Is Academia's response to overpopulation inadequate?
Randolph Femmer
Sunday, 24 May 2009 19:41 UTC
There have been posts elsewhere in this forum that comment on the inadequate degree of humanity’s collective response to overpopulation / carrying capacity crises.
Many biologists, for example, view a continuation of today’s demographic and industrialization trajectories as an ongoing courtship with biospheric and humanitarian calamities of irredeemable proportions – in effect, a demographic bubble of immense magnitude.
As a result, we face a deepening crisis which cries out for a Franklin Roosevelt / Winston Churchill level of response. And while the inadequate level of response among many is dangerous and disconcerting, what is surprising is an unwarranted degree of complacency and an inadequate level of response within Academia at large.
Certainly there are scholars who speak directly to limits, carrying capacity, and overshoot in their papers and their teaching. Imagine a biologist or climatologist, for example, who (a) shares the population,carrying capacity, and overshoot concerns that are the subject of this forum, and (b) who actually raises these issues in their papers and in their teaching. (Notice that the field of individuals is becoming ever-narrower.)
If the scale of the problem in any way demands a Roosevelt – Churchill scale of response, how adequate are even those peer-reviewed papers and classroom presentations? Suppose that a peer-reviewed paper, for example, reaches 6,000 colleagues in Academia who are already well-informed. And also imagine multiple course presentations to 100 or so top students each semester.
At current rates of population growth, the effects of the above efforts are utterly obliterated and annihilated by a tidal-wave of 800,000 extra births that continue to take place over each four-day period.
And among those unending tidal-waves of new arrivals, too many, born into failed states and/or poverty, may end up as illiterate or uninformed involving population and biospheric issues. (Even those lucky enough to enjoy quality schooling will not read those peer-reviewed papers nor hear those science-major presentations for at least two decades, if ever constituting a lag-time of calamitous extent).
As a result, even our best academic efforts to carry civilization, knowledge, and understanding forward are doomed to failure in the face of an overwhelming demographic countercurrent that is carrying us all toward the precipice.
Questions for this topic:
How can scholars scale-up their impacts?
(films? documentaries?)
How can scholars instigate a Roosevelt – Churchill scale of response in (a) the media? (b) the White House?
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Replies
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Depending on one’s interests, there are several ways that scholars might scale-up their impacts. One of these might be to offer their best population – biospherics – carrying capacity presentations on-line as foreign language equivalents for use by educators and presenters elsewhere in the world. A second possibility might be to develop and/or offer PowerPoint (and/or PDF) equivalents of their most important population – biospherics – carrying capacity presentations. And as a third alternative or option, scholars might offer one or more short summer workshops for educators, journalists, and policymakers, both in the industrialized world, and/or in the poorest and highest-fertility nations of the world. (Imagine grant funding such a project, for example, and globalizing it.)
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Woefully inadequate!
Given what many people are recognizing now as human-induced global challenges that are looming ominously before the human family, it appears experts with understanding and knowledge of such formidable and pressing circumstances as could soon be confronted by the human community have what feels to me like a “duty to warn.” Those possessed of clear vision, coherence of mind, intellectual honesty and moral courage are called upon to speak out loudly, clearly and often so as to make yourselves heard around the world.
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I certainly agree with Dr. Salmony’s reference to a “duty to warn.” A quarter century ago, as the evidence pointing to CFC damage to the ozone layer and the implications became obvious, top scientists in the United States and around the world actually held workshops for journalists and policymakers. Where are the population / overshoot workshops today?
It is hard to believe that the silence today is so deafening. It is as if we are all on board the Titanic, and as scientists we know that an iceberg field is out there, but we are busy in our staterooms preparing our papers on the K-T boundary and x-ray crystallography.
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Perhaps ‘cancerous’ greed and a plethora of material addictions are widespread diseases of many too many leaders and their minions in one not-so-great generation, a dangerously disordered minority who harbor the potential for utterly ruining the future of children everywhere and the Earth as a fit place for life as we know it.
In such circumstances, do knowledgeable people who choose to remain electively mute end up complicitly appointing themselves mortal enemies of the future of life? Or not? If not, how is this behavior to be reasonably and sensibly characterized?
Is it not yet self-evident that the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us live in patently unsustainable ways as dangerously disordered greedmongers, plunderers, hyperconsumers and hoarders and that the human beings among us with feet of clay are unexpectedly the very people to guide the human community toward sustainability because they retain the capability for doing so
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