Salt * Wet * Fish

Yup, we’ve all heard about it, the Earth is warming, forests are being chopped down, we are poisoning our rivers, air and ocean at unprecedented rates. How do we plan to stop it? Reduce plastic use, eat less sharks and whales, drive less, fart less or get the cows to fart and burp less, go vegetarian and so on and on and on.

But seriously speaking, does any of us really think that any of these measures will halt the environmental disaster that we are heading towards? Probably it will slow, but I don’t think that there is anything that we can really do that is going to stop it, probably just prolong its coming.

I feel that the main reason is that we are not looking at the root of the problem. Actually, I think many people, including environmentalist and our political leaders know the root of the problem, but to say it is probably courting political suicide.

Yes, its our population.

The reason why we are in this mess is because there are just too many people to sustain the resources we are left with. Further, the population is not going to stop growing, so no matter what we do there is going to be more and more mouths to feed and more and more demand for goods and services.

Look at it this way, 20 person cannot really deplete the forest that fast, but if you have 2 million people demanding for the same wood then the forests have got to go. And if these 2 million increase to 20 billion, what’s left of the Earth’s forest?

50 person drive car have very little impact on the air nor contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect, but if you have 20 million people driving around, air quality will definitely be effected, increase that to a few billion, you will need an oxygen mask walking around the streets.

So the day to day things that we do contributes to the worsening of the Earth’s environment only because there is a huge among of people contributing little by little to it. Take a cup of water, if you add a single salt crystal, you can hardly taste the salt, but put in 3 tablespoon and the water is undrinkable. This is the effect of the population on our Earth. In situations like that, there is really 2 solutions, one is to increase the amount of water in the cup (say with a pail of water), but this means we need to find a BIGGER Earth, sure Jupiter and Saturn are much much more bigger than Earth, go stay there lor… if you can. The 2nd solution is a no-brainer, don’t add in too much salt! That is to say, we need to limit the population so that becomes sustainable without degrading the environment.

Limiting the population becomes tricky, who gets to say who can give birth and who cannot? What kind of population should we limit to? Should we maintain an ethnic ratio? There will probably never be an answer to this.

I think, at this moment, no country in the world will ever admit that population is the problem nor work towards “solving” the problem…by volunteerily discouraging population growth in their country. Moreover, our economical models are based consumption, the more we consume or the more others consume from us, the better. Any reduction in demand will mean that people may loose their jobs and economic taking a downturn, overtime probably leading to social chaos, no government managing based on the current economical models can afford for that to happen.

I am not saying that we should stop all other “save the environment” efforts. We should continue on with our various efforts to reduce our impact on the environment, if anything else it benefits ourselves as we learn more about our selves when we care about the environment. But we should also be aware that despite our efforts, if the population continuous to spiral upwards and demand for goods also escalates, it may not matter too much what we do or don’t do.