Local opinion: Overpopulation underlying environmental woes

In recent weeks, the Arizona Daily Star has published a number of important articles concerning the current conditions prevailing on our planet. We’ve heard about how many countries around the world are now dependent on desalination plants for fresh water, how Kabul, Afghanistan is running out of drinking water, and closer to home, how developers are attempting to change the rules so that they can build thousands of cheap houses for an ever-expanding population. We are also painfully aware of the Colorado River situation and the debate about how to allocate what water is still available. Most of us would prefer not to address these issues, but it becomes clearer every year that if humankind continues on its current oblivious path, disaster is the only possible outcome.

This is not an overstatement. I’ve just returned from an extensive trip that allowed me to visit many African, Indian, and Asian countries. Some of them are doing well, but in far too many of these countries, three realities dominate. First, extensive housing developments, small boxes piled atop one another and stretching for miles, are everywhere, each country’s attempt to house an unprecedented quantity of human beings. Second, desalination plants are a fact of life, plants that are essential to a population that has long exceeded the natural supply of fresh water. And third, human beings are remarkably dirty, piling trash everywhere and when room runs out, throwing it into the ocean. With every expanding population center, both the land and the ocean that I viewed on this trip were overflowing with trash. And in some places, air pollution made breathing almost impossible.

We are so far fortunate in the U.S. that, for the most part, we are not dealing with these extreme conditions. We see the U.S. as having plenty of room, such that some worry about declining birth rates. Why not fill up all that room? And while we’re at it, why not build more highways, dig out mountains for mines, and put in energy-consuming data centers? Because human beings do not do well when they are piled atop one another without some room in between. Because other creatures on this planet need to breathe and eat as well, since they are as much a part of the fabric of life as humans are. And because water is a limited resource that even desalination plants can augment only so far. It is inarguable that without a reliable water supply, we — humans, plants, and animals alike — will all die. So — how far do we humans want to push our dominance? To the point where one day we suddenly discover that we’ve gone too far, that the water we took for granted is no longer available and that our quality of life is gone?

The fundamental basis for all of this is simple: the human population is expanding beyond available natural resources. We pride ourselves on “controlling” the populations of other mammals “for their own good,” but somehow that approach is never considered in relation to human beings. The time will come when, collectively, humanity will have to pull its head out of the sand and face the simple, if painful, fact that, after a certain point which we are all too rapidly approaching, more is not better.