Accents
The Earth's 5th Commandment
All of Wednesday's newspapers, July 11, prominently featured World Population Day to draw attention to the ever-increasing number of people on earth. It was the 20th anniversary of World Population Day, established by the UN Development Programme to mark the planet's 5 billionth inhabitant born in Yugoslavia on July 11, 1987.
Twenty years later, the total number of human beings alive on planet Earth is over 6.7 billion, estimated to reach 6.8 billion by 2010. The number of people born everyday is burgeoning at a dizzying pace, 200,000 and counting. With the population about to pop, the UN enjoins everyone to do his/her bit to curb population growth. Thus, I zealously call on all child-bearing folks to obey the Earth's 5th Commandment: You shall limit your offspring for multitudes of people are a burden unto the earth.
Mother Earth is getting overburdened--never more apparent than in our own tiny piece of the globe. There are 86 million of us now in the Philippines competing for its meager resources. The riches nature has endowed our country continue to diminish. Take our overfished seas. We tell the fishers to throw back into the waters the gravid fish they've caught, those heavy with eggs, because those will multiply in the millions for them to go fish again. But what happens is that many fishers cook or sell the fish, gravid and all, because of the increasing number of mouths to be fed, not to mention the family's other crying needs that have to be met.
Take our denuded forests. The kaingin system that eats up the rainforest has been denounced a long time ago. Some of us learn to let the trees be, but others never learn or refuse to learn--because of need. Trees give way to Juan de la Cruz's basic necessities: shelter and fuel in addition to food and clothing for his brood. Adding insult to injury, so to speak, are corporate “evil-doers” who contribute to soil erosion, deadly landslides, and killer floods with their lumber concessions and greed for profit.
The legendary underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau has made the conclusion for all of humanity to be wary: “Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.” How population growth endangers the environment cannot be over-emphasized. The environment groans with the demands we place on it from the microcosm of communities to the macro life of countries. The media have reported bitter conflicts arising thereof.
Demographers say world population will double by the middle of the next century. Is this the Malthusian theory come true--that population increases faster than food supply? We met that in high school economics and forgot all about it. But I leave Malthus and the intricacies of his theory to the economists. His dire warnings will suffice. If we cannot stop the population from exploding, the keen competition for scarce resources, massive poverty, and large-scale deaths from hunger and malnutrition will ensue. Scenarios that boggle the mind. Thus, every conceivable way to achieve a sustainable environment must be pursued. Science is in intense pursuit toward this end, but the technological advances in food production can hardly keep pace with the number of newly-born the world has to feed, clothe, and shelter. People can do so much less: just minimize the multiplying to sustainable levels.
To present inhabitants of Mother Earth, it is important for us to understand how population is closely tied to sustainability. The earth is not getting any bigger while human beings are exploding in number. One more inconvenient truth to add to Al Gore's global warming and its grave danger to the eco-system.
The thing to do? Limit our offspring. The battle for a healthy environment, our very own survival to be blunt about it, is uphill. The efforts of ardent environmental activists, progress of civilization, and advances in science are all for naught if the Earth's 5th Commandment is dispensed with, disobeyed, and ignored.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)