Loading ...It’s worth noting that the world’s population was 5 billion in 1988 and 6 billion in 2000. That’s a net gain of 1 billion souls in twelve years. Further, the previous billion took eighteen years to accumulate - 1974 to 1988 - and the two billion before that took forty-four years, from 1930 to 1974. Verily, what about the billion before that, the big jump from 1 billion to 2 billion? 1820 to 1930, one hundred and ten years. Everyone needs to just settle down and watch tv.
The five billion extra people are albatrosses round their own necks. The world’s problems, those mammoth and legion difficulties that confront us all in various configurations, have been created and compounded by the sheer scale of our own selves.
But this is slightly untrue. Six billion humans are sustainable, materially and spiritually. It requires unity. Yet how can we be united to six billion humans at once? At a screening, recently, of a journalism school assignment following Ugandan children avoiding abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army and bondage as a child soldier, one enlightened individual made the point that, though it was in theory a moving documentary, what reason was there for us to care? If there is a real bond between us and Ugandan children, why don’t we feel it? What reason is there for US to care about Them? Indeed, after watching footage of Ugandan kids studying by candlelight, in the dank basement of an abandoned building, all to avoid the LRA, this pack of westerners spent nearly an hour debating how to react.
Should we care? Should we not care? And to my great detriment and shame, I realised only at the end that we were discussing with self-captivating seriousness such indulgent notions as “the awareness factor” and “compassion fatigue”, both terms I myself had blithely inserted into the discourse. In the same household, a day earlier, I’d been asked by some irreverent banker whether I am a communist. I pulled a face; I subscribe to The Economist, I’m no pinko. But damn it, don’t let me be one of Them, either.
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Still, 6 billion seems a lot. It is a very good reason to choose not to procreate.