Mankind: The global parasite

“Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.”
D.H.Lawrence

A parasite is an organism living in or on another and benefiting at the expense of the other, based on this definition and the qualification that the other, in this case, is the Earth, I believe we must consider ourselves to be a parasitic creature. I am not aware of any other living creature which produces toxic and non-biodegradable waste and whose very existence is detrimental to the entire ecosystem of which it is a part. The growth of the human population over the last 300 years has been little short of biblical in proportion. It took approximately 180,000 years for the human population to reach a quarter of a billion and since the late 1800’s the population has risen from a billion to today’s 6.9 billion with the last one billion of those being added in less than 12 years. Furthermore the global population is predicted to rise to in excess of 9 Billion by 2050.

Irrespective of our polluting ways and the consequential impact on the environment, the earth simply cannot support so many human beings without significantly damaging its ability to produce sufficient food alone in future years. We must recognise this as fact and take action to reduce our population over the next century, with a goal of achieving a global population of between 0.5 and 1.0 Billion people within 150 years. In the meantime, we will need to recognise that we must drastically reduce our consumption of absolutely everything and develop products and materials which are truly recyclable and preferably organic; in so much as they can quickly be returned to the ecosystem, as the original natural resources from which they were fabricated.

Another dire consequence and contributory cause of the population explosion has been the urbanisation of our species. When once we were wanderers who moved with the seasons and in response to the availability of food, we have now built permanent cities and have our food produce by relatively few people in the agricultural industry. This has left us vulnerable to changes in climatic conditions, changes in sea levels, storm patterns and ocean currents which can completely undermine the entire infrastructure of cities designed for entirely different conditions. I believe that as the more devastating impacts of climate change become manifest, millions upon millions of people in cities all around the world will be radically affected. I fear that the citadels of the 20th century are destined to become the mausoleums of the 21st.

Albert Einstein suggested that a problem could not be solved at the same level of thinking which created it, how must our thinking now change?