Too Many People

The other day I read a bit of news that is scary to me. Every second there are 12 babies born and every second there are 8 deaths.That means we are continuing to fill the earth. The earth is a finite thing. It will only support a certain number of creatures. 

So today I looked it up on the web and learned that as of noon on February 14 there are 6,899,943,795 people on the earth. That is a lot of mouths to feed. If we all ate nothing but fish from the oceans we could be starving to death. Many kinds of fish are in danger of becoming extinct. But since we eat other things the strain is spread out to other things as well.

And even if you are a vegetarian you need space to grow your food. Therefore there would be less land available for toad and snail and bears and hawks.  Don't forget they need to eat too. The disappearance of habitat is the reason many of the wild creatures are having a hard time staying alive. 

The reason the spotted owl was having a hard time was not because it was hunted and killed but the fact that the area of forest it inhabited was being cut down to make houses for mankind. A simple fact. And the more children we have the more houses we will need to build, not to mention the farm land to raise the food on. 

I think the rulers in China were right when they decided that each family should have only one child. It lessened the strain on the countryside a great deal. Just think if there were two or three times as many people trying to live on the produce from the farms there now. It would be hard to do.

In order to bring back the herds of animals and huge flocks of birds and the richness of an ocean full of fish we need to slow our people growth. I actually wonder when we are going to have another "Black Plague" to depopulate the earth. About one third of the people in Europe died at that time. 

Just imagine how quickly the rivers would recover and run clean if one third of the waste we put in the water was not there. And one third of the pollution we pump in the air everyday was not happening the skies would be blue again all over the world. 

Can we fix it without a Plague?