There has never been an apex predator species that did not overpopulate its environment beyond its carrying capacity.  Perhaps there could be.  Perhaps Homo sapiens is a candidate; but it’s not looking good so far.

We bicker constantly over which group’s direst needs should receive priority.  Some arguments rely on the supposed good will of humans for one another; others present a subset of logical consequences if their demands are not met; still others are simply trying to manipulate others’ minds for their own profit.  They all ignore the fundamental truth that there is never going to be enough for everyone, because everyone will always want more.  More, at least, than their neighbors.

Putting aside matters of human psychology, there is the question of limited resources.  In 1974, the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth“, in which they predicted that the growing human population and its perpetual growth economy would have exhausted the Earth’s resources by now.  They were immediately attacked by Lyndon LaRouche and others.  And indeed, we have held out longer than expected, thanks to new technologies like GMO foods and the Internet.  The advocates of Perpetual Growth conclude that we will always find more “technical fixes” that will allow us to kick the can down the road a bit further.  Some admit that the Earth will eventually be used up, but there are lots of other planets “out there in space” that we can colonize and continue expanding forever.  This is a recurring theme in what I call Hegemonic Science Fiction.  If there are alien species already occupying those planets, well… they are aliens, and therefore have no human rights, by definition.  You can’t stop Progress.

Personally, I expect any sensible aliens who discover humanity to react about the same way we do to termites in our hardwood floors.  But let’s also put aside such silly extrapolations for now.  Can we not agree that perpetual growth is impossible in a finite environment?  The best we can manage is to delay the inevitable until after we’re gone and let our great^n-2 grandchildren deal with The Big Crunch?

Let’s take “affordable housing” — one of the main postfixes to our beloved “We have to…” prefixes:   I assert that all housing is affordable — to someone — otherwise the prices wouldn’t keep going up.  The real complaint is, “It’s not affordable to me!”  It is inconceivable that this could ever be otherwise as long as housing is subject to the Free Market.  At present there is definitely enough housing for everyone in Canada, but until we decide to provide free housing for everyone, there will always be some who can’t afford it.  This is in turn the inevitable result of allowing a few powerful people to acquire all the money.  There will always be a distribution of wealth; this can be proven using Statistical Economics (analogous to Statistical Mechanics) if we acknowledge any degree of randomness in financial transactions.  But the distribution has now become distorted by what I can only call “cheating”.

If we changed our laws to forbit cheating and evened out the wealth distribution, the housing crisis — and the health care crisis, and the education crisis, and the transportation crisis, and the inflation crisis — and all the other crises that one interest group or another insist must take precedent over all the other crises — could be averted for a while.  But only for a while.

What about birth control?  By one means or another, many young people today are choosing not to have children, or to only have one.  The mean number of children per woman in Canada is now 1.26, far below the replacement rate.  So we should soon have a smaller population, and more than enough of everything for everyone, right?  We might even preserve some of the remaining wilderness we purport to love so much.  If we start right now, we could build a stable relationship with the Earth.  We would have to give up a few of our “values”, like absolute liberty to do whatever the hell we please, but perhaps that could be arranged.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people less fortunate than Canadians who wouldn’t mind a kick at our can.  If we refuse them entry, it may come to pass that they find ways to express their resentment.

I’d like to express my gratitude to the young people who have elected to eschew propagation.  They are heroes in the war to save our planet.  However, like so many war heroes, they (or at least their genetic legacy) will be “lost in action” while the profligate propagators will inherit the Earth.  That doesn’t seem fair, but I can’t think of a way to avoid it that doesn’t seem even less fair.

Let me exit with this:  I am sick of listening to groups of people shouting that their problems are more unacceptable than anyone else’s problems and should get addressed first, with whatever resources are necessary.  It is in politicians’ interests to encourage this sort of pointless bickering, since it distracts their electorate from remembering that they made mutually contradictory promises to each group before the last election.