An article that appeared in the Boston Globe on March 5 revealed that the world's population, currently 5.7 billion, will reach 8 billion by the year 2020. Undersecretary of state Timothy Wirth was quoted as saying that two billion people don't get enough to eat, and another 500 million go to bed hungry. "Over the next 35 to 40 years, we need to triple the amount of food in the world," Wirth said. "But there's no more arable land, and the water supply isn't growing." The scientific consensus is that if the world's population continues to increase at its current rate, and if the industrial nations, particularly the United States, continue to blindly exhaust and pollute the planet to feed their limitless economic growth, the Earth's ecosystem will gradually collapse, causing famine, disease and war on an unimaginable scale. With these prospects, suicide will become an increasingly sane, heroic, and even fashionable alternative. Since Americans consume and pollute so much more than everyone else, it seems logical that we should be the first to go. Every imaginable resource is extracted from the Earth by slave labor, and transported to our shopping malls so that we can live in luxury. Our media provides us with constant diversion, while insulating us from any responsibility for our ecosystem. We are thoroughly indoctrinated and believe we are highly civilized. Apparently we measure civilization by how far away we can transport our dung. Why do we hate our dung so? In an earlier period of history many of us feared our species would be destroyed by nuclear war. In 1948, a zoologist named Fairfield Osborn correctly predicted that the primary threat to our species was topsoil depletion. He calculated that two and one-half acres of average topsoil are required to sustain one human, and further observed that if our planet's less than four billion acres of topsoil were divided by our population of two billion at most two acres were available. In the subsequent period we have permitted our population to more than double. Our rate of topsoil erosion continues to increase, and we are rapidly contaminating what remains with toxic chemicals. Already entire nations have become uninhabitable deserts. Their populations flee, or are left kill each other and die of starvation, as recent events in Somalia and Ethiopia illustrate. It is truly ironic that the earliest known human remains have been discovered in Ethiopia. To look at Ethiopia today is to look at our future. Our species faces extinction.



If current trends continue, world population, currently at 5.5 billion, will nearly triple to 14 billion within the next century. Moreover, new Census Bureau projections show that the U.S. population will likely increase by 50 percent in only 57 years -- from 256 in 1992 to 383 million in 2050. Although the United States is home to only 5 percent of the world's population, we are responsible for using 23 percent of the world's commercial energy, for producing more garbage than any country in the world, and for generating about 21 percent of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions -- the major contributing gas to global warming.



Every aspect of the deepening global environmental crisis, including climate change, poisoning of the water and atmosphere, reduction of biodiversity, and topsoil erosion, directly results from the over-abundance of a single species: homo sapiens. The human population is increasing by one million every four days, according the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau. This is a net increase of 95 million per year, the current population of Mexico. Even a major war or epidemic hardly dents the rate of growth, and modern wars have tremendous environmental consequences.