By Frosty Wooldridge
May 13, 2024
Part 4: Blip in time, resources, energy exhaustion, what it takes to keep this civilization operating.
“Mother Earth has been talking to us ever since her beginning. She smiles through sunshine, cries through rainfall and screams through storms. And now, more than ever, paying attention to the many moods of the earth is crucial, as we face climate change and detrimental weather events that place people at risk. Life as we know it depends on the health of the planet, and that’s why Earth Day, which falls on April 22, is so important.” —Manal Aman, Lilli Iannella
To give you a startling metaphor in the last part of this series on Earth Day 2024, let’s rediscover April 15, 1912 when the H.M.S. Titanic churned too fast, too blind and too stupidly through the iceberg-filled North Atlantic Ocean. Captain Edward John Smith, thinking his Titanic provided an invincible steamship, plowed through the dark night at full speed. He wanted to make a record run to New York harbor. Such arrogance combined with the time of year and the absolute knowledge that monstrous icebergs floated everywhere in that area, proved fatal to him, his crew and his passengers. A horrifying 1,517 innocent lives died when the Titanic sank. Again, a cautionary tale for America, Canada and Europe!
Do you notice that every time you turn around in America, someone pitches you to buy a faster Internet connection. We’ve gone from 2 G’s to 5 G’s to 10 G’s. If you buy an item from Amazon, you can expect it to arrive within 24 hours in many cases. Car spokespersons promise to carry you at screaming speeds to your next destination. Computers do everything but dance the Charleston.
But everything takes energy to unearth, transport, manufacture, ship and sell at destination. Everything takes water, food and air to allow our civilization to remain sustainable…and to function.
Here’s the rub: there is not ONE SINGLE politician or mainstream media outlet informing you or educating you to the absolute fact that exponential growth cannot continue.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” ―Albert A. Bartlett
That term, “exponential growth” means endless growth, like a cancer cell, which always kills its host. He was my friend for 30 years. I still keep his letters in my files. He educated me. He inspired me. His quotes are timeless and sobering.
“We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.” ―Albert A. Bartlett
Yet, in his and my State of Colorado, after he gave 1,600 lectures on what’s coming to our civilization as to human overpopulation, the leaders of Denver and other cities continue to build homes, apartments, businesses without any thought of the “human iceberg” awaiting all of us. That goes for the rest of the country. We are on course, like the Titanic trying to make it to New York harbor at record speed, to add 100,000,000 (million) more people by 2050. That’s 4,000,000 net gain, annually for the next 26 years.
“’Smart growth’ destroys the environment. ‘Dumb growth’ destroys the environment. The only difference is that ‘smart growth’ does it with good taste. It’s like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same.” —Al Bartlett
Since the mainstream media won’t educate you, and politicians continue to explode our population via legal and illegal immigration into America, you cannot count on knowing or understanding what Americans face in 26 short years. But I can tell you this: it’s gonna’ get really ugly for anyone living in that 2040 to 2050 decade when America hits that 100 million added human “resource competitors.”
They, that’s you and/or your kids, will be competing for water, energy, food, resources, clean air, and everything we take for granted in 2024. And, if catastrophic climate destabilization, which is driven by human population growth, really arrives with a vengeance, you’re going to find that our civilization will go the way of Easter Island, the dinosaurs or the way of every species that cannot feed, water, warm and sustain itself.
There are plenty of books showing with incredible accuracy as to what we face:
♦ Blip: Humanity’s 300 Year Self-Terminating Experiment with Industrialism by Christopher O. Clugston. He shows when all those resources required to allow this civilization to operate—will be exhausted. Our civilization will not be able to operate. We will collapse.
♦ The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. Remember that we keep killing 1,000,000 roadkill’s 24/ 7 in America, alone! How will any animals have a chance to live with their habitat being turned to pavement as well as them being slaughtered on our highways, in the air and on the water? As human numbers add another 1,000,000,000 of ourselves to reach 9 million or more by 2050, how in the hell does Nature’s other creatures stand a chance?
♦ The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler will give you a blow by blow account of life when that “human iceberg” smashes into our civilization.
♦ Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein. He shows what we face when oil is gone. Guess what? Electric cars and conservation won’t solve anything!
♦ Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg. His book chronicles much the same as Clugston’s book—Blip.
♦ There another 20 books saying the same thing about our future.
In other words, we’re in SO DAM*ED MUCH TROUBLE, there’s no way we’re going to keep this civilization operating. If you’re alive in 2050, you and your family is screwed as the wheels fall off our ability to feed, warm and sustain ourselves. Yes, you hear all this cheery stuff on Earth Day, but it’s a national farce—because since 1970, everything has gotten worse because humans added 4.5 billion more of ourselves. We dumped 170 trillion pieces of plastic into our oceans. It’s sickening what we’ve done to this planet. It won’t tolerate humans much longer.
What can you do? Answer: a great deal. In my book, America’s Overpopulation Predicament: Blindsiding Future Generations by Frosty Wooldridge, I give three huge chapters on what you can do at the local, state, national and international arenas.
By acting, future generations stand a chance. By doing nothing, your kids or anyone living around 2050 will experience pretty much what happened to those passengers on the Titanic.
That pretty much sums up Earth Day 2024. What will Earth Day 2050 look like? Take a guess!
© 2024 Frosty Wooldridge – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Frosty: frostyw@juno.com
