Brian Lee
I recently attended a talk by Brian Riddell, the CEO of the Pacific Salmon Foundation. Riddell outlined threats to BC’s wild salmon — warming ocean and freshwater temperatures, destruction and alteration of stream and estuary habitats, fishing pressures, pollution and Harbour seal predation. On the latter, he supports a growing movement for a seal cull.
I don’t disagree. Once again, we’ve tipped the natural balance and have a responsibility to try to correct it. But we can spend millions researching where the salmon went while culling everything that doesn’t fit into our vision of natural order or just accept what we already know — seals aren’t the problem, we are.
When it comes to virtually every threat facing our planet, from climate change to micro-plastics to species extinction to Donald Trump, the research is clear — we need to cull ourselves. Ethically, it’s the only solution. But the optics of a human culling program might be a hard sell politically so, instead, I suggest we begin by abolishing all the stuff that saves us.
Billions are spent on cancer research yet finding a cure might be the worst thing we could do to the planet. The disease takes out 8.9 million of us each year; eliminating it would only accelerate demand for the Earth’s dwindling resources. Since 1960, the world’s population has jumped from three billion people to more than seven billion. According to the Guardian, 70 per cent of all usable water on Earth now goes to food production and almost 40 per cent of our ice-free land surface is dedicated to agriculture.
Global energy demand will triple this century with much of it continuing to be met by oil, coal and gas — even with optimistic projections of growth in renewable energy.
We could try to encourage more heart disease and stroke, the world’s leading human killers, snuffing 15.2 million people a year, but it would require an extraordinary amount of kielbasa to make a noticeable dent. We add 840 million people annually and the UN projects there will be 10 billion of us in a few decades. And they will all need iPhones.
As we edge towards max humanity, it seems the only thing that might save the planet now is a plague.
The Black Death in 1342 was pretty good — it wiped out a third of Europe. That would be a start but I suspect our big empathetic brains would find a cure before it went far enough. Ebola showed some promise but Taylor Swift dumps more Americans annually than it kills.
As we waffle on a solution, the human tragedy of overpopulation has now reached the Sunshine Coast too. On a Wednesday, Dec. 5, I was 40 minutes early for the 8:40 a.m. ferry and just squeaked on. At least 30 cars were left behind. If that doesn’t tell us we need to thin the herd, I don’t know what does.
So, a resolution for 2019? Stop breeding, eat more sugar and bacon and take up smoking.
Happy New Year.