Hahaha!
So true!

More people, more heaping piles.

I'm not a tree hugging eco nut
But I just don't understand why
Trees are still being used we
Have so Manny other things
To make the stuff they are used
For

Yeah, wood is actually an obsolete building material but it is cheaper than alternatives.
Until it's substitute materials become affordable by most of the populace, trees will still be harvested.

The delusion is thinking that trees are only used for building materials.
I lived in a town in upstate New York that had a paper mill.
There were always logging trucks making deliveries.
If you like the fact that you can wipe your but you are using trees to do it.
Those paper towels that cleaned up Jr's spilled milk, you, trees.
The paper on the drywall that your houses walls were built with...yup, trees.

I've been homeless before.
One thing about me is I notice empty homes.
There are a lot of empty homes around.
Yet we continue to build more homes.
We continue to use resources like trees instead of fixing the already built.
We have the technology and the resources to fix already built buildings yet we choose to clear more land and use more resources to build new?

What is the alternative to toilet paper? Three seashells?
What is the alternative to drywall? Oh wait, I have lived in houses that had no drywall. Problem is, it uses wood to create slats to apply the plaster.

The logging industry is just as valid as it was a century ago.
We have made no significant progress towards ending the rape of the natural world.
If you saw the actual usage of trees you would be appalled but, most people don't want to think about that.
They want everything they want right now.
But what is truly scary is the fact that there are more and more people wanting everything right now and we are doing absolutely nothing about it.
Hell, most people don't even realize the problem.

People need to be constantly reminded of the problems, that's why I thought I'd rattle some cages in this sleepy little web site, and get someone to look up from their word games and puzzles, and go 'OH'.

Humans now have their own aged layer of extinctions in archaeology, the anthropocene age.

More possible new ways of living are needed, and some new ways may look a lot like the ways of life that the indigenous peoples led, who we tried to wipe out and steal their lands.

So come on human brains trust, think, and put forth ideas on how not to extinct ourselves and most everything else.

They can make paper from
Hemp 100% renewable
As far as greenhouse gases humans
Are only apart of the problem
I also find it hard to believe cow
Farts are a major problem yes
The earth is changing but it's natural

The human species is a short-term species.
We are a fluke, a flutter, a burp.
We proliferate beyond our own capacity, quickly.
Our intelligence is actually hurting our sustainability.
Our empathy is detrimental to our continued existence.

Just look at nature around us.
There are natural checks and balances that humans have learned to circumvent.
More people are being born than die.
We preserve our defective gene pool and allow it into our mainstream genetic structure.
We cure the diseases that are there to cull our populations.
We rework the land, rework our food sources to sustain more and more living people. We pave the planet and push the natural world back in the name of progress and never realize that the natural world is part of the same world.

We are not going extinct. We are already extinct but fail to realize it.
There are only two solutions I can think of.
1. Reduce the numbers
2. Leave the planet.
Neither is getting any serious consideration.
Most people don't even realize how far gone we are.
We are already past the passive fix, anything we could do at this point is going to have to be radical and drastic.
We won't, so our fate is sealed.

Now that we have (almost) run out of new places to explore, I'm sure that when the cost comes right down, explorers will leave this planet in search of another to live on. New exoplanets are being discovered at a great rate. One day this planet might be destroyed by a world war, let's hope if that happens we have already left in sufficient numbers to continue human existence elsewhere. The subject of many science fiction novels could become fact in the future.

The world population growth has recently accelerated dramatically. I read somewhere that the planet can support a situation in which every couple has (an average of) one child. The maximum average is, if I remember correctly, about 1.2 children. As soon as that average goes above that figure we're stocking up future trouble. I believe the figure is now nearly two children per couple.

For some time, China had a one couple per child policy, legally enforced. If all the countries in the world did the same, we'd be OK. But it's not going to happen because most couples like more than one child so they have children to play with each other. That is counteracted to some extent by the couple who have no children, but it is the average across the world that matters. Even China has now cancelled that one per couple policy.

Cultures with dominant or vocal religious clubs can take a lot of the blame for over population, trying to out breed each other for dominance, and denying abortions and divorces and euthanasia.

And at least one religious club thinks it is good to marry your cousin, and in case of war, it is OK to marry your sister to produce children to continue the war.

I knew an Indian guy who wanted enough boy kids to have a football team. Why ?
After he emigrated from his own country, 'for a better life'.

Make the new ideal family size 2 + 1 . And let the single kids play together.
Make having more than 2 kids morally a bad thing, unless a family merger.
Make all birth control free.

Some people criticize religion while they are unable to realize that their belief system is more rigid, more controlling and more self righteous than those they criticize. No one seems to own mirrors anymore!

Imagine you had a ship the size of an aircraft carrier with 1,000 people on it.
Now, launch that aircraft carrier sized ship into space.

Now imagine you have 1,000 of those ships each with 1,000 people on it.
Launch 1,000 aircraft carrier sized ships into space.
You just launched 1,000,000 people.
There are 7,708,737,999 people on this planet alive right now and increasing.
1,000,000 people is nothing. (SOURCE: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ )
To launch 700,000,000 people on those ships at 1,000 people each it would require about 2 launches a day of 1,000 ships per launch each year.
Which leaves another 7,000,000,000+ people still here and growing exponentially each minute.

Currently we have the ability to launch, what, around 20 people every 6 months?
We are not even close to the technology level needed for planet exodus to be a solution.

We are already extinct.

I always hold out in hope, regardless of the mounting nhilistic pessimism, which is likely true.
I can't just give up, and drive a smoky V8, and waste water, and not recycle because 'the end of the world is nigh'.

All the rest of animalkind is dying from our pollution, micro plastics, herbicide and pesticide runoff and drift, vehicle and incinerator fumes, dams and diverted rivers, clear fell logging, land clearing, over fishing, the list goes on.
I think we can do more about destroying less.
Less impulsive consumerism.
Less massive serves of food.
Less damage when venturing away from towns.
Less re-building wood houses in tornado regions.
Less manufacturing junk because you aren't buying it anymore.
Less paranoid countries manufacturing military hardware.
And less giving up.

Christians should be worried, because if there is a second coming, the boss is going to be pretty pissed off with what you did to the garden.

All the things we tell ourselves are helping are not really helping but if you find comfort, go for it.
The extinction is not going to happen while any of us are alive.
It might take 3 or 4 generations before people actually understand the significance.
The mechanism was started a few generations ago and nobody caught it then , why would you think they could catch it now?

Its difficult to understand that no matter what you do or don't do is insignificant to the issue that faces us.
Saving is already a moot point but it can't hurt to throw a little water on the fire.

The issue that everyone wants to fight, wants to work to make better is already in effect and anything less than something drastic is not going to actually change anything.

We are fighting the symptoms but not the cause.
Everything wrong with our world is wrong because there are too many people.
Unemployment, higher cost of living, shortages of fresh water or food.

I read recently we are expecting a reduced crop yeild this year because of all the flooding in the heartland.
Yet we don't control the weather and flooding is a major issue in today's world because more people and industries are threatened by nature.
The whole Mississippi basin is flooded out.
Yet we couldn't stop it from happening.
If we could, it would still be productive but that would only move the threat focus to something else.
If we didn't have so many people to provide for, we wouldn't need so much farmland.

But...since the crop yields are low, the food costs more.
When that system trickles down the whole economy is affected.
So now you need even more money to feed your family.
Needing more money, you are driven to find better paying jobs or supplement with additional jobs.
Now there are less jobs available for more people.
Crime rates go up.
Quality of life decreases.
Prisons fill up - which must be funded by something so your taxes go up.
We keep going thru the same motions in a viscous never-ending cycle.
Any efforts you have a capacity to contribute are too insignificant to the problem, the real problem we all face.
This cycle will continue for generations.
There is no solution that is not drastic or extreme.

So when you "Do Your Part" and save water or electricity or throw litter in a bin you are not actually doing anything towards a solution to the problem.

The solution requires we bring our population under control.
This means to have more deaths than births in a given year.

The one child per couple is not a solution.
It is a band-aid to the actual problem at hand.
The problem is more births than deaths.
The solution is either
1. Less births
2. More deaths
3. A balanced mix.

But, let's consider what that actually means.
Less Births
You gotta control how many births happen in a given year - WORLDWIDE
More Deaths
You gotta control how many deaths occur in a given year - WORLDWIDE
A Balanced Mix
You gotta control how many births and how many people die in a given year - WORLDWIDE.
See the problem?

From an outside point of view, the solution is easy.
Just kill a bunch of people and the children being born but then you become a MONSTER.
But see, when it does become a focused worldwide problem on everybody's mind, you might be surprised at how human being react to protect themselves.
So now you have some people looking to kill the other people.
I'm not talking about strangers either.
The frenzy will surpass family ties.
Cousins killing cousins. Perhaps even parents killing their own children.
One more mouth to feed when there already isn't enough food for the mouths that already need to be fed.
People will get focused on survival.

Its gunna happen.
Not sure when (probably long after all of us are dead) but it will happen.
So the real problem will never be our immediate problem but...your children? grandchildren? great grand children???
We are at 7.7 BILLION people alive on this planet right now.
In 30 years? What, 12 - 14 billion?

Gotta get a grip on the reality in front of you.
Your plans are reactive and we need a proactive solution.

Get rid of the over-population you get rid of
Starvation (we know how to feed people)
Pollution (Less people means less pollution)
Unemployment (Less people means more job openings)
Note: with less people we require less businesses to support them.
Smaller classrooms (Teachers can dedicate more time to each student)
Ya know, there are many aspects of our lives that would benefit from less people.

The problem is empathy and science.
Our empathy doesn't allow us to kill anyone and to cherish every life.
Our science gives us a way to stop the natural dying process.
Imagine a world without hospitals, ambulances, fire stations, doctors, nurses, nursing homes, maternity wards.
You giving birth, you do it at home with your family.
No drugs, no medical assistance, just family.
You get in an accident and are hurt beyond your ability to heal, you die.
You have a disease that ravages your body and gives you pain until you die, nobody is there to help you you die.

It doesn't even need to be a permanent condition.
Shut down all hospitals and heath services for two years and just let NATURE progress as it does.
That might knock down the world population numbers but there would need to be an additional measure to make an immediate reduction.

What, 7.7 BILLION, perhaps we should shoot for 3 Billion. At a reset of 3 billion people, we would be fully equipped with resources.
We could allow breeding.
We could then monitor our breeding output and regulate as needed.

But hey, we have rights, right?
Rights are a concept where one group of people allow another group of people to exercise the given rights.
Rights are not reality.
Rights are an agreed upon restriction imposed upon you.
In nature, there is NO SUCH THING as rights.
Tell a cow, chicken, pig about the right to life.
Try to stop a snake from eating a mouse with a sermon about the right to life.

There is no such thing as a right to life in nature.
That is human to human permission and nothing more.

The problem at hand is our own over-population.
We try to ignore the signs of impending extinction but that doesn't make the outcome change.
You can blame anything, global warming, pollution, political unrest and the list goes on and on and on...
The fact is there are too many people and more people are being born than die.

I might sound like an extremism but I am actually a realist.

The reality far exceeds your delusions.

Yes and I realise Milankovich cycles will slowly change the earth's patterns somewhat over eons, and we will be long gone when the sun becomes a red giant and consumes the earth, but I'm a dreamer and idealist and bloody minded Luddite, surrounded by tech heads, investors, and developers all keen to do anything to the earth and its creatures to make a buck.

So in the meantime the question remains: how can we live a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle, and not be in 3rd world poor conditions.
Good health. Good health care including mental and dental. Clean drinking water. Housing for everyone if they want it. Cultural pursuits and events. Make having single child families most desirable. Encourage food trees in public areas.
Re-vegetate disused cleared land. Make safe old mine sites. Look for ways to reduce rural road kill. Remove exotic species and encourage local native wildlife species.
Plenty other things to do.

Kill about 1/3rd of all humans presently living.
About, hmm, round 3 BILLION people.

We will do that eventually.
Maybe not while any of us are alive but eventually the problem will be in EVERYBODY'S faces and we will make extreme changes or perish.
But, hey, its not a problem right now so why worry about it.

Time to colonise the moon, mine the centre hollow, and turn it into a space ship powered by its own ingredients, aimed at the next best fit planet, for future colonisation and population explosion destruction.

And when the Earth is finally destroyed, where do all the ghosts and occult entities go ?
Space ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit; like the ones from the Pleiades.

Hug the trees, save the whales and the wolves and the spotted hairy nosed finch, just to prove that we aren't all A'holes intent on profit at any cost.
And if all our efforts are in vain when it falls apart, at least we tried, and gave some forms of life a reprieve, for a few extra years.

Using the excuse that 'it is going to die anyway some time', could become popular with murderers.

Everybody knows Space Ghost is Coast to Coast.

The facts of reality is not an excuse.
The fact is more people are being born than die ever year.
Ignoring the significance of that fact makes one delusional.

As time ticks by the problem is increasing.
Not stabilizing, not decreasing.
We do not possess the technology or drive to find a feasible off-world solution that will have any significance.
To develop, invent, test, build, fund, launch and establish an off-world destination for a significant percentage of the population that will have any significant effect on the end result is too little too late.

Granted, everything one does to preserve, prevent or postpone our deterioration of the natural order is positive thinking but its like throwing a thimble of water on a raging forest fire.

If anyone can think rationally, try to understand you are adding to the problem just by being alive. Its all interconnected. No one person or group of people are going to make any difference.
If you get 3 or 4 Billion people to act together it might make a small difference in the immediate time frame but eventually even that will fail to have positive effects as more an more people are born and less and less people die.

The only solution is to remove a significant portion of the people and bring the birth/death ratio back into alignment.
At our technology level and global commitment to the cause, the only solution is to kill large numbers of people.
As the problem continues to escalate, our time for other methods falls away.
The longer it takes for humans to get their heads out of their (sand) the bigger the problem becomes.

So free birth control for everyone for life. That will slow the acceleration of population growth.

Seen on Futurama: suicide booths. May not be so popular.

Was it Logan's Run, where 30 year olds were turned into energy and a light show. Again probably not that popular.

Maybe the next pole shift will cause Tsunamis somewhere, or that massive electrical effect that fries everything near.

Is rising sea levels the answer; more biblical floods. I'm working on a boat right now. (Room for 2 ladies.)

Maybe god should do another passover.

And if smallpox ever got out, that would do it.

The black plague ? Not sure. Ebola ?

Another Dis - asteroid strike of size would do it. And also stuff everything else.

The lunatic's Neutron bomb. It leaves infrastructure intact and irradiates everything to death. How nice.

Governments and religions need to wean themselves off of constant population growth; and negative / destructive 'traditions' should be stopped.

Save the worms, and frogs, and slime molds. Not just the cute stuff.

Believe it or not, birth control might have worked a few hundred years ago.
It still might slow the increase a bit to give science more time to find a humane solution.

The quickest way to get results would be to end all medical support, end disaster relief efforts, allow nature to cull as nature directs.

The problem is, not many people understand the significance of our present dilemma.

Nanotechnology holds promise as a method to repair the habitats.
Mind uploading holds promise to preserving the intellect and possibly the personalities.

Our need for personal wealth and power is hurting our efforts to create an off-world solution. Do away with ownership and power structures and get everyone on the planet working on solutions might make a significant difference for the generations to come but will have little pay-off for those doing it right now.
But that would require species unity and purpose and we can't even find unity in most families.

People like to think if we were attacked by an alien force we would come together to save our species but our species is being threatened and we can't come together over anything.

So, until we grow up as a species and unite for a solution, we are extinct.

Now that's the sort of input I was after, Tom. Options.

That would have to be from the bottom up, with a groundswell of enthusiastic people raising awareness of the masses, because politicians don't want to get less kickbacks from less profitable businesses. They don't care about the future past themselves, so they won't help.

But I really don't think most of the soft comfortable western world will want to live less opulently to save their future families. And the rest won't follow the plan if the west doesn't too.

As it is it is a catch 22, or Mexican standoff, where we are locked into earning so much to have a home; where we work is destroying stuff; most every other type of work is destroying stuff; so we must continue destroying in a fashion just to remain housed and fed.
Making the wrong change could wreak havock with economies; but all economies are due for upheaval and reorganisation in favour of the people.

Village based household cottage industries in efficient networks of supply and demand, and self sufficiency. Half acre and 1 acre blocks to micro farm and share crop. Pigs, chooks, sheep or goat, trees, herbs, root veges, grains, still, workshop, water bore and windmill,

One child rule everywhere. Second child goes to a childless couple.
More palliative care for more dying single childless people.
Spartan child care was interesting, only the strong ones survived.

Its difficult to understand the impact of 8 billion people.
The only way to have your ideas be effective is to first reduce the number of people.

Imagine the true cost of one carrot from your garden.
The true cost includes everything it took both directly and indirectly for that carrot to get to your mouth and everything that ultimately happens to it after it leaves your body.
No matter what you include there is always more that is failed to be considered.
Multiply that true cost by 8 billion. That's just one carrot.
Now do that with everything you have in your life. Multiply those numbers by 8 billion.

Right now 7.7 billion people are alive eating and pooping. Making more people that eat and poop.
People consume and discard their waste.
Other people provide and remove that waste all while consuming and discarding their own waste.

Look around you right now.
How many things do you see made of plastic?
Imagine the true cost to make that plastic what you see right now.
When you are done with it, imagine the true cost of getting rid of it.
Multiply that by 8 billion.

A significant drop in population globally would put the brakes on.
The true cost of anything goes down as we use up the surplus left by the void in population.
Once that surplus is used or wasted away, you might find you didn't really need it to begin with.
The remaining population adjusts to fit the needs of the smaller population.
Less is consumed and less is wasted.
Because there are less people.

Oh, the carrot...
Did you walk out into the woods and harvest the seed yourself.
Where did you get the energy to do that?
You ate something right?
Where did you get the food you ate?
You dug the hole in the ground with your hands right?
If you used a tool, where did you get the tool?
Was it a tree branch your broke off a dead limb on the ground?
Did you buy a shovel?
Where/how did you get the money?
How did the shovel get to you?
Did you go to a store to buy a shovel?
Did you walk to the store?
Was the store just a bunch of stuff laying on the ground?
Was it a building?
How did the building get built?
Where did the materials used to build the building come from?

The hole you dug to plant your carrot seed was just anywhere or do you 'own' that land?
What did you have to do to own that land?
What do you have to do to maintain the ownership of that land?
Do you work?
What is involved with you being able to work?
Do you need electricity?
Do you need a fresh water supply?
Do you need food for energy?
What happens to that food when you are done with it?
Do you dig another hole in the ground to store it?
Who's ground is it?
How did you dig that hole?
Where did you get the energy to dig?

My point is, everything is connected in some way and once you consider all aspects to find the true cost you realize that 8 billion people are causing the problem.

Our species is operating on a diminishing return.

Its why we have mountains of trash, giant islands of plastic, polluted water, polluted land, polluted air, deforestation, loss of wildlife, noise pollution, traffic, junk yards, strange weather patterns, resource shortages, and on and on and on and on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
World War Two: 6 years and 1 day
118,357,000 estimated deaths related to the events of that war.
118 million is insignificant to 7.7 billion.
War is not the solution.
We would need a war with a death toll of 3 billion in a few weeks.
Plus, after war there is always a baby boom.
War is not the fix we need.

The tv series Life Without People simulated the sudden disappearance of the human species. While it was entertaining it was fantasy. People are not going to just disappear. While it shows the planet finding a new equilibrium, what it depicts is not entirely accurate to the scenario they proposed.

The planet can recover but not with 8, 10, 20 or 50 billion people around.
We must stop our runaway population growth ASAP.