When I was born in 1960 there were 3.02 billion people in the world. If I live until 90 I'll exist in a world with 10 billion people. In the last two centuries humanity has hit "outbreak," which is a biological term for when a species exceeds the boundaries of natural selection.
For those of you who believe that we are above the other animals you are dead wrong. Outbreaks occur all over the world with various species. Unfortunately, it always ends badly. If you put some Protozoas in a Petri dish and add some nutrients the population will explode until all resources are consumed and everyone dies. In the eighth grade I looked into a microscope and was amazed to watch Protozoas having babies — they simply break apart into two separate organisms.
The human population explosion began in the 1950s and 60s, following the agricultural revolution and advances in medicine. As early as the 1960s and 70s scientist began showing concern. We knew that improvements in technology and medicine were making the population blowup but we didn't know what was going to kill us. Industrial agriculture has done an amazing job at keeping up with human growth, but at the cost of clearing forests, poisoning our soil with chemicals, and putting tons of methane into the atmosphere.
When I was age 10 the fear was that we'd simply kill ourselves with pollution or nuclear war. But, lo and behold, we've made substantial progress in cleaning up our rivers and air, and somehow avoiding a nuke show.
Yet, we turn around again and another challenge is facing us. The carbon dioxide from all the coal and oil we've been burning has accumulated in the upper atmosphere, and is creating a greenhouse effect on our planet. When people tell me they don't believe in climate change, I tell them to sit in their car, with the windows up, on a hot day. Their response is, "Awww, Todd, I ain't gonna do that."
Everyone wants food, warmth, and nice junk. To achieve that we burn more fossil fuels, and as the population grows, well, we keep sending more carbon into the air. A cruel irony is that a massive population cheapens the cost of labor. In crowded places like Asia labor is so cheap that it's profitable to put them to work in a factory, pay workers nearly nothing, and then send the cheap junk they make to America, using freighters that burn heavy diesel fuel. After barfing up enormous waste to get the product to the local junk store, we happy American consumers buy the stuff, take it home, and then it breaks. It's all sort of vain.
So, the unexpected surprise is that we won't run out of food because we'll just keep slashing and burning forests to make room for more pastures and farms. We will bioengineer food to make corn cobs the size of baseball bats and pumpkins as large as houses. Hurray, there's plenty of food — pass the salt. Unlike the Protozoa we won't eat up our food supply, rather we will just cook ourselves in our carbon waste. The polar caps will melt, much of our best land will be under water, and our relatively stable climate will become like the climates of other planets — harsh and unpredictable. That good ol' rain that has watered our crops for a hundred years will go away, and when it returns it will flood and wash away the soil.
Screw the politicians and screw the oil industry because this all comes down to you and me. Are we any better than a single-celled animal that swims around in a dish? I doubt that we are, but we have frontal lobes in our brains, and we are expected to use them.
The Human's Story
Your skull looks exactly like the skull of your ancestor from 20,000 years ago. That's because our frontal lobes had already evolved and it was just a matter of evolving the brain inside it. But if you go back 1.65 million years ago you'll see that our ancestors had a brain that looked like a bicycle helmet — the front of our skulls were slanted — great for reducing wind resistance but bad for advanced thinking. See, we had no frontal lobes then.
I used to think that a God or aliens made us smart but there is enough time for it to have happened on its own. Evolution works through mutations and natural selection, and somewhere along the line our brain got bigger through a mutation. Some people believe that burning protein around a fire pit made us smart.
At 120,000 years ago we became capable of symbolic thinking. That's when we could use a gesture, word, number, or drawing to represent something. It's probably around then when we started conjuring up the idea of an afterlife, which is a form of religion. Then, at 80,000 years ago, humans were able to start thinking creatively. That means we could not only use a tool but we found ways to improve it, and thus technology was born. And at the same time we developed more abstract thinking and started developing our religions. Most of what we know about our past is based on drawings and items found in caves and in human gravesites.
Religion
Today, there are 20 major religions in the world. Many religions begin indoctrinating children at a young age and by the time they are adults their ability to think critically is gone. Furthermore, religious people tend to live in bubbles where they are surrounded with others who think like they do. The end result is a serious case of confirmation bias, where world events are twisted to support a person's beliefs. Those who think differently outside the bubble are given insulting names like heretic, scoffer, apostate, infidel, heathen, and pagan. If you sense something is wrong with your belief system you'll be gaslit, ostracized, and some religions will even have you executed.
The problem is that the narratives of these religions don't address the challenges of the times, and instead explain away everything with ancient stories. "It's all a part of God's plan," you are told.
A Treehugger's Perspective
My narrative is simple: Overpopulation, overconsumption, and a live-for-the-present mindset is destroying our planet. To address this we must adopt simple lifestyles, make family planning services universal, end fossil-fuel use, and plant trees like crazy. Immediately, people will challenge me by saying "the Earth can handle it," "warming trends are natural," "God has it under control," etc.. It's a mild form of gaslighting were people try to make me question my own convictions. Rather than approaching a problem with critical thinking, I'm amazed at how people brush me off with a religious explanation or they repeat something they've heard on a talk radio show. To me, using religion or anything else as an excuse for inaction is simply denial and laziness. Climate change is one of those faraway issues that no one wants to address, unless they've been hit by a natural disaster or their home is underwater.
A Questionable Narrative
I was brought up in the Born Again Christian narrative, and even at age 8 I was trying to sort it all out. Originally, the god who became god of the Jews and later the Christian god, was just one of many gods worshiped by the Canaanites. As far as I can tell, Hebrews were a spinoff from the Canaanites who lived in the Promise Land and likely intermarried with other tribes. The Hebrews became monotheist and adopted Yahweh, a war god, as their main god.
Now, a fellow blogger added up all the people that Yahweh killed in the Old Testament and came up with a figure of 2,476,633. This is the literal murder number going by scripture, but if you add events where a death toll wasn't provided, like the Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn Egyptian children, etc. the figure hits 25 million. If you want a list of Yahweh's kills, visit the Dwindling In Unbelief blog. Now, in Yahweh's defense, he IS a war god so he was just doing his job in many instances.
After slaughtering Amalekites, Egyptians, Midianites, Canaanites, Perizzites, and other neighboring nations, and after drowning everyone in the freaking world, God has a son who comes to earth. But, according to the Trinity, the son WAS God (now you can see why I was so confused as an 8-year-old). After thousands of years of murder, Jesus comes to talk about love, forgiveness, kindness, etc.. Now, I believe, revere, and respect the teachings of Jesus and my research concludes that He existed. But to have a murderous war god suddenly come to Earth and be warm and fuzzy for 33 years, well, the optics just aren't good.
During His brief time on Earth, Jesus told people to accept him or they'd go to Hell. As a youngster I was essentially told that we are all born sinners, God can't tolerate sin, so we have to go to Hell unless we "accept Jesus into our hearts." Now, as an evolutionist I firmly reject the idea that I was born flawed. Humans are simply advanced mammals with a built-in nature designed for survival. For God to create us and say we are screwed up is troubling. I do not lie because I've learned that it's better to tell the truth and take the consequences because in the end your integrity remains intact and people respect you more. I have never stolen except one time when I had some tools from a former employer and didn't know what to do with them. I was required to keep the tools in my car trunk because theft was so rampant where I worked, and when they closed the division I worked in and my boss left, I had no one to return them to. So, for this wrongdoing a bad fate awaits me. I recently burned myself removing a cookie tray from the oven and it HURT. But in Hell your entire body will be burning not just for a second, but for trillions of years (eternity). To me, this punishment is overkill for stealing a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, but it's in the Christian narrative and who am I to question. But I will gladly take this punishment rather than to live with a god who murders babies.
Is Everything Perfect?
Are you fine with the way things are in this world? Do you just ignore the constant mass shootings in America? Do you ignore the news reports showing our climate is approaching chaos? Are you satisfied because you drive a Lexus and throw twenty bucks in the offering plate every week? Is the world okay for you because the stock market is up, even though our current president is sinking the country with deficit spending? As you watch Pee-Wee Herman reruns and sip on your Budweiser, are you thinking about how happy you are? If you've sucked up the prosperity gospel and think everything is well, then whoopee for you. But if you are like me, and sensing that something is very wrong with the mainstream nationalistic, Born Again, narrative, then I encourage you to take action. Making the massive changes necessary to avoid climate catastrophe will require a united effort by everyone. Break free from your bubble and childhood indoctrination and join me in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions. It's easy to laugh at me, make jokes about me, and brush me away. It's hard to break out of your cozy life and become a warrior for the environment. Call me crazy, but I assure you that the 20 manmade religions on this planet don't provide the answers. The answers are provided by the geologists, archeologists, historians, astronomers, climate scientists, biologists, and the hundreds of scientists and researchers in other disciplines who all provide a consistent story of how we got from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to where we are now. I will cook on Earth and I will cook in Hell, but at least my integrity will be intact and I can die with peace for knowing that I at least tried.
Wake up, America.
Sources:
"How Will We Survive When the Population Hits 10 Billion," by Charles C. Mann, TED Talk
"The Roots of Religion," by Genevieve von Petzinger, TEDxVictoria
Markus Spiske
