Down the road to oblivion

When I was born, there were fewer than two billion people on this planet. Today there are some seven billion.

Those people all need space to live, they need feeding, they need clothing, they need medical care, they need sewerage and clean water, they need heating in cold countries (in winter at least), cooling systems in hot countries.

And this with an international economic system that is broken and cannot provide a decent living standard for a massive number of people on the planet, even in the developed world.

Meanwhile we are watching a massive number of other species being gradually eradicated. The tiger is the poster child for this, but check out elephant populations, look at the fish in the North Sea, and the once common house sparrow.

And yet in parts of the world people (egged on by ignorance or religious dogma) have eleven to twelve to thirteen children, and no hope of a decent lifestyle for any of them.

About the only saving grace is the craze for boys. The massive disproportion of boys to girls in certain parts of the world (including the grotesque infanticide of little girls) will lead eventually to a slowing down in the birth rate, as well as leaving a large number of restless young men who cannot find a female partner when they reach adulthood (and as some of these countries with a disproportionate male/female bias are Muslim countries where men can have four wives .... Try the arithmetic some time!).

Meanwhile the only tigers and elephants left will be living in zoos. Imagine human beings being locked up in cages, and thousands of other species watching them "play" and "feed" and ....

Am I the only person out there who thinks that things have already gone badly wrong and nobody is allowed to criticise the situation and what has caused it? And as I have also ranted on enough in this blog on the need to eradicate poverty and unemployment and debt, it is not that I am unconcerned or do not care!

The problem is serious though. We can continue to close our eyes, send up prayers to some non-existent deity, and hope against hope. But really given the lack of intelligence being applied in this situation (often because some powerful individuals want us to remain indifferent), we need far more than hope to resolve the situation.