Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild World PDF
Preview Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild World
2 3 Copyright © 2014 Dave Foreman and Laura Carroll LiveTrue Books http://lauracarroll.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the author or publisher. ISBN-10: 098638321X ISBN-13: 978-0-9863832-1-2 Jacket design by Creativindie Covers 4 To Hugh Iltis A truthteller about overpopulation and extinction 5 CONTENTS Foreword Introduction What This Book Hopes To Do 1 Man’s Population Explosion 2 The Great Shortsightedness 3 Redefining Carrying Capacity 4 How the Man Swarm Eats the Earth 5 The Cornucopian Mindset 6 Birth Dearth Follies 7 Was Paul Ehrlich Really Wrong? 8 A History of Thinking about Man’s Limits 9 The Great Backtrack 10 Population or Affluence—or Technology? 11 The Thorny Issue of Immigration 12 Steps to Capping Immigration to the United States 13 What We Can Do Endnotes Acknowledgments About Dave Foreman & Laura Carroll About The Rewilding Institute 6 FOREWORD In 2011, I met renowned conservationist Dave Foreman at a population meeting in Washington, D.C. Within days I read the first edition of Man Swarm and was inspired by his incredible clarity and courage to speak the truth about overpopulation—human numbers and our impact on the Earth have expanded far above truly sustainable levels and, therefore, must be frozen and then reduced. That same year, as part of researching her book, The Baby Matrix , Laura Carroll contacted me to discuss overpopulation issues. It was not long before Man Swarm came up in our discussion. Laura and I agreed that Man Swarm is one of the best books about overpopulation that has been published in the last fifteen years. Originally written largely for conservationists, we wanted this book to reach a wider audience about the perils of overpopulation and population growth. We proposed the development of the second edition of Man Swarm to Dave to do just that, and to our delight, he agreed. Dave Foreman lives and thinks on the cutting edge of conservation issues. Like in the first edition of Man Swarm , Dave shows us in this book how he is the bold visionary conservationist and global thinker the world needs to help solve the overpopulation crisis . Yes, crisis. By the time you finish reading this book, you will understand and we hope you will accept the truths about overpopulation and population growth. Unlike other books on population, you will be armed with ways you can be part of the solution. We hope you will join us in our deep commitment to solve this issue. If we all act, overpopulation is solvable! David Paxson, President World Population Balance 7 INTRODUCTION WHAT THIS BOOK HOPES TO DO If true ecological balance exists, then human populations should be stable. They would not grow rapidly for long, nor would they crash. 1 —Steven LeBlanc It’s painfully straightforward. We have come on like a swarm of locusts, and now at over seven billion and counting, there are too many of us for Earth to harbor. But it is much worse for the other Earthlings—that is, all other living things we share the Earth with—tamed and untamed. A key insight of Charles Darwin’s is that all lifekinds can track their beginnings back to a shared forebear. Biologists today call this forebear the Last Common Ancestor or LCA. We—plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms —are kin. We all share the name, “Earthling.” For many years it has been the booming and spreading overflow of Man that has been the greatest threat to the life of other Earthlings. By Man I mean our species —Homo sapiens . I use the word Man in this book as a straightforward way to describe our kind that is not gender specific. Amongst we Earthlings are “wild things”—or all forms of untamed living things, from plants to wild animals. Aldo Leopold, a top conservation thinker of the twentieth century, wrote in the beginning of his wonderful book, A Sand County Almanac, “[T] here are those who can live without wild things, and there are those who cannot.” Maybe you are like me; I’m one of those “cannots.” I don’t want to live in a world without wild things. In this book, I hope to show you that unless we can freeze and then make Man’s footprint on Earth smaller, we will have an Earth with fewer and fewer wild things. I hope to show you that more of our kind means fewer wild things, that a stabilized human population means hope for wild things, and that a shrinking human population means a better world for wild things. And for men, women and children. It’s that straightforward. In this second edition, my goals for Man Swarm are to help readers understand that: 1. the population explosion is ongoing both worldwide and in the United States; 2. the overpopulation of Man is the main driver of the extinction of many kinds of wildlife, the wrecking and taming of wildlands and wild waters, and the creation of pollution, including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; 3. those who do not see a population threat need to be challenged; 4. we will grow to as many as twelve billion in the next one hundred years unless we do something—or unless something awful happens to us, which is likely unless we wake up; 8 5. there are many things we all can do to freeze and then lower population; 6. overpopulation is solvable! I hope to give you the background and understanding that inspires you to talk with others about why population stabilization and reduction are so critical in our world today. At the time of this writing, the world population is growing by145 per minute, and the United States has a population of about 314 million. Unless we do something, the population of the United States will double in the next one hundred years to above six hundred million—even up to more than eight hundred million people. Is this what you want? What are we going to do about it? At the first Earth Day in 1970, Hugh Iltis, the great botanist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where Leopold also taught), warned that we had begun a mass extinction of other Earthlings. Hugh is one of my mentors and has always taught that our overpopulation drives this mass extinction. This book comes from his trailblazing. Dave Foreman, 2014 9 1 MAN’S POPULATION EXPLOSION The massive growth in the human population through the twentieth century has had more impact on biodiversity than any other single factor. —Sir David King, science advisor to the British government Sir David King’s words wrap up the last hundred years with the blunt truth— overpopulation is endangering biodiversity, the diversity of plant and animal life in the world. Complex animal life evolved over five hundred million years ago. Plants came a little later. Half a billion years of geological layers of the Earth show five big extinctions. Each of these big die-offs was brought on by blazing ice balls rocketing through the solar system to hit Earth or the might of geology splitting and moving continents. Biologists and conservationists call today’s extinction, the one that is happening right now—yes, right now—the Sixth Mass Extinction. This one stands alone. It’s been brought on willfully by one kind of life form warring against all others. 1 Today’s Sixth Mass Extinction boils down to one species. Homo sapiens. Us . Never before has one kind of being become such a mighty swarm, spreading over Earth to almost everywhere and scalping forests, grasslands, deserts, and other wildlands in its wake. Never before has one kind of life gobbled up so much of all other forms of life and what they need to live. And never before have so few become so many so fast—with billions now standing where thousands once stood. For every Homo sapiens alive fifty thousand years ago, there are one million alive today. We have flooded the Earth with ourselves. 10
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