Editor:
The 2014 Living Plant Report is out and the results are we’ve lost 39 percent of our terrestrial species in the past 40 years. Freshwater species: 76 percent. Marine species: 39 percent.
Why? Hunting/fishing and habitat degradation/loss from human overpopulation were the two primary causes and then climate change, pollution. They have a graph showing the decline and I noticed that there is a bounce-back of animal life whenever we are in a recession.
The report also measures what it calls nine “planetary boundaries” (i.e. tipping points). Three have already been crossed: biodiversity, carbon dioxide levels and nitrogen pollution from fertilizers. Two more are in danger of being breached – ocean acidification and phosphorus levels in freshwater.
Next, the long-held belief that the human population would top out at 9 billion and possibly decline has been discarded and replaced this last month with a seven-year University of Washington/United Nations study. The new numbers are 11 to 12.3 billion by 2100, with Africa leading the pack – going from 1.1 billion today to 4.2 billion! The USA will go from 319 to 462 million.
Jobs anyone? How about immigration reform? Too late, you say. Right. JFK/LBJ’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the floodgates.
President Nixon lobbied Congress for and got the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The reports’ conclusions were: “after two years of concentrated effort, we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from further growth of the nation’s population; rather, that the gradual stabilization of our population through voluntary means would contribute significantly to the nation’s ability to solve its problems.”
It called for Americans to abandon their “ideological addiction to growth” and the outdated pro-natalist biases rooted in their social institutions.
Even business people on the commission supported the central finding: “The health of our country does not depend on population growth, nor does the vitality of business, nor the welfare of the average person.”
It recommended freezing legal immigration to no more than 400,000 a year, stopping illegal immigration dead and approving the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure freedom from discrimination based on sex.
But the Vatican and other religious and conservative groups soon caught wind of it and moved in quickly and efficiently to kill it.
According to John D. Rocke-feller III, chairman of the commission, and other commission members, the U.S. Catholic bishops and the religious right threatened President Nixon politically (report came out in election year ’72), and for fear of losing votes, Nixon canned it. And that’s what keeps it dead and buried.
A behavioral scientist named John B. Calhoun began a series of experiments on mice designed to reveal what would happen if a population kept growing unchecked, in a limited amount of space. Calhoun built a series of “mouse utopias” – warm, roomy structures with lots of habitrail-like tunnels and dens, which he kept perpetually stocked with food.
When the mouse population boomed, they eventually fell into cannibalism, senseless violence, sexual promiscuity or random celibacy, and finally lost their ability to socialize entirely. Are we mice?
On another note: Kevin Williamson, a columnist for the National Review (“the bible of American conservatism”) and pro-lifer, believes all women who have abortions should be hanged.
Along with the doctors, the nurses, and the hospital staff who enable it. KW would also execute the pro-choice politicians. From 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred. You count in the doctors, nurses and staff and we’re talking hundreds of millions KW would execute.
Vote Democrat!
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home