The population explosion
Paul R.Ehrlich & Anne H.Ehrlich
http://www.ditext.com/ehrlich/title.html
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human beings, besides tuning out gradual trends, do not easily recognize the need to adjust their ways of life to accommodate the needs of more than five billion fellows, most living thousands of miles away. That all people must change their behavior to permit everyone on the planet to lead a decent life is not a notion evolution has prepared us to accept readily. It is not surprising that Homo sapiens has brought its old mind into the new world. After all, biological evolution would require many thousands of generations to adjust the old perceptual apparatus to new situations, and world-scale problems have appeared only in the last one or two generations.
So, if society is to come to grips with the population explosion and the other elements of the greatest crisis it has faced in historic times, it will have to do so through cultural evolution. Cultural evolution consists of changes in the body of non-genetic information that is passed from person to person and [188] generation to generation. Cultural information, unlike the genetic information coded into the DNA of human beings, can be altered very rapidly -- well within a single generation in the modern world, sometimes within a week.
Cultural evolution must be harnessed and directed so as to amplify people's awareness of the gradual environmental changes that so threaten our civilization. Somehow we've all got to learn that a fluctuating but continually climbing line on a graph measuring the concentration of a colorless, odorless gas in the atmosphere may represent an enormously greater threat to our children's security than all the world's terrorists put together. People must learn to perceive in columns of population statistics an increasingly certain death knell for their way of life.
It's tough to override a legacy of billions of years of biological evolution and tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution.
Making the population connections therefore isn't all that easy, because people are basically designed not to pay attention to the factors that are related to population growth, or to that growth itself. Population growth, climate change, faltering food security, the loss of stratospheric ozone, increased acidity of rain, the extermination of populations and species of plants [189] and animals, and various other signposts collectively pointing toward global collapse are all trends too gradual for human beings to perceive easily and are not obviously connected to one another. Worse yet, most of them are difficult or impossible to perceive directly, even when attention is called to them.
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Good and interesting book that adresses the problem of overpopulation in humane like and respectfull ways .
Focus is put on the necessicity of a global cultural revolution .
As
metaw3 below I am favoring massive education resulting in raised awareness and global responsability rather then the use of coercive laws .
Love always
mudra