The World Human Population Rockets Past 8 Billion
For some perspective, if you lived for 8 billion seconds you would die when you are 253.68 years old.
It's startling for some, unremarkable for others. For those affected by the cumulative toll of overpopulation, their own struggles are too often hidden from those privileged enough not to have to face the issues. I have done some serious research and found that even some of the most authoritative sources are highly euphemistic in their claims, being overly reluctant to acknowledge the sufferance caused by a burgeoning human population, which reached 8 billion in mid-November 2022.
The most disappointing thing about the ecological crisis is the combined feelings of "it doesn't really matter...but if it does, there's not much we can do about it". It is truly a breathtakingly vast problem, one that will not be easily solved, but only ever managed into the terrifying future of the planet.
As a species, we have consumed more resources (land, food, water, air, fossil fuels, minerals) in the last 50 years than the whole of humanity before us, creating huge amounts of waste and pollution (air and water pollutants, toxic materials, greenhouse gases), and causing dreadful harm on a super-massive scale through animal exploitation. The idea of quality of life when applied only to humans is still very much in question: for example, the wealthiest people can escape the effects of climate change, or even literally escape to outer space, whereas those in the lower classes have very few options when faced by the forces of nature.
Compared to other species, humans are a huge ecological burden, breeding further and further into the urban glut and ghettos. By comparison, there are 1900 pandas, 3500 great white sharks, 7100 cheetahs, 13,000 tigers and just 20,000 blue whales left in existence. Human appetite has created some 26 billion chickens, and a billion cows, et cetera, bred as highly inefficient commodities for our species’ consumption, and causing so many of us to live shorter, unhealthier, more disease-ridden lives.
Water-usage rates per capita depend on many factors. The most important of these probably relates to human consumption of animals: a nonvegan person can consume the equivalent of up to 5000 liters of water per day. In the course of a lifetime, an average human can consume as much as 7000 animals, but be responsible for the deaths of many times this much (think about bycatch, for example, if you eat dead sea animals). This figure varies according to citizenship, since a US citizen has an ecological footprint much greater than people in other countries who can only aspire to be as reckless, destructive, and wasteful as us more privileged people.
Especially in remote regions of the world, some 150,000 children die in states of poverty every week due to lack of resources. About 690 million humans live below the poverty-line, on less than $1.90 a day. For some countries, such as South Sudan or Burundi, as much as 80 percent of the total human population lives in poverty. It really does look like the circle of suffering and death, rather than the circle of life!
Even with so much evidence of the overpopulation crisis staring us in the face, there are still a huge number of detractors and disbelievers.
Please, be considerate of your fellow humans. Don't breed into need and into competition for scarce resources! Let's help those who are already living.
MARCUS TEN LOW is a universally kind and happy ethicist. He is vegantinatalist, minimalist and an ideas-driven thinker. His biggest fears include overpopulation, the climate change crisis and the manifestation of the police state. As well as being published numerous times in Quadrant and elsewhere, he promotes his ideas on social media @antibreeder1m.