Population, biodiversity interaction is 'complicated business'
Fishing port in Mboul, Senegal. (Photo: Milamber)
The economics and culture of Earth’s rising human population interacts with our planet’s biodiversity in a complicated way.
Joel Cohen is Professor of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities.
Joel Cohen: Let me give an example, though, to show that this is a complicated business. It’s not only numbers of people that matter here. For several hundred years, Europeans have known that there was a very rich fishery off the west coast of Africa.
Deforestation and rapid population growth in West Africa sent large numbers of people to coastal cities. Cohen said that fish soon became the major commercial export of the West African country of Senegal.
Joel Cohen: And the Europeans had invested enormously in fisheries, through the European Union, to provide employment to unhappy minority cultures like the Basques in Spain. So, the European Union generated a vast, subsidized fishing fleet and promptly exhausted the available fishes in the Mediterranean, and this fishing fleet began looking for other places to go.
Cohen said the result was a vast depletion of the large and many beautiful fishes off the west coast of Africa. He’s said it’s an example of how biodiversity effects are due to a complex interaction between human population, economics, cultural conflict and the environment.
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Dear Joel,
Is there even a remote possibility that the seemingly endless and, perhaps, patently unsustainable expansion of the global economy, that is being orchestrated primarily for the benefit of a small minority of people in the predominant human culture, will overwhelm global biodiversity in these early years of Century XXI?
How do you expect biodiversity will be impacted by the predominant culture’s reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources as well as the degradation of its ecosystem services, as unbridled economic globalization overspreads the surface of Earth in our time?
When can the current leviathan-like scale and fully anticipated growth rate of global human over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation be expected to adversely impact global biodiversity?
What worries is this: the present scale and growth rate of human consumption, production and propagation activities are soon to become unsustainable on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet the size of Earth. Could these distinctly human activities somehow, inadvertently and unintentionally, precipitate the massive extinction of biodiversity, the irreversible destruction of the environment and the unjustifiable depletion of a lion’s share of planetary resources?
Thanks for your consideration and comments.
Sincerely,
Steve
What could correctly be described as the selfish interests of a small minority of people have been held high and extolled as virtues in the predominant culture, I suppose. What science has uncovered regarding biological aspects of human creatureliness and physical aspects of the small, finite planet we inhabit, indicate that billions of human beings are very likely having an overwhelming impact on Earth.
It also appears that the current gigantic scale and rapid growth rate of global human over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities simply cannot be sustained much longer, much less forever, by the limited natural resources and frangible ecosystems services of our planetary home.
How on Earth can anyone reasonably and sensibly expect biodiversity and life as we know it to survive the colossal, unbridled growth of the consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species in our time?
Dear Joel,
Something is happening. Something is definitely happening; but people generally are not yet adequately focusing their attention upon an extremely forbidding and apparently unforeseen human-induced, distinctly human predicament, one that could present itself to humanity in the offing.
What worries me has to do with something within the psyche of the family of humanity that is making it difficult for our species to acknowledge, let alone address, the threat to life as we know it and to the integrity of our planetary home which could be posed to humanity, even in these early years of Century XXI, by the huge scale and increasing growth of unbridled over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species now overspreading the surface of the relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
How do things look to you?
Sincerely,
Steve