On World Population Day in 2008, could now be the time to acknowledge the threat to the family of humanity that could soon be posed by the current huge scale and anticipated growth of the human population on Earth?

Somehow, sooner rather than later, we have simply got to find reasonable and sensible ways to communicate openly with one another about real global challenges that are ominously looming before humanity, visible even now on the far horizon. These issues are supremely significant to human and environmental health as well as to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth, even in these early years of Century XXI. Our silence wastes precious time. Time appears to be something that we cannot afford to continue frittering away much longer while the human species unintentionally ravages the Earth.

Many too many so-called and self-proclaimed people with ‘expertise’ assure us that we simply need to do nothing except that which we are doing now; that we must “stay the course” of unbridled economic growth, increasingly conspicuous per-capita resource overconsumption and unregulated propagation of absolute global human population numbers.

Are people going to stand up, speak out loudly and clearly, to say that the “same ol’ business as usual” course of action may be nothing more or less than a “primrose path” to the future, at the end of which could be the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and an unintended ecological wreckage, the likes of which only the King of kings, Ozymandias has seen.

The idea that silence is regularly triumphant in moments like this one is anathema to me. People with clear vision, intellectual honesty, coherent minds and good scientific evidence have got speak up and, in so doing, overcome the silence.

Perhaps silence presents itself to the human community as the greatest of all dangers: a threat greater than 9.2 billion unrestained human consumers on Earth in 2050; greater still than environs being relentlessly polluted by the unrestricted expansion of large-scale industrialization activities; even greater than the reckless dissipation of Earth’s finite resources and the irreversible loss of biodiversity worldwide. Silence is not only deafening; it is also destructive of everything we are intending to do well.

If now is not the right time for open acknowledgement, then when will that time come? What possible value can be derived from more denial and delay? Who or what can we possibly be awaiting?

Human-induced global challenges loom before us here and now, I suppose. Then again, perhaps I am mistaken.

Sincerely,

Steve

We used it in a classroom and tried to work out the amount of pollution that Australia makes for it’s tiny population. It’s pretty high.