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Thought of the month ...

October 2011: Celebrating overpopulation: Today, the last day of October 2011, is the day when humanity is celebrating the seven billionth living inhabitant on Earth. The “honor” of being this latest addition to overpopulation is not claimed fro one baby, no, all around the world babies are labeled the '7-billionth-baby. How weird. We all know, or should know, that this planet is just not big enough for all of us, particularly if we all want to live the American-way of a wasteful and energy inefficient life. Nevertheless, we are celebrating that we just broke another mark showing that so many things in our life are accelerating. But we are accelerating on a trajectory without know where this is leading. This is comparable to running faster and faster in a pitch-black night without light. This can only be fun until we hit something. And be sure, we will hit something.

Today is not a day to celebrate. It is a day to reconsider what we define as a “Crime Against Humanity”. If we define a crime against humanity as an act that endangers a other human beings and takes away their livelihood, then, yes, most wars, terrorist attacks, and some economic practices qualify as crime against humanity. However, there is something else, something looking far more innocent that I would count as a crime against humanity.

Having more children than necessary for a slow reduction of the number of the world inhabitants to a bearable number is a crime against humanity. It will lead to the death of many people in the future. Having more than one child in waste-based countries like the U.S. already today leads to many children and adults dying all over the world, as a consequence of our greed for resources, the wars we fight for them, the economic constraints we impose that lead to food not being produced, and the waste, pollution, and climate change our archaic production and lifestyle entails. Thinking this thought to the end, we cannot avoid the unpleasant conclusion that having plenty of children is at the origin of most crimes against humanity.

Why are we celebrating the '7-billionth-baby' all over the globe instead of attacking the true source of many of our challenges? But don't make the mistake only to look at the numbers of inhabitants and their growth. The equation for the crime C against humanity committed by a country S over a given time interval T = [t0,t] is:
        C(t) = (N(t) - N(t0)) * L
where N is the number of inhabitants as a function of time t, L is the average load a person in this country puts on the planet during his/her lifetime in terms of resource usage, waste production, and pollution. Thus, a large population increase in a country where L is small, may be a much smaller crime than a small increase in population in a country where L is extreme. Since L is so much larger in the USA than, for example, in Nigeria (estimates state that the ratio is on the order of 150), the crime committed by the USA by far exceeds the crime against humanity committed by Nigeria.

An unpleasant, or should I say, inconvenient, but nevertheless real truth.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.