankly, we don't. Because we're such an infantile race of stupid creatures just barely more intelligent than apes, we are going to ride this crazy train of idiocy right into the ground. We are going to burn out this planet, kill the ecosystem, poison the waters and taint the skies. And most of the population is going to giggle all the way to their own graves as they perish from the very same systems of self-destruction they voted for at the polling booths.

From a galactic perspective, humankind wears the "dunce" hat. In fact, we are probably referred to by other intelligent civilizations as the "radioactive hominids" because we are stupid enough to detonate hundreds of nuclear weapons on our own planet, followed by building hundreds more nuclear power facilities, all of which are extremely vulnerable to a solar flare event that could kill virtually all human life on the planet.

I predict the human race will destroy itself and collapse back to a tiny population of ragged survivors. Even beyond that, I say this has likely already happened at a smaller scale. We are not the first civilization to rise and fall on this planet, nor will we be its last. Our planet is full of evidence of lost civilizations that were once great yet perished into oblivion. There is convincing evidence that an atomic blast happened in the Middle East thousands of years ago. There is also evidence that ancient civilizations possessed highly advanced technologies that have since been lost. (A full discussion of this is covered in Jim Marrs' new book, Our Occulted History.)

We modern humans stomp around the planet with a twisted sense of arrogance intertwined with obliviousness, having no idea what destroyed previous civilizations on our planet yet somehow believing we are immune to such outcomes. We believe we are "superior" but can't answer the question, "Superior at what?" Making nuclear bombs? Manufacturing synthetic pesticides? Creating genetic monstrosities that dot the agricultural landscape?

This is not progress, and it's not sustainable life on a planet. Unless we change very soon, we will destroy ourselves and render the overpopulation problem moot. Before long, no one will even be left alive to care that there even existed an evil creature named "Bill Gates." It matters not one inkling in the timescale of our planet's existence.

When future archeologists dig up our modern-day cities to study humanity's dark past, they will find mercury, plastic bags, pill bottles, toxic electronics and fragments of human bone giving off curiously high levels of radiation. They will wonder what calamity struck the human race and caused the collapse of global civilization, and they will likely rise up out of the ashes to make the same mistakes we are making.

Humanity is a race of short-term thinkers, and short-term thinkers have no real future on any planet. From a sufficiently distant perspective, our entire civilization looks like little more than a colony of hungry bacteria spreading across the surface of a petri dish until nothing is left to eat and the entire system collapses. Don't kid yourself: We are not as smart as you've been led to believe. If we were, then why would we poison our own food, water, soils, skies, infants, oceans, crops and planet?