When we think about human overpopulation – the ticker hit 7,000,000,000 this past week – we might think globally first: to ship breakers in Bangladesh, or the slums outside Sao Paulo. Domestically, our thoughts go to urban centers – Times Square at midday, or an aerial shot of a New Jersey suburb. But rural areas are dealing with human population growth, too, just in different ways. A logger lamenting the effect of forest fragmentation on his business, a dead fox on the side of I-87, the feeling of claustrophobia you get when you’re out deer hunting opening morning and someone you’ve never seen in your 30-plus years of hunting there drives his four wheeler up and parks it by your stand – all of this stems back to the fact that there are a lot of people, and a lot of people vying for a slice of land pie that’s only so big. Even in the sticks.
To say the tension is ubiquitous is not an overstatement, as many of us are internally conflicted about this issue. I don’t want a 12-lot subdivision in the meadow I walk through in the evenings, but I do want the housing market to pick up somewhere else so my friends who are in the logging and construction trades can pay their bills and take their wives out to dinner on a Friday night. There’s just no winning a philosophical argument if you’re having it with yourself. And it’s not just me: just look at the tortured thinking of our politicians and rural think-tanks. They want high-speed rail and high-speed internet to connect rural regions to urban centers and make the Northeast more job-friendly. They also want to limit sprawl and preserve small town integrity. That the two sets of goals are antithetical is rarely, if ever, discussed.
The New York Times wrote a story this week about an environmental group using condom wrappers as a way to connect human overpopulation to environmental issues. (Wrap with Care! Save the Polar Bear!) And while our more jaded readers will roll their eyes at the idea that a cutesy slogan on a condom can change anything, the fact remains that the human footprint is something that every one of us is reckoning with so we may as well talk about it. And we may as well think about where it’s all going to lead.
So what’s your take? Is 7,000,000,000 and counting the elephant in the room? We’ve added five billion people to the earth in four decades – where’s it all going to lead? Extra credit will be given to answers that are hopeful in nature and scenarios beyond: “we’re screwed.”
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