Global Population Speak Out: Letter to Representative David Price

February 19, 2009 – 3:36 pm

The Honorable David E. Price (D-NC)
U.S. House of Representatives
2162 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-3304

 
Dear David,
 
Because we are neighbors and there is a matter of personal concern to me, I am contacting you on this occasion at your home address.  This letter is copied to your office in Washington, DC. 
 
In our time, the USA is a leader of the international community of nations comprising the family of humanity.  This worldwide family is confronted with numerous looming economic challenges and formidable ecological threats.  Of all challenges to human well being and environmental health, there may be no threat so large and oppressive as the one presented to humankind by the projected unbridled growth of absolute global population numbers in the first half of Century XXI.
 
President Barack Obama has made a commitment to rely on the best available scientific evidence in policymaking and action planning rather than be guided by preternatural theories, ideologically-biased factoids, purely political convenience and excessive attention to economic expediency.
 
With these circumstances in mind, I have joined the “Global Population Speak Out” Project (gpso.wordpress.com).  This project is featured in Science Magazine (Science Volume 322, Issue 5902 p. 655 “Return of the Population Bomb”).  People from around the world have pledged to speak out loudly and clearly about the challenges that could soon be presented to the world by the skyrocketing increase of human population numbers on Earth.  My project is a simple, straightforward one: to send you this letter.  As my Congressman and a respected scientist, I am asking you to consider revolutionary scientific evidence that appears to advance our understanding of human population dynamics.  A 30 minute presentation of this research by an outstanding scientist from Chapel Hill (and a colleague of yours at Duke University) can be reviewed at the following link (www.panearth.org).  At least to me, the evidence in the presentation by Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., “World Food and Human Population Growth,” has potentially profound implications.
 
If it pleases you to do so, examine the evidence.
 
Thanks for the great work you have been doing over many years for the citizens of Chapel Hill and the 4th Congressional District as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
 
Sincerely,
 
Steve
 


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Embrace change for planet’s sake

January 18, 2009 – 2:16 pm

(The following letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 11 January 2009.)

In calling for change in our time, scientists are speaking about what could somehow be true, speaking out loudly and clearly to wealthy and powerful people who adamantly insist that the “business as usual” status quo be relentlessly promoted and ruthlessly maintained.

Industrial/big business powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians want to keep over-consuming, overproducing and overpopulating in our planetary home as they are doing now, come what may for children, life as we know it, and the integrity of Earth and its environs. Many of our voices are needed to support these great “voices of science,” these exemplars who are courageously speaking truth to those leaders who possess the power to authorize change. The provision of a good enough future for our children is an achievable goal, but only if we elders choose requisite behavior change now.

If changes in behavior are not initiated in a timely fashion, then a sustainable world for our children may not be achievable. By doing precisely what we are doing now, the limited resources of Earth could be permanently dissipated, its biodiversity massively extirpated, its environment irreversibly degraded and life as we know it recklessly endangered. The current scale and anticipated growth of per-capita over-consumption, global production capabilities, and human population numbers worldwide could be simply, clearly and patently unsustainable, even to the year 2050. Given Earth’s limitations as a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet, the projected increases in unchecked consumption, unbridled production and unregulated propagation activities of the human species could soon lead the human family to come face to face with some sort of colossal ecological wreckage.

Now is the time to speak loudly, clearly and often about what is true for you. Forget about political correctness and convenience. Resist economic expediency and greediness. Embrace necessary change rather than waste another day perniciously defending an unsustainable, same old “business as usual” status quo.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Billions end up paying for excesses of the wealthy on Wall St.

December 31, 2008 – 11:59 pm

(This item was published as a guest column in the Chapel Hill News, November 26, 2008.)

Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.

Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of the human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.

How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.

Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.

Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a subprime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The subprime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.

Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling (i.e., deleveraging) of the worldwide subprime swindle are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that 30 percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.

In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle-down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ’ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people (i.e., more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth) do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Tapestry beautiful but resources finite

September 14, 2008 – 8:58 am

(Following Steve’s July letter to the editor of the Chapel Hill News another newspaper reader replied. The reader offered some objections that have become familiar to those of us who have been working for some time toward sustainable population and culture. Steve’s follow-up reply was published in the Chapel Hill News, 9 September 2008.)

My father was in the business of manufacturing textiles. A tapestry is the centerpiece of our family’s living room. Jane Ballard’s Sampler hangs on the far wall. From an early age I learned to behold the beauty found in woven, ornamental fabrics and knitted cloth. But of all the tapestries and “samplers” I have ever seen there is nothing so beautiful, good or true as the tapestry of life to which Brian Lawe refers in his Aug. 3 letter. Each new life adds to tapestry. Mr. Lawe is due thanks.

Perhaps my perspective of the biophysical world we inhabit as relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible is mistaken. That may be so. It would please me so if it turns out that my observations are shown to be fatally flawed and Brian’s perceptions of what is somehow real are altogether proven to be the correct ones. That will be just fine.

Because something is happening that continues to worry me and occasionally to awaken me in the middle of the night, I find myself sending dozens of letters to editors, hundreds of missives into the blogosphere and thousands of e-mails into cyberspace. Always the theme is the same. It is simply this: Earth’s body is finite, its resources are limited, and its ecosystem services capable of irreversible degradation by the huge scale and anticipated growth of human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones we see rampantly overspreading the surface of our planetary home in our time. Earth does not resemble a mother’s teat at which the human species may forever suckle. Despite the assurances of many economists and politicians, Earth is not a cornucopia. No possible way.

The unbridled growth of the human species presents a colossal challenge to the family of humanity. The Earth as a constant, seemingly endless provider of whatsoever human beings desire is a fantasy … a widely shared, consensually validated, distinctly human product of wishful and magical thinking.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Letter to the Chapel Hill News, July, 2008

July 31, 2008 – 3:55 pm

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, July 29, 2008.)

We in the town of Chapel Hill are implicated in a daunting global threat, a colossal problem that appears to involve every citizen on the planet. No one is to blame for this human-driven predicament; yet all of us could be enjoined by the requirements of practical reality to humanely and voluntarily take responsible, self-limiting action to meet the challenge, I suppose.

Please note that annual birthrates of newborns in the human community are rising precipitously in the United States as well as in many other countries worldwide. For example, more than 4.3 million newborns joined the American family in 2007. That is more births than occurred in 1957 at the height of the post-WWII baby boom. Would someone please point out what advantages the American family derives from such rapid growth in its population numbers?

The total number of human births last year exceeded the highest annual number of births ever achieved in the United States. How much longer can the United States sustain the momentum bound up in the skyrocketing growth of the human population? How long can the frangible ecosystems and finite resources of Earth be reasonably expected to sustain the human species, given the determination of people in most countries, not to regulate the growth of human numbers?

Many capable scientists are validating the projection that the human population on Earth could increase from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in the next 42 years. That is a 40 percent increase in our global population. Given its current and anticipated growth, it appears to me that the human species may well ravage the Earth between now and 2050 unless meaningful individual and collective efforts are made to slow the growth of human numbers.

Perhaps someone will kindly explain how much longer a planet with the relatively small size and make-up of Earth can be sensibly expected to support the well-established and easily discernable over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation behaviors of the family of humanity.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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June 2008 letter in the Chapel Hill News

June 13, 2008 – 8:04 am

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 12 June 2008.)

In our time humankind is surely experiencing the fulfillment of a Chinese proverb: “We live in interesting times.” Many of our brilliant scientists report that God is a delusion. On the other hand, intuitive and gifted believers regularly tell us that these scientists themselves suffer from a form of delusional atheism. No one knows, I suppose, which of these groups is correct.

I am one of those people who believes the family of humanity can use God’s gift of science to take the measure of any global challenge and find solutions that are consonant with universal values. But, before we can move forward to reasonably address and sensibly overcome a challenge to human wellbeing and environmental health such as global warming, that challenge needs to be openly acknowledged and widely discussed. I suppose it is a function of my life experience to suggest that we accurately ‘diagnose’ whatever the challenge is before proceeding to implement ‘treatment’ options.

If great spiritual and scientific leaders are somehow on the right track when realizing, “The Earth has a human-induced fever and could overheat,” then at least one available treatment option is to carefully and skillfully examine the extant scientific evidence related to global warming and to make necessary changes in human behavior, both individually and collectively.

All of the above serves to set the stage for our consideration of a question. How can politicians and economic powerbrokers in the human community be empowered to muster the “political will” necessary for addressing human-driven climate change as well as for providing the substantial economic incentives and financial capital necessary to overcome this potential global threat to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth?

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Earth Day letter to an editor

April 22, 2008 – 5:08 pm

(This letter has been submitted to the Chapel Hill News. We publish it here today to acknowledge Earth Day.)

Humankind inhabits a tiny celestial orb that is miraculously set among of sea of stars. As far as we know, life as we know it exists nowhere else in the Universe. In the light of these circumstances, perhaps we of the human family have the responsibility of assuring the security for the future of life in our planetary home.

April 22nd is Earth Day. Our many Earth Day celebrations focus attention on the pressing need for human beings to protect and preserve the finite resources of Earth and its frangible ecosystems. If we fail to achieve this goal, then an unimaginably bleak future awaits our children.

If 6+ billion human beings live on Earth now and 9+ billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then we simply cannot keep doing what we are doing now because the Earth has limited resources upon which all forms of life and human constructions like national economies utterly depend for existence. Without adequate resources and ecosystem system services of Earth, life as we know it and human institutions would collapse.

Now, some portion of the world’s human population conspicuously over-consumes the resources of our planetary home. Other people, in charge of huge multinational conglomerations, are doing business in a way that recklessly dissipates natural resources at a rate that these resources cannot be restored for human benefit. Still others in the human family are overpopulating the planet. The leviathan-like scale and rapid growth of global human consumption, production and propagation activities are putting the Earth, life as we know it, and the human community in grave, clear and present danger.

Since Chapel Hillians live in the overdeveloped world, we are among the people who are ravenously over-consuming Earth’s resources. We could choose to consume less. People in the developing could choose to limit overproduction of unnecessary things and contain industrial pollution. People in the underdeveloped world could limit their number of offspring. Perhaps these are ways the family of humanity begins to respond ably to the human-induced global challenges that loom so ominously before humanity in our time.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Life as we know it being put at risk

March 25, 2008 – 9:24 am

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 22 March 2008.)

The chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change was in Raleigh last month to speak at the Emerging Issues Forum and to receive a six-figure award for his distinguished service.

My good fortune was to join the panel chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, and others for a reception-luncheon in his honor on Feb. 11 at N.C. State University. Here is what I learned from this great man.

The family of humanity appears not to have much time in which to make necessary changes in its conspicuous over-consumption lifestyles, in the unsustainable overproduction practices of its big-business enterprises, and its overpopulation activities. Humankind may not be able to protect life as we know it and preserve the integrity of Earth much longer.

If we project the anticipated growth of unbridled per-capita consumption, rampantly expanding economic globalization, and 70 million to 75 million newborns annually, then human civilization and life as we know could be put at risk soon.

According to my admittedly simple estimations, if humankind keeps doing just as it is doing now, without doing whatsoever is necessary to begin modifying the business-as-usual course of our gigantic global political economy, Earth could sustain life as we know it for a relatively short period of time.

Unfortunately, top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the destruction of Earth’s body as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Leaders refuse to see what’s happening

February 13, 2008 – 10:33 am

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 12 February 2008.)

Scientific evidence is springing up everywhere that indicates the massive and pernicious impact of the human species on the limited resources of Earth, its frangible ecosystems and life as we know it.

Guided by mountains of carefully and skillfully developed research regarding climate change, top rank scientists issued a Code Red emergency declaration this month to leaders of governments and to the family of humanity proclaiming the necessity for open discussion and action by politicians and economic powerbrokers.

From my humble perspective, many leaders of the global political economy are turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and dangerously degrading the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.

Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be presented to humanity appear to so many fine scientists as human-induced, leaders have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, ready or not, like them or not.

Perhaps leadership in our time has too often chosen to ignore whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. It appears that too many leaders are content to hold tightly to widely shared and consensually validated specious thinking when it serves their personal interests.

Is humanity once again finding life as we know it dominated by a modern Tower of Babel called economic globalization? That is, has human thinking, judging and willing become so grievously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy that we cannot see or speak intelligibly about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots?

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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Our gift to children is a murky future

January 6, 2008 – 2:22 pm

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 6 January 2008.)

The leaders in my generation apparently wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, increasing per capita consumption of scarce resources and skyrocketing human population numbers worldwide; their desires are evidently insatiable; they choose to believe anything that meet the ’standards’ for political convenience and economic expediency; and they act accordingly. But, despite all their widely shared and consensually validated specious ideas and soon to be unsustainable production, consumption and propagation activities, Earth exists in space-time, is relatively small and bounded, and has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends. Whatsoever is is, is it not?

What worries me is this: the elder guarantors of a good enough future for the children appear to be leading our kids down a “primrose path” along which the children could unexpectedly be confronted with sudden, potentially colossal threats to human and environmental health that are directly derived from human-driven, converging global challenges such as pernicious impacts of global warming and climate change, pollution of the air, water and land from microscopic particulates and solid waste, and the reckless dissipation of scarce natural resources. All the while, the leading elders remain in denial of the fulminating ecological degradation by willfully declining to acknowledge, much less begin to address, humanity’s emerging, human-induced predicament. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, our children could have extraordinary difficulties responding ably to that with which they could soon come face to face; that is to say, because their elders have so adamantly refused to recognize God’s great gift of good science, our kids will not even know what “hit” them, much less why it is happening.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill


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