Tipping
Point: The critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a
significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.
—Merriam-Webster
Dictionary
Nature
embraces several immutable laws such as gravity, mountains eventually wear down
to plains, water always runs downhill when a liquid or a solid, the sun always
rises in the east and sets in the west and critical
mass - the minimum amount or number required for something to happen (Webster's New World Dictionary). Applied
to life forms, this means that a given ecosystem will support only so many of a
species before its numbers will be drastically limited until balance
(homeostasis) is again restored. Our species is in trouble because it is
rapidly headed toward critical mass.
In 1798, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834),
a British clergyman and economist, published his much-quoted Essay on the Principle of Population in
which he posited three main themes: (1) the
increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence; (2)
population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase; and
(3) the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population
kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice. Today I write about
his first premise and will examine each of the others in succeeding blogs.
(1) The increase of population is necessarily
limited by the means of subsistence. In
Malthus's view, subsistence primarily pertained to food but must also consider
clothing and shelter because in today's world all three have at their basis
cost that must be met with some form of capital, capital that much of the
world's population lacks in sufficient supply to adequately provide all three
necessities. Worldwide, thousands of humans, especially children, die every day
of starvation, and too many of that number live within the United States.
Starving people become desperate people and when they believe they have nothing
to lose and everything to gain by bloodshed, they will revolt. Demonstrations
that do not produce results, morph rather rapidly into rebellions and revolutions.
World history clearly proves this.
There is now another major player that Malthus did not
have to consider—the environment. Weather plays a major role in food production
and the climate is changing to the detriment of world agriculture. Add to this
the destructiveness of monocultures and genetic manipulation, pollution and
over-harvesting and the problem is exacerbated. Nature will tolerate these
destructive human behaviors only until the world's population reaches critical
mass and the tipping point is passed. It is quite possible that humans will
prove to be the vanguard of the globe's next mass extinction that at the
present rate of overuse and destruction of our environment may occur not in
millennia or centuries, but unfortunately within the lifetimes of our great
grandchildren.
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