The month of 7 billion

Sometime this month the population reaches an estimated 7 billion, the most people the Earth has ever had – and it continues to increase, at great detriment to the environment we all depend upon. I cannot feel optimistic about the future – i.e. that humans will manage to radically change their attitude and society. Things will likely continue on the same self-destructive path until the environment is devastated, and the world will look like the nightmarish hellholes depicted in Avatar and Terra Nova. I would like to be proven wrong, but given intractable human nature, I think I will be disappointed. (A post at the Dark Mountain blog echoes what I am feeling: despair.)

National Geographic online has a special section on the topic.

In unwelcome news, Australia’s population has reached 22.5 million, just over half that due to excessive immigration, the rest to high birth rates.

There was a report on A Current Affair a family with 15 children; I didn’t watch it on TV but have been unable to view the video due to some technical issue (not viewable on any of my browsers), so I don’t know if they are all biological or if some are adopted. If they are all biological the family is irresponsible in the extreme. Unfortunately Government child support encourages such extravagance.

There is a large families section in a parenting forum on The Age. The concept that educating and empowering women will result in smaller families seems to have bypassed the women there. A few of the posts seem defensive – well, they bring it on themselves by their excessive breeding! The women have no excuse but selfishness. They obviously don’t care for the environment – no matter how frugally they might live, every extra child born negates that. [Looking at some of the posts in that forum, is pregnancy and giving birth addictive for some women, bizarre as that concept may seem?]