FrostyWooldridge's Blog

By Frosty Wooldridge

“We lose four acres a minute, 6,000 acres a day and 2.19 million acres annually to development caused by population growth in the USA.”

                                                       
                                                     Mike Matz, Denver Post

Before the Industrial Revolution, humanity existed by tilling the fields for crops, picking fruits and storing them in root cellars. Transportation included animals, ox carts, rivers and oceans. All limited and slow!

Diseases wiped out millions of people at the drop of a hat. Polio, cholera and Bubonic Plague ruled.

In 1900, the average American male died by 49 years of age. Citizens kept warm by firewood and coal. As long as humans depended on solar flow, winds and currents, we remained sustainable within nature’s carrying capacity.

However, in the late 1800s, steam power burst upon the scene. With it, steam driven ocean liners and trains afforded swift transport across oceans and continents. With the advent of the internal combustion engine, the tractor and car made their appearance.

Whereas one farmer might feed 20 people with his labors, a tractor allowed one farmer the ability to feed 10,000 humans. Food canning guaranteed sustenance throughout the year.

With the advent of electricity, everything changed in America. Coupled with production and the assembly line, consumption became the driving force of capitalism.

Those technologies allowed Americans to overwhelm the natural world. In 1900, we numbered 76 million in America. At the time, scientists created 100 different chemicals. Today, we surpass 72,000 chemicals with an added 1,000 created annually. All of them outside the bounds of nature! All of them deadly to life forms including us.

Today the United States, at 303 million people and headed for 400 million by 2035, sucks the lifeblood out of nature at increasing and alarming rates of speed. If we examined the carnage and consumption of our voracious civilization, we might be appalled at the figures we exact on Mother Nature and our fellow creatures.

We burn 7.3 billion barrels of oil annually in the USA. We burn millions of metric tons of natural gas. We burned 1.17 billion tons of coal to produce electricity in 2006.

However, as fast we produce it, we devour it faster. The Sears Tower in Chicago uses more electricity in a single day than the entire city of Rockford, Illinois with 152,000 people. Humans consume 40 percent of the net primary production of energy on earth—the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis—while we make up less than one percent of the animal biomass on this planet.

“It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world,” said Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation of Economic Trends, “we quickly approach another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild. Rising population; growing consumption of food, water and building materials; expanding road and rail transport; and urban sprawl continue encroaching on the remaining wild, pushing it to extinction.”

Within the lifetime of our children, vast areas of the wild we take for granted will vanish from our planet. The Trans-Amazon Highway cuts across the entire expanse of the Amazon rain forest, hastening its destruction. What is the result? Biologist E.O. Wilson states that humans create the ‘Sixth Extinction Session’ whereby we lose, “50 to 150 species a day or between 18,000 and 55,000 species a year. By 2100, two-thirds of Earth’s remaining species are likely to become extinct.”

As we kill more and more basic plant and animal life, it creates a cascading effect whereby all creatures depend on all other creatures in the web of life. As you kill off more and more species, a cascade of extinction destroys environmental equilibrium. Given enough time, we shall kill off the grizzly, hummingbird, bald eagle, moose, giraffe, lion, elephant, cheetah, trout, bass, dragonfly and millions more of earth’s creatures.

Makes your head hurt doesn’t it?

Since I’ve already seen this nightmare in India and China, I know what’s coming. Rifkin said, “In the great era of urbanization, we have shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that we could conquer, colonize and utilize the riches of the planet to ensure our autonomy without dire consequences to us and future generations.”

Sorry, we can’t get away much longer with what we’re doing to this planet.

It’s as if our citizens by their apathy and our politicians by their ignorance--beg for this country’s demise, its degradation and its collapse.

If I could take you for a two week trip to Mexico City, Mexico; Shanghai, China; Bombay, India; Dacca, Bangladesh; Alexandria, Egypt—you would become sick to your stomach. You would be inspired to take action. You wouldn’t want your children to live what those people endure in their misery by the millions as they cling to life—every day of their lives.

The PBS journalist Bill Moyers asked the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?”

Asimov replied, “It will be completely destroyed. I use what I call the bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to stay as long as you like for whatever you need.

“But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person; you have to bang on the door, “Aren’t you done yet?”

He concluded, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive. Convenience and decency can’t survive. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.”

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Bob Woodruff of ABC asked input from all citizens concerning the future of our planet. Go to www.earth2100.tv for a sobering reality check as to what we face and to what I have been writing about for the past 20 years. Our ‘window’ to change to a balanced population and non-polluting energy diminishes every day we ignore the symptoms manifesting all over America and the planet.

To take action: www.numbersusa.com

www.thesocialcontract.com

www.fairus.org

www.proenglish.org

www.capsweb.org

www.vdare.com

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

From: Frosty Wooldridge

This three minute interview with Adam Schrager on “Your Show” May 4, 2008, NBC Channel 9 News, addresses the ramifications of adding 120 million people to USA in 35 years and six million people to Colorado as to water shortages, air pollution, loss of farmland, energy costs and degradation of quality of life. In the interview, Frosty Wooldridge explains the ramifications of adding 120 million people to the USA in 35 years. He advances new concepts such as a “Colorado Carrying Capacity Policy”; “Colorado Environmental Impact Policy”; “Colorado Water Usage Policy”; “Colorado Sustainable Population Policy”. Nationally, the USA needs a "National Sustainable Population Policy" to determine the carrying capacity of this nation for the short and long term. Wooldridge is available for interviews on radio and TV having interviewed on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX.

Click the link to view the 3 minute interview with NBC's Adam Schrager:

http://www.9news.com/video/player.aspx?aid=52364p>

Frosty Wooldridge

www.frostywooldridge.com