Part 2
Lack of Water

Part 3
Losing Land Fast

Part 4
Killing Our Oceans

Part 5
Species extinction

Part 6
The End of the Age of Oil

Part 7
A-Global Warming

Part 8
B-Global Warming Via Tipping Points

Part 9
Crossing Our Agricultural Rubicon

Part 10
Fracturing America

Part 11
Crowding of America

Part 12
Poverty in America

Part 13
Piling Up on the Rocks

Part 14
Sustainable Growth is Unsustainable

Part 15
Losing the Wild

Part 16
Energy and the Silent Lie

Part 17
Selected Growth Fallacies

Part 18
Environmental Refugees

Part 19
California--The Bow of the Titanic

Part 20
Coming Soon

Conclusion
What YOU can do for a better future for your country

Part 1: Consequences of Human Tsunami

According to Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson, the United States surpassed 300,000,000 people in October 2006.  Their current demographic predictions, based on accelerating growth levels, show America adding 100 million people by 2040.  

For those asleep at the wheel—that’s 34 years from now—a blink in time.

To place this kind of horrific growth rate into perspective, it resembles a human tsunami.  Much like nature’s earthquakes that occurred beneath the surface last year, the wave of energy sped under the ocean for hours and hundreds of miles without notice.  Once it hit the shoreline in Sri Lanka, it created cataclysmic devastation and tens of thousands of deaths.  Why?  No one suspected it.  No one took action to save themselves.  They didn’t know it was coming.  Once it hit, everyone became victims!  The tsunami rendered a human tragedy of epic proportions!

The U.S. Senate in May, 2006 passed S.B. 2611 that doubled current immigration levels from 1.0 million to 2.0 million annually.  It increased work visas by tens of thousands.  It continued allowance for millions in chain migration.  It allowed millions more in anchor babies.  The senate bill did nothing to stop illegal immigration estimated by Time Magazine in a feature story on September 20, 2004, that showed three million people crossing into America illegally every year.  It did not stop the 50,000 annual diversity visas that allow that many people to come to America from the poorest countries in the world.  It added more visas that allow more foreigners to gain jobs and anchor babies in America that assures they never return to their home countries.

The bill did not take into account that millions of people arriving from Third World countries do not change their large family propensities of six to eight and more children per couple.   

What does that mean to American citizens?  What about our overloaded cities?  Overwhelmed schools?   How about our water, farm land, energy, air quality, food sources, species habitat, and dozens of other issues?   Is there any way to stop it?  Does anyone understand the ominous consequences?

In this 10 part series published on Thursdays, this column addresses what we as a nation face if we allow this ‘human tsunami’ to crash upon our shores.  It addresses every aspect of our society, environment, sustainability, culture, language and viability as a civilization. 

The first question we must all ask ourselves is: can anyone name a single advantage to adding 100 million people to America in 34 years?  From Third World countries?   What will it do to our society?  Do we want to grow to 1,000,000,000 people?  Why?  If not, at what point will we stabilize growth?

What has a 2.4 billion person population done to India or China?  Do you think their citizens enjoy the standards of living and quality of life we enjoy in the United States?  Not even close!

In 1900, the world population reached 1.6 billion; today, it exceeds 6.4 billion; by mid century it’s expected to grow to a low of 9.0 to as high as 9.8 billion.  (Source: Population Reference Bureau)

In this 10 part series published on Thursdays, this column addresses what we as a nation face if we allow this ‘human tsunami’ to crash upon our shores.  It addresses every aspect of our society, environment, sustainability, culture, language and viability as a civilization. 

The first question we must all ask ourselves is: can anyone name a single advantage to adding 100 million people to America in 34 years?  From Third World countries?   What will it do to our society?  Do we want to grow to 1,000,000,000 people?  Why?  If not, at what point will we stabilize growth?

What has a 2.4 billion person population done to India or China?  Do you think their citizens enjoy the standards of living and quality of life we enjoy in the United States?  Not even close!

In 1900, the world population reached 1.6 billion; today, it exceeds 6.4 billion; by mid century it’s expected to grow to a low of 9.0 to as high as 9.8 billion.  (Source: Population Reference Bureau)

Name one advantage to adding 3,000,000,000 more people to the globe?  Is there some cosmic reason?  Reasonable religious reason?  Any rational reason?  Any sane purpose?  

Already, according to March 14, 2005 Time Magazine, eight million people starve to death annually.  Over 35 percent of humanity does not have clean drinking water.  Species extinction exceeds thousands annually.  What is it that we hope to accomplish by adding another 3.0 billion people to the planet with the consequences already raining down on us with current population levels? 

For those who can remember, in 1964, America housed 194 million people.  Gas prices remained steady at 29 cents a gallon.  Candy bars sold for five cents along with ice cream cones.  A pack of cancer sticks cost 20 cents.  Movies cost 50 cents.  Nine-five percent of kids arrived at school from a two parent home.   No one heard of gridlock, air pollution or road rage.  Today, gas exceeds $3.00 a gallon, ice cream cone tops $2.00 and cigarettes run $3.80 a pack and movies exceed $8.00 a ticket. A bag of popcorn costs $5.00.  What’s changed?  Short answer: supply and demand caused by population.

In 1965, U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy passed the stealth Immigration Reform Act that changed 50 years of a steady influx of immigrants from 175,000 annually to a gargantuan 1.1 million people per year.  Along with illegal immigration, the United States grew by 106 million people in 41 years.  If allowed to continue, we will add 100 million in three decades.  Reports show America will add another 100 million by 2065, which is 25 years.  That number means America reaches a half billion on its way to a billion.

Here are a few things you can expect in your state as population rises all over this country.

In the next 50 years, you can expect 1,000,000 to as many as 3,000,000 more people added to your state depending on location.  Once their numbers manifest, they won’t go away.  Why?  Because, at the same time, that 100 million spreads to other states!  Texas adds 12 million by 2025, Arizona adds five million and California adds 20 million by 2035.

Today, states like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California don’t possess enough water for their residents. Aquifers degrade as fast as diesel engines pump them dry.  No matter how many reservoirs they build, it won’t rain or snow more because they add millions of people.   Water shortages and rationing will become the norm while green lawns become as extinct five cent candy bars.

At the same time, states like Colorado lost 1.65 million acres of prime farm land to development in the past 10 years. Why?  They added 1.3 million people.  They will add four million more by 2050.  Latest reports show Colorado will lose 3.1 million more acres by 2022.  How many by 2050?  An additional 2.0 million more acres will be placed under concrete and asphalt via roads, malls and housing.  Ask yourself: have you ever seen cows grazing on concrete or have you ever seen corn growing out of pavement?  What will be the acreage losses in your state?  Your losses will be commensurate to your population growth.

While we exceed the land’s carrying capacity, we pack ourselves in like sardines with smart growth, slow growth and managed growth.  It’s all growth that adds cars, trucks, homes, power plants, malls and smoke stacks.   Have you noticed traffic in your city?  Have you seen the Brown Cloud thicken in toxicity over your area?   How about the bumper-to-bumper traffic?  Can you imagine what it will be with an added 100 million people in 34 years? 

By that time, gas or other alternative fuel will cost $8.00 to $10.00 per gallon and water prices will break your wallet.  Your food costs will triple.  Goods and services will explode beyond predictions. 

How about your quality of life?  Standard of living?  What about species extinction?  Air pollution?  Acid rain?  Crowding of national parks?  Lakes?  Streams?  How about soil erosion?

We paint ourselves into a corner.  We’re driving this population train into a dead end tunnel.  When will local and national leaders stand up and speak out?   When will newspapers, TV and radio talk shows deal with our number one crisis: overpopulation?   In this series, I’m going to expose it.  I will offer solutions. I invite your solutions.  For a hint of our future, visit www.thesocialcontract.com

“Immigration of the kind and on the scale America has had for the last three decades is in effect a recipe for cultural suicide and the squandering of a rich national heritage.”  Dr. Lee G. Marland

What will become of the ‘American Dream’?  Short answer: it will go the way of the dodo bird.

Part 2:  Lack of Water

By mid October, 2006, America reached 300 million people.  In the next 34 years, through unrelenting immigration, the United States of America adds another 100 million people.  By 2050, our country adds 20 million to reach a total of 430 million.  Many experts expect higher numbers.  Is it a milestone, millstone or societal nightmare?

In the face of scientific evidence of our polar ice caps melting, accelerating species extinction, water shortages, soil erosion, air pollution, acid rain and vanishing farmland—where can we find a national leader to address America’s worst crisis early in the 21ST century?  Overpopulation!  No leader in the Catholic, Protestant or Jewish churches speaks out.  

While the Pope witnesses starvation, misery and suffering worldwide, he promotes maximum human birth rates.  Islam commits to the same agenda. Church leaders will not budge from their 2000 year old dogmas.  They refuse to step into the realities of the 21st century.

U.S. industry giants won’t speak about it.  President Bush ignores it.  All 50 U.S. governors flee this subject.  No U.S. senator touches it.  Most Americans vehemently deny its reality.  They’re like the late Ray Charles injecting himself with heroin for years while denying it harmed his life.  

A few like Colorado’s U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo and former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm speak realistically about it.

But, like the Amtrak Express on the midnight run, it’s comin’ and it’s comin’ fast.

Have you ever heard of “silent-assertion”?  Mark Twain said in 1860, “The shabbiest of all lies is the lie of silent-assertion…it happens when politicians, presidents, the media and all leaders obfuscate, deny, suppress or ignore a social wrong or anything deleterious occurring inside American society.”  In his time, slavery continued as the silent-assertion of the day until it exploded into states rights and the Civil War. 

Today, you witness in the halls of Congress and the White House a complete abrogation of common sense, civic responsibility, action for the common good and rational thinking toward the future. With each new scandal, such as Congressman Mark Foley of Florida soliciting young boys, an aberrant side-dish serves up weekly that detracts from the harsh realities we face.

James Madison said, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

We face an invasion by Mexico so crippling, so debilitating, so preposterous in its scope—that any public servant with an ounce of brain power would step up like President Eisenhower and stop it!  Instead, Bush and members of Congress stand around scratching their rear-ends.

We face disaster from our southern border.  In the last century, Mexico expanded from 50 million poverty stricken peasants to 104 million today.  In this century, because the Catholic Church encourages unlimited births, Mexico will explode to 300 million, which is three times as many as today.  If you think they will ever solve their problems, think again.

As this population overload advances, we face major water dilemmas.

In a September 30, 2006 Rocky Mountain News report, Boulder scientists predict grim drought forecasts for the West.  They used eighteen of the world’s most powerful computer climate models.  Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, “Climate change is moving us in the direction of a perpetual state that is of the Dust Bowl type.” 

Scientists expect increased evaporation and drier soils leading to more severe and frequent droughts.  Hoerling said, “Droughts could be 25 percent worse than the 1930s Dust Bowl days.” 

Who stands to suffer the greatest risk?  Today, citizens downstream of the Colorado River devour 13.5 million acre feet of the river.  Bob Raynolds of NOAA said, “We’re going to have to adapt our survival strategies to coping with less water.”

My question is: how will we adapt when we’ve added 100 million people in the next 34 years?  Why not choose to stabilize our population so we won’t have to adapt but, in fact, flourish with a stable population that remains sustainable?

Associated Press writer James McPherson on July 30, 2006 wrote a piece “Without Rain, Dakotas Dry Up.”  He reported, “Fields of wheat, durum and barley in the Dakotas this summer will never end up as pasta or bread…what is left is hot winds blowing clouds of dirt from dried-out ponds.”

More than 60 percent of the United States suffered abnormally dry or drought conditions last summer.  I traveled through 48 states in June, July and August.  I saw burned up corn and pigmy crops from the lack of water.   This drought stretched from Georgia to Arizona and from Montana to Wisconsin.

Mark Svoboda, climatologist for the National Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska said, “The Dakotas are the epicenter…it’s just a wasteland in north central South Dakota.”

Is there a chance that America will experience commensurate rain fall to provide food and water for that added 100 million in 34 years?   Will we be able to feed and water the 300 million already in the USA?  Is there a chance that science might produce miracle crops that grow without water?  As farmland and wetlands vanish by the millions of acres for new malls, highways and housing, do you our water supplies grow?

Short answer: No!

Along with lack of water, we degrade water quality.  Californians buy more filtered water than anywhere else in America.  Why?  They can’t provide enough clean water to their 37.5 million residents.  What about polluted and chemicalized water run-off.  We spray crops; inject insecticides and herbicides into millions of acres of farmland.  It seeps into our groundwater and runs into our rivers.  The Mississippi River spews millions of gallons of fertilizer and chemically poisoned water into the Gulf of Mexico that creates a 3,000 square mile dead zone where few fish or native marine life can’t live.  Every river running to the oceans carries enormous amounts of poisons.  Acid rain from toxic air pollution falls with every rain storm.

Water?  It’s no longer pure.  It’s no longer clean.  It’s dangerously polluted.  It’s no longer ample.  With an added 100 million people, our supply, our way of life, our nation and our society faces consequences we may not be able to solve.

“Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion.  We are demolishing, poisoning, and destroying all life-systems on the planet.  We are signing IOUs our children will not be able to pay.  Without radical changes in heart, mind, vision and action, the Earth will end up like Venus, dead!”  Brazilian Minister for the Environment

Part 3: Losing land fast

Name one advantage to adding 100 million more Americans in the next 34 years.  Don’t Americans suffer enough problems with one million homeless people staggering around our cities, unending and ulcer-provoking gridlock traffic, toxic air pollution and suburbs expanding over the horizon?

What does it take to wake up an entire civilization to its impending calamity?   A lady named Miss Ross wrote me, “Sir, don’t you know that Malthus was proven wrong and that he retracted his thesis that overpopulation caused mass starvation?”

Thomas Malthus wrote his thesis when there were less than one billion people on the planet.  Today, we suffer 6.5 billion.  In the March 14, 2005 issue of Time Magazine, writer Jeffrey D. Sachs reported, “Eight million people die annually because they can’t feed themselves…35 percent of them don’t have access to clean drinking water.”  While we add 100 million Americans, 190 countries around the world will add three billion people.  If you think humanity suffers today, you’re invited to stick around to see it worsen beyond your wildest predictions.

I’ve traveled over six continents on a bicycle.  I’ve seen overpopulation up close and ugly.   I’ve seen what’s coming.  What I am attempting to show readers is this: we cannot solve 21st century problems with 20th century thinking or actions.  As Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.” 

Our government and leaders create a policy for everything under the sun.  We follow traffic, water, irrigation, immunization and dozens of other policies.  However, we fail our children without a national “Population Policy”.   Where does that leave us?  Our leaders think it’s acceptable to grow this nation into 1.3 billion people like China.

But that kind of thinking created consequences China can’t solve.  Why do you think millions of Chinese flee to America and Canada?  As their population grew, their freedoms diminished.  As their numbers exploded, their environment degraded.  Their problems became irreversible and unsolvable. 

India offers another example.  I met Arun Gandhi, the grandson of the great Gandhi, a year ago.  He said to me, “With 1.1 billion people, we have devastating poverty.  We have four million people who are born in the streets, live in the streets and die in the streets without ever having taken a shower, used a toilet or slept in a bed.”  Therefore, if you think Malthus is wrong or Paul Ehrlich, think again.  It’s only a matter of timing.

Do we want to be like Germany with 82 million people in a landmass the size of Indiana and Ohio combined?  How would you like to live in Holland which is 180 miles by 100 miles in size and houses 18 million people?  Virtually everything must be imported.  They exceeded their carrying capacity and depend on the outside world for food, energy and goods. 

As we explode toward this next 100 million added Americans, let’s talk about losing farmland.

By growing at three million per year, each U.S. citizen destroys 12 acres which is developed, cultivated, paved and covered in concrete.  It’s called a citizen’s ‘footprint’.  You may call it ‘human impact’.   In this case, that equals 1.2 billion acres of land destroyed nationwide to support 100 million added Americans by 2040.   We’re talking serious destruction to natural habitat, wetlands, farmland and the “web of life”.  You’re also talking about 100 million more people using water, gasoline, natural gas and electricity.  In my state of Colorado, we suffered rolling blackouts last winter because we didn’t have enough natural gas to heat our homes. 

For those of you who think we can grow endlessly because you see ‘lots of open space’ as you fly in an airplane across our nation, you must address “carrying capacity”.   That means how many humans, plants and animals can be sustained by a limited amount of land and water. 

Since I know Colorado best, let me use our example in order for you to apply it to your state.  Colorado grew by 1.4 million since 1992.  As reported in the Denver Post, May 7, 2006, “Disappearing Farmland”, because of massive population growth and housing development, we lose five family farms a week.  Since 1992, we lost 2.89 million acres of agricultural land.  At the current rate of growth, Colorado loses 3.1 million acres of prime farmland by 2022.   That’s 16 years from now.  If you extend that to 2040, you’ve got a whopping added 3.3 million more farmland acres destroyed for human development.

Note that we suffer a water crisis in our state with water restrictions in 2006. 

With more pavement replacing pastures in Colorado, rainwater runs into drains instead of naturally working into the topsoil.  Therefore, underground aquifers can’t recharge.  At some point, no one can irrigate crops on the remaining farmland.

As we destroy prime farmland, our population explodes beyond our carrying capacity.  Agricultural experts predict America will be importing more than 40 percent of fruits and vegetables within 30 years.  As fuel prices rise, the cost of food will degrade our standard of living.  And, worse, what if those countries sending us food today, can’t or won’t in the future? 

To give you an even greater sense of the gravity of the dilemma we face, let’s turn to California.  They add 1,650 people per day. That’s 600,000 people added per year.  They expect to add 20 million by 2040 not counting illegal aliens that pour into that state without being counted.

If you take the same formula from Colorado’s land loss, that’s five times greater farmland lost.  Right about now, you’re mentally staggering while you sit reading this information.  This population nightmare grows so fast as to be almost incomprehensible.  As California adds 20 million, Texas adds 12 million by 2025 and Arizona adds four million. Every state adds from 1.0 to 3.0 million and more.

Additionally, few take into account aquifers drying up like the Ogallala Aquifer feeding the irrigation systems in the Midwest.   Few officials understand the long term consequences of spraying herbicides, pesticides and injecting fertilizer by the billions of tons into our soils.  From the millions of tons of toxic smoke stack particulate flooding down with each rainfall, we’re poisoning our land faster than it can cleanse itself of 72,000 human-made chemicals.  We poison our ground water with chemicals leeching into the soil from landfills and industrial waste.  With an added 100 million people, we poison the land, which is the foundation of our existence, faster than it can recover. 

Another sickening aspect of our society is a lack of respect for the land.  Millions of Americans throw trash, cans, bottles, plastic, old cars, millions of gallons of used oil and other chemicals onto and into the land.  I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of personal dumps on farms, along the road and in the woods.  Think what an added 100 million people from Third World countries will do to our land. 

From my research, at the accelerating speed of America’s immigration-driven growth, we pave several thousand of miles of roads daily.  If you notice across the land, you can’t take a picture without power lines or other human development.  We’re flooding our natural world with everything un-natural.  By adding another 100 million people, we can only pollute our natural world with more dams, power lines, highways, housing sprawl, malls, fire houses, schools, hospitals, bridges, airports and worse.  In the end, where will the animals go, how do they feed and how do they procreate?

Because of loss of habitat in the lower 48 states, the National Academy of Sciences reports that 2,500 plants and animals suffer extinction every decade.  How can we, a cognitive species, continue that kind of a killing spree?

Finally, aren’t we packed in like sardines already on the east and west coasts?  Aren’t Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Denver, San Francisco and all the major cities horrible enough?  Everyone is crammed, jammed and grid-locked into an ongoing hyper insanity.

We clearly need a national population policy.  We, as Americans, created a stable population with a 2.03 fertility level in the 1970s.  Immigration causes our population crisis.  If we continue on this path, we’ll reach an added 100 million people on our way to one billion people with commensurate misery and consequences.

How can we stop this crisis?  Simple: 10 year time out/rollback/moratorium on all immigration.  After the moratorium, we allow a maximum of 100,000 immigrants annually ONLY if that maintains a stable, sustainable U.S. population.  Those overpopulated countries need to stabilize their own populations. We can help them, but in the end, they must help themselves.

“Sustainable growth is a self-contradictory concept beloved by those who want to continue the same old stands—growth as a solution to all problems—very few people grasp the simple fact—demographic or economic growth is unsustainable.”  Lindsey Grant, author of “TOO MANY PEOPLE”
 

Part 4: Killing Our Oceans

Millions of Americans scoff at the idea that overpopulation causes any detrimental effects to our land, water and air.  If they knew more, they might speak out and lead the “Charge of Enlightenment.”   They would push for change based on knowledge instead of emotions or past models.  They might thrust aside anachronistic paradigms that no longer work in the 21st century—and apply new concepts for present conditions.

Instead, they squeal derogatory names at those who speak up.  “Quit being a chicken little,” one reader wrote.   Or, many who understand our ‘human dilemma’ bury their heads in denial.

Meanwhile, the August 1991 issue of Life Magazine, titled, “Shark Alert!” reported, “The age-old struggle between man and shark has become a killing frenzy.  We slaughter 100 million sharks every year, driving them to extinction.”

Sharks prowled the seas for the last 400 million years.  But now, the predator has become the prey.  Humans kill sharks at such an alarming rate that many varieties face extinction.  Shark fins are bought by the Agger Trading Company in New York where they are dried and resold.  Hong Kong alone buys over seven million pounds each year for shark-fin soup. 

Fast forward to the March 2006 issue of Mother Jones News, titled, “Last Days of the Ocean.”   Researcher Julia Whitty wrote, “One of the biggest culprits is long-lining, in which a single boat sets plastic line across 60 miles of ocean, each bearing gangion lines that dangle at different depths, baited with 10,000 hooks designed to catch a variety of species.  Each year, two billion long-line hooks are set worldwide primarily for tuna and swordfish—though long-liners inadvertently kill far more other species that take the bait, including 40,000 sea turtles, 300,000 sea birds and 100,000,000 sharks.”

Not only that, fishing trawler captains cut loose thousands of miles of drift nets that get snagged on reefs.  Those nets continue killing uncounted numbers of marine life by the millions for however long the plastic monofilament lasts: in a word—almost forever.  Experts say that drift nets represent ‘clear cutting’ under water where everything is destroyed. It’s been called “raping the oceans with no moral or ethical responsibility.”

Whitty continues, “Fishing fleets in the Gulf of Mexico have dropped the white tip shark population 99 percent since the 1950s, driving that species into virtual extinction.  These sharks are thrown dead or dying back into the ocean; these unwanted species make up at least 25 percent of the global catch, as much as 88 billion pounds of life eliminated, for no reason, annually.”

If you consider the figure of 100 million slaughtered sharks in 1991, annually, up to 2006, that’s 14 years to slaughter 1.4 billion sharks for their fins for human soup.  If you add in 300,000 seabirds annually, that’s 4.2 million seabirds killed in those 14 years.  That’s over a half million sea turtles killed for nothing.

Whatever life remains in the Gulf of Mexico suffers from what is called a “dead zone” which is an area of ocean filled with human chemicals so toxic that few fish species can withstand it or reproduce.  A deadly conveyor belt known as the Mississippi River delivers nitrogen-laced, chemically active fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides by the millions of gallons hourly, twenty four hours a day.  Latest research shows a 3,000 square mile dead zone beginning at the mouth of Old Man River.

“Close to 50 hypoxic dead zones fester on the coasts of the continental United States,” Whitty reported.  “The situation is far worse in Europe, with 14 persistent dead zones that never go away, and almost 40 others occurring annually, the biggest and worst being the 27,000 square mile dead zone in the Baltic Sea, which equals the landmass of North Carolina.”

The most horrible news stems from human chemicals poisoning coral reefs.  Because of global warming and chemicals injected into our oceans, the exhaustive study in 2004, “Status of Coral Reefs of the World” showed 20 percent of the world’s reefs so badly damaged they are unlikely to recover and another 50 percent teeter on the edge of extinction…15 percent of the world’s sea grass beds have disappeared in the past 10 years, depriving marine species of critical habitat.”

“Likewise, kelp beds are dying at alarming rates; 75 percent are gone from Southern California alone—victims of the demise of sea otters that regulate populations of kelp-eating sea urchins.”

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that oceans absorbed 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.  Today we add 25 tons daily.  This exhaust stems from 84 million barrels of oil burned worldwide each day.  That doesn’t take include gas, wood and coal burned all over the planet. 

“This mitigation of carbon dioxide changes oceanic PH levels,” Whitty said. “Coral reefs plagued by so many stressors will almost certainly vanish.”

A quick trip west of San Francisco during our nuclear expansion in 1945 shows the U.S. government dumped 400 barrels of radio-active waste 20 miles off shore.  A recent PBS report showed all 400 barrels ruptured with their contents dissolved into the Pacific Ocean.  Can you imagine what other nuclear countries have done with their radio-active waste?  Is it any wonder tuna, salmon and other marine life test chemically positive and our children should not eat fish because their small bodies can’t tolerate the doses inside marine tissue?

In Alaska, polar bears struggle and drown with vanishing ice pack because they must swim too far to gain the ice.  Worse, toxic chemicals plague the ice bears.  Researcher Marla Cone wrote, “Polar bear cubs already harbor more pollutants in their bodies than most other creatures on the planet.  Mother polar bears store a lifetime of chemicals in their fat and bequeath them, via their milk, to their young.  Several hundred of the industrialized world’s most toxic chemicals like PCBs and organochlorine pesticides such as DDT have transformed the Arctic into a chemical repository.  The chemicals magnify in animals each step up the food chain leaving polar bears, killer whales and other predators highly contaminated.”

Today, in the Gulf of Mexico, leatherback turtles have declined 97 percent in the past two decades.  They feed on jellyfish, but today, shrimpers can’t draw their nets into the boats because millions of 25 pound jellyfish make it impossible to retrieve nets.

On top of this ‘tip of the iceberg’ report, you may appreciate that global warming causes horrendous storm activity in our warming oceans, so much so, hurricane scientists call for a new category greater than Katrina’s category 5.  They expect category 6!

More tidbits to consider:

--Cruise ships produce 30,000 gallons of sewage and 19 tons of garbage daily which is dumped into the oceans in defiance of international laws.

--U.S. Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA) has accepted over $23,000.00 in foreign junkets to help him weaken federal laws protecting fisheries and marine life.

--Gorton’s Seafood’s has killed 2,700 whales against international laws in the guise of “scientific research.”

--Toxic PCBs are regulated by the FDA, but the FDA allows such high levels of cancer-causing PCBs in farmed salmon that, if they were present in wild salmon, the EPA would restrict consumption to one meal per month.

--Chemically caused cancers kill millions worldwide annually.

When does avoiding a look at one’s paradigm cause damage?    Is there a time when one’s entrenched paradigm needs digging out lest a person or company or society bequeaths on future generations a problem that is both irreversible and unsolvable?  Is there a moral and/or ethical question as to this kind of killing spree by a cognitive species upon defenseless non-cognitive fellow creatures?

Am I a chicken little?  I am a realist.  I am a messenger.  I’ve seen what’s coming in my world travels from the Arctic to Antarctica. 

What you must ask yourself is, “Do I want to leave this degraded world for my children, or do I want to change it for the better?”

Can Americans change course to a more viable and sustainable long term future?  If we add another 100 million people to this country, the answers is: No!  As I noted in the first column of this series, you can’t see a tsunami until it hits.  As you read part IV of this series, it dawns on you that you couldn’t see any of what you’ve just read, but it’s happening at an accelerating rate of speed--all caused by population overload. 

How far can we afford to expand our human numbers?  At what point do we crash head-on into the brick wall labeled “human fallout” with what we’re doing to ourselves and all other living creatures on our planet home?  It’s a decision we better make fast.  In light of reading this report, name one advantage of adding 100 million more Americans by 2040.

“Surviving like rats is not something we should bequeath to our children,” Jacque Cousteau world renowned oceanographer

Part 5: Species Extinction

To support each American citizen, 12 acres of land must be developed, i.e., taken out of its natural setting.  It must be paved over, planted in crops, built into suburbs, schools, colleges, fire houses, malls, roads and everything that sustains our society.  That means the next added 100 million Americans wreak havoc on the natural world in an ever more deadly population dance.

If I could lead several hundred million average Americans to China at 1.3 billion, India at 1.1 billion or Bangladesh with 129 million people in a landmass the size of Ohio--for a week tour of THEIR population nightmares, you’d see a massive throng of Americans demanding our borders be closed as well as a national population policy implemented.

As we add that next 100 million to America, it means we reduce habitat for all other plant and animal life.

With the United States growing by three million people annually, that equals 36 million acres transformed from the natural world into the unnatural.   That means animal habitat diminishes by 36 million acres each year.  It means they can’t eat, drink, find shelter or procreate their species.  If you look at the annual road-kill, they can’t make it across our highways without being slaughtered by the millions.

Within the past 100 years, Americans, ever expanding across the land--destroyed 50 percent of all wetlands in the lower 48 states.  That means water sources no longer exist for ducks, geese, beavers and millions of other animals.

Today, 6,330 animal species in North America teeter on the edge of extinction.  The National Academy of Sciences predicts 2,500 plants and animals go extinct every decade from habitat loss.  At some point, these extinction rates create a “cascading” effect for all other dependent species.  We all answer to an intertwined ecosystem.

In the West, the prairie dog provides sustenance for 67 other creatures in the food chain.  Over half of prairie dog colonies suffered human development destruction in the past 20 years.  As their numbers plummeted, every creature depending on those rodents declined commensurately.  In Denver, where eagles and hawks once soared daily in the skies, they no longer exist.  You can see, however, a brown cloud of pollution from horizon to horizon.   

In southern California, those majestic California condors do not soar on heat thermals any longer, but must be kept in cages to preserve a few dozen left alive.  Most duck populations suffered from 25 to 50 percent decline in the last half century. 

As you can’t see a tsunami until it hits, you’re invited to step into growing ‘unseen’ consequences pushed by the next added 100 million Americans. 

I think Chief Seattle said, “What humans do to the web of life, they also do unto themselves.” 

In a report in the Boston Globe, October 19, 2006, by John Donnelly, “Scientists alarmed at loss of pollinators,” he reports rapidly dropping numbers of birds, bees and bats could impact humanity’s food supply.

Most plants depend on their pollen being picked up by birds, bats and bees to be distributed so that fruits, nuts and vegetables can grow.

In Colorado’s eastern plains, in 2006, farmers imported beekeepers with their mobile bee hives to pollinate crops.  The lack of bees in the United States created the first imports of bees since 1922. 

“In addition,” Donnelly reported, “wild pollinators from bumblebees to butterflies to nocturnal moths—have lost much of their habitat, due to vast use of pesticides and herbicides that kill plants and hedges in which the insects and birds live.”

Most Americans reading this column eat fruits and vegetables from fields sprayed with poisons and soils injected with chemical fertilizers. Is it any wonder, in a secondary arena of our dining rooms, we ingest chemicalized foods that cause us cancers?  Can you imagine what happens to the birds, bees and bats—not to mention the insects—that die or become mutated by man-made chemicals?

I am troubled by Americans’ total disregard for their fellow creatures.  In 1800, over one billion bison roamed the western prairie.  A billion carrier pigeons blackened the migratory sky.  When I was a kid, geese and other birds flew over our house in wave after wave, week after week.  No more!  You’re lucky to see a few hundred buffalo in Yellowstone National Park.  You’ll never see a carrier pigeon because Americans shot them into extinction.  Grizzlies regress into non-existence.  I find it almost hilarious that Americans leap out of their cars to see a moose, buffalo, grizzly and other great beasts, but they won’t stop their own numbers to allow such creatures enough habitats to live.

With our causing the extinction of 2,500 plants and animals every 10 years, that number can only grow in the coming decades as we encroach further on their habitat.  What moral and/or ethical question does that bring to mind?  What right does a cognitive species pretend to possess to create such a killing spree on other species that can’t think or fight for their survival?  How far and how many other North American species do we expect to vanish forever to benefit  our relentless expansion? 

What might be the optimum number of extinct species that would fall short of the “cascading effect?”  At what point would we supersede the “cascading effect” to create an avalanche of even more extinctions of other creatures that depended on the web of life?  

At what point would that affect human survival as in the case of the pollinators?

As you can see in this series, we already create horrific consequences in the natural world with our current 300 million Americans.  As mentioned in Part 4 about destroying our oceans, a PBS show last week showed hundreds of thousands of tons of discarded fishing nets retrieved by Scuba divers.  The nets had been destroying reefs and marine life because nothing in nature could deal with the nylon. It rolled around the ocean bottom, washed by eternal tides, while it destroyed millions of marine creatures caught in its indolent grasp.

Fishing captains cut it loose—knowing the kind of death their nets created for all marine life victimized by those man-made products.  How morally unconscionable and utterly reprehensible!

Let’s fast-forward to 2040 with another 100 million people added to North America.  Remember, the human race globally will have added two billion more humans by that time.  Their impact can only multiply our impact for a devastating species extinction die-off unprecedented in history.  In fact, scientists tell us that five extinction sessions occurred since the dawn of time.  The sixth one moves forward in this century.  What’s causing it?  We are! 

At some point, nature resembles a house made of cards--delicate.  Humans resemble Katrina’s destructive power in a Sri Lanka tsunami-type process.  How far down that rabbit hole can we afford to go and how will it affect our children at the mid century?

My answer: we must stabilize U.S. population by the simplest means possible.  We need a moratorium on all immigration. Immigration makes the United States the third fastest growing nation in the world behind China and India.  If not for immigration, we maintain a stable population with 2.03 female fertility levels in the USA.  It’s that simple and that important.  We must be a model and inspiration for the rest of the world.  

If we don’t take action, we shall become like the rest of the third world.

Part 6: The End of the Age of Oil

As America grows by 3,000,000 people annually on its way to adding 100 million people in the next 34 years, our planet home grows by 80 million people each year and will add another 2.1 billion by 2040. 

In order to drive cars, boats, planes and fuel industry, Americans use 20 million barrels of oil each day while the rest of the world burns 62 million barrels.  That equals 82 million barrels of oil every 24 hours!

When you multiply 365 days X’s 82,000,000 barrels of oil burned daily, it equals a whopping 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually. 

If you remember your science, it took two billion years to produce all the oil on this planet.  In other words, when oil reserves burn up, we’re out of the single major energy source that drives our society and most other societies on this planet.

How much is 20 million barrels of oil?  Dr. John Tanton, publisher of The Social Contract at www.thesocialcontract.com, wrote a piece, “How Many Is Twenty Million?”

“In this age of millions, billions and trillions, it’s hard to understand such numbers,” Dr. Tanton said. “Twenty million is the number of barrels of oil we burn in the United States each day.”

That’s 42 gallons to each barrel (drum) at 30 inches tall and 20 inches in diameter, or 840,000,000 gallons burned per day.  It works out, according to Dr. Tanton’s figures, to three gallons of oil per day per person in the USA. (Source: The Social Contract, winter 2004-05, page 151)

He said, “Suppose we took 20 million barrels and stood them side-by-side.  How long a line of barrels would that make?  Let’s do the math: 20 inches/barrel multiplied by 20 million barrels equals 400,000,000 inches.  Divide that by 12 inches/foot, and you get 33,333,333 feet.  Divide that by 5,280 feet per mile, and that comes out to 6,313 miles.”

Dr. Tanton figured that would make a string of barrels, “…reaching from Seattle to Los Angeles (1,157 miles), from Los Angeles to Chicago (2,134 miles), from Chicago to Miami (1,377 miles), from Miami to New York City (1,281 miles), and from New York City to Cleveland (486 miles).  Total mileage, 6,435.”

“That’s how much oil we burn in the USA each day,” Tanton said.  “The total global consumption daily rate of 82 million would be four times this amount, or 25,000 miles—the circumference of the globe at the equator!”

Dr. Tanton asks a sobering question, “How much longer can this go on?”

The simple, unadulterated answer is: not much longer.

You may want to read, “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” by David Goodstein. He is a professor of physics at California Institute of Technology.

We used energy from the wind, sun, animals and rivers for centuries. Two hundred years ago, we became addicted to finite oil. “We have unintentionally created a trap for ourselves,” Goodstein said.  “If we turn to coal and natural gas, the resultant increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide may make Earth uninhabitable.  Even if human life does go on, civilization as we know it will not survive, unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”

World oil extraction expects to peak in a decade.  Goodstein, ever precise in his research, shows that those hoping for other fuels and substitutes to replace oil dangle their hopes by hanging from a thread over a cliff with no net or parachute.  Societies as large as humans have created based on oil, cannot—and will not--survive. 

Even if huge oil deposits are discovered, it won’t help much.  Our expanding populations gobble them up.  China stands on the verge of an industrial revolution of proportions based on 1.3 billion people.  They expect to place a car in every Chinaman’s garage.   With our 300 million Americans using 20 million barrels of oil daily, you’re talking four times that amount in China.  If you look at the growth rates of 2.1 billion added to the planet by mid century, oil reserves don’t stand a chance.  We’re all screwed, or, at least our children are screwed!

Goodstein said, “Fossil fuels have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide from 275 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 370 parts per million today.  Continued burning will raise it to 550 by century’s end, with dire consequences as to global warming.”

We shall deal with global warming in this series.  However, for those that scoff at it, they cannot persist with denial that nothing is happening to the planet when we burn 82 million barrels of oil daily as well as millions of cords of wood, natural gas and coal that warms our houses.  Our extreme use of energy hastens extreme consequences. 

What can we do?  Goodstein said, “The best, most effective way to ameliorate the coming fuel crisis is to improve existing technologies for efficiency.”

We can deny, bury our heads or pretend it’s not coming, but the end of this Age of Oil threatens our civilization.  It’s coming as surely as the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka; it’s as certain as Katrina hitting New Orleans.

What are you going to do about it?  What can we as a society do about it?  Let’s demand two and four cylinder cars as the standard from Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, Toyota, Honda and all other automobile manufacturers. We don’t need six and eight cylinder cars.  We sure as heck don’t need Hummers, Ford Expeditions, SUV’s of any kind, Winnebago’s, Prevost’s and other land yachts that get five miles to the gallon.  We need more mass transit in our cities.  We might start charging $10.00 a gallon for eight cylinder engines, $8.00 a gallon for six cylinder engines, $3.00.00 a gallon for four cylinders and $2.00 a gallon for two cylinder cars.  That kind of negative incentive would also bring positive incentive to inspire the auto industry into faster gear to create 100 mile to the gallon cars!

Additionally, “flex-fuels” already work from sugarcane fields in Brazil and Argentina.  It’s amazing they refined their ethanol fuels ahead of U.S. manufacturers.  Why do you suppose that’s happened?  Follow the money!  U.S. auto manufacturers drag their feet while kicking and screaming into the oil shortages of the 21st century.

Again, instead of growing our population via immigration by three million annually on our way to adding 100 million Americans in 34 years, we must demand an immigration moratorium; national population policy and lead the world toward an international population policy that will allow future generations a viable and sustainable future.

To ignore our realities condemns them to the same consequences that befell the civilization and children of Easter Island.  It’s that simple and that brutal.

“The oil crisis may not hit until the next decade or the one following, but it will hit.”  David Goodstein

Part 7: A-Global Warming

We could sit back in the old Lazy Boy lounger; press the remote, drink a beer and watch as the next added 100 million Americans pile up on our shores by 2040.  We may think that 34 years extends so far into the future that it’s not important to take action today.  Ah shucks, 100 million more Americans won’t be any different than the last added 106 million added since 1964!  Since we now house 300 million, what’s the problem with another adding 100 million people?

Short, sobering and gut wrenching answer: plenty!

You may find it interesting to note in 1906, India reached 300 million people.  Today, demographic experts say India, at 1.1 billion, will out-grow China on India’s way to 1.4 to as high as 1.6 billion people by mid century.  Both China and India have become SO accustomed to degraded living and human misery, they think it’s normal.

As the human race speeds toward its mid century destiny of a predicted high of 9.8 billion, I invite you to visit www.populationmedia.org to see a population ticker showing the number of people added to the planet every minute.  If you’re drunk, it will sober you up.  If you’re having coffee, it will sour your cream.  If you added sugar, it will taste bitter.  If you’re a parent, you’ll wonder what awaits your children.

But long before we make it to mid century; and long before the United States reaches that next 100 million added citizens; and long before India and China add another 500 million each—all of us must contend with another threat to our existence in the 21st century:  global warming.

Yes, you’ll hear naysayers and you’ll hear excuses, but I spent a season “on the ice” in Antarctica.  I saw global warming in action.  I watched the best scientists in the world report their findings.  Folks, we’re in a whole lot of trouble of our own making. 

However, some scientists negate the findings of fellow scientists!  Professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University William M. Gray said, “I have closely followed the carbon dioxide warming arguments.  From what I have learned of how the atmosphere ticks over 40 years of study, I have been unable to convince myself that a doubling of human-induced greenhouse gases can lead to anything but quite small and insignificant amounts of global warming.”

He could be right, but if he’s wrong, why should we error on the side of continued population growth?  What’s the point?  What positives can you think of that the next added 100 million Americans will bring our children?

I know one thing from simple common sense, we cannot expect to burn 82 million barrels of oil every 24 hours; we cannot burn millions of metric tons of natural gas daily; we cannot burn millions of board feet of wood every day worldwide; we cannot burn billions of tons of coal for electricity around the clock—and think it’s not affecting the planet’s delicate ecosystems.  If you do, you’re either a fool, uneducated or intellectually bankrupt. (This, of course, would make you a politician)  At this point, I say our president and this Congress are all three!  We’re the only country not to sign the Kyoto Accord to address global warming.

It matters little whether you like former Vice President Al Gore or not, but his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” awakens even the idiots among us.  Those who counter his movie, from my first hand knowledge in Antarctica and around the globe, illustrate and promote their own form of intellectual absurdity.

Today, we resist the facts; we deny their proven reality; we recoil at what faces us.  Most U.S. citizens cower in a corner concerning the reality of global warming.  We resist partnering with other nations in finding solutions.  We continue accelerating our population which adds momentum to our impending Katrina-like global calamity. 

In 2004, John Schellnhuber, a distinguished science adviser at Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Great Britain, identified 12 global warming tipping points.   If ignored long enough, any of them could initiate sudden, catastrophic changes on our planet.

As long as we continue in our bald-faced denial of global warming; as long as we maintain no personal responsibility or action; without a 13th tipping point toward stabilizing global warming—we can’t hope to avoid global mayhem.

Julia Whitty, research writer, said, “The 18th century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus named us Homo Sapiens, from the Latin ‘sapiens’, meaning “prudent, wise.”  History shows we are not born with wisdom.  We evolve into it.”

We better get our butts in gear to engage our minds!  Once we engage our minds, we must activate solutions to haul our species out of this maelstrom.

I’ve also spent time in the Amazon rainforest.  I’ve seen the astonishing, if not sickening, cutting and burning at the astounding rate of 1.5 acres every second.  Schellnhubers’ climate model shows that a warming globe will convert the wet Amazonia forest into a savannah within this century, and “the loss of trees will render the region a net carbon dioxide producer, further accelerating global warming.”

What happens next?  The more we destroy the support systems developed on this planet over millions of years, the faster we destroy ocean currents that regulate climate around the globe. 

“As the Atlantic warms, ice caps melt, diluting the ocean and shutting down its thermohaline circulation (THC), the oceanic rivers currently delivering the thermal equivalent of 500,000 power stations’ worth of warmth to Europe,” Schellnhuber said. 

That in turn creates another tipping point on the Greenland Ice Sheet.  “This ice, if melted, would raise sea levels by 23 feet worldwide—not counting ice loss from the Arctic and Antarctic,” Schellnhuber said. 

He continued, “One tipping point affects the other in a balance as delicate as that of an acrobat’s spinning dinner plates at the top of a stick.  Greenland’s increasing freshwater flow into the North Atlantic will impact the THC.  Warm water recalculating within the central Atlantic may further rearrange airflow over the Amazon, accelerating its dry-down and tree loss, and potentially freeing as much carbon dioxide from its enormous reservoir as the 20th century’s total fossil fuel output.  A sudden Amazonian release would melt whatever of Greenland hadn’t already melted, crashing the THC and drastically cooling Europe, in worst-case scenario, freezing it solid.”

As you can see, we’re tinkering with nature’s most delicate balancing system like no other species on the planet.   It’s like we’re little kids, who sit intrigued at the operating mechanism of our new watches.  We want to see how they work.  We pry off the backs and pull out the working parts. We place them over a candle to see if the plastic will melt.  We pour Clorox on them to see if those watches can withstand chemicals.  We dump oil into the mechanism to see what happens. When we try to put it all back together; we don’t have a clue.  Our watches are broken with no way to fix any of them.

This 7th part of the series requires two sections.  Next week, we’ll deal with the other tipping points that lead to deleterious global ramifications for not only humans, but for all living creatures on this planet.  The second part of this report on global warming will be even more serious and sobering than the first part.

If you would like to investigate further, look for Julia Whitty’s “The 13th Tipping Point: 12 Global Disasters and 1 Powerful Antidote” November/December 2006, page 45-51 at www.motherjones.com

“Pretending or being in denial of global warming is like throwing your children into a tank of sharks and hoping the sharks have suddenly become enlightened vegetarians.”  Frosty Wooldridge

Part 8: B-Global Warming Via Tipping Points

You may argue, rant and become indignant about whether or not global warming manifests across the globe, but it won’t do you any good if what the scientists tell us, is, in fact, true.

However, if you think the next added 100 million Americans as well as the next 2.1 billion people added to the planet by 2040 aren’t having an effect on, or there is no such thing as global warming, forget the second part of this portion and wait until next week for “Part 8” on food production in America.

In this section, we discuss “tipping points” as they relate to global warming. What is a tipping point?  Last weekend, the San Diego Chargers fell behind three touchdowns and a field goal late in the third quarter.  They didn’t stand a chance of winning.  But a pass here, a run there, and a touchdown, then an interception led to a tipping point where their momentum smashed their opponents and by the end of the fourth quarter, the Chargers made a last minute score that won the game. 

Things ran smoothly with the planet in 1900, but then the internal combustion engine arrived on the scene.  Nothing much happened with 76 million Americans and 1.6 billion humans around the planet.  They burned whale oil, coal and wood.  But today, with billions of cars and 6.5 billion humans burning billions of gallons of gas, fuel oil, natural gas, wood and coal, these become the factors in the “tipping point” of planetary imbalances.

History shows that scientific advances suffered scurrilous opposition by people who might benefit.  The pope persecuted Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun.  Church leaders denounced Harvey for claiming blood circulated through the body instead of standing still.  Newspapers branded Louis Pasteur a quack for his germ theory.  Everyone ‘knew’ the Wright brothers couldn’t get that new fangled flying machine into the air.

This week, I presented my program, “THE COMING POPULATION CRISIS IN AMERICA: AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT,” to a fine group of gentlemen in Denver, Colorado.   No one blinked during the 30 minute program.  They asked if the DVD video was available.  I told them it would be ready on my web site by November 30, 2006.  However, at the end, two men walked up and told me never to speak about global warming because they didn’t want to hear about it because it was patently untrue.  I felt the same gut reaction as Galileo, Pasteur, Lindbergh and Harvey probably suffered. 

Again, distinguished science adviser at Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom, John Schellnhuber cited a study whereby Americans fall into “interpretive communities” that share similar world views.  On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got naysayers who, “Perceive climate change as nonexistent.  They are predominantly white, male, politically conservative, holding pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, anti-environmental, carrying highly religious paradigms and rely on radio as their main news source.”

On the other side, you’ve got the alarmists. In the middle, you see measured and reasoned researchers.  Me?  I’m an educator and messenger.  You can use this information and go to the web sites provided, or you can blow it off.  To a large degree, our media, which corporations control, brings you bloody killing stories from Iraq, but squashes news about 80 degree days in November in Colorado or dead zones reaching thousands of square miles in our oceans.  As I’ve said in the past, it’s Mark Twain’s famous statement about ‘silent-assertion’ being the shabbiest of all lies—perpetrated by politicians and the media.

To give you an example, the media reports the latest mass killings in Iraq or Jennifer Anniston’s latest heartbreak, but it won’t tell you about the ozone hole expanding over Antarctica.  It’s another one of the tipping points.  

“We hear about the connection between ozone depletion, skin cancers and cataracts, but little about the fact that increased ultraviolet radiation will destroy oxygen producing phytoplankton (80% of our oxygen comes from them). Without them turning sunlight into organic life, none of us would be or will be here.”

Phytoplanktons create counter weights to another tipping point which is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which circulates 34 billion gallons of water around Antarctica every second. 

“When phytoplanktons die, they sink, taking the oxygen load with them to the bottom of the ocean. Global warming slows the nutrient upwelling, affecting the phytoplankton populations in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans,” Schellnhuber said.  “As the oceans affect the atmosphere, the land affects the oceans.  Warming will shrink the Sahara by increasing rainfall.  A greener Sahara will emit less airborne desert dust to seed the oceans and feed the plankton, which in turn suppresses hurricane formations to fertilize the carbon dioxide eating trees of the Amazon.  Hardly a neighborhood on earth will look the same if Africa tips.”

In nature’s dance, everything plays its part, whether water, land, air or fire.  The more we offset the natural cycles, the greater our price.  Nature rearranges herself with ruthless dexterity when we create imbalances.  For example: Katrina!

“The source of Tibet’s thunderstorms is the Asian monsoon, which drives moisture up the Himalayas,” Schellnhuber said.  “A warming climate could either weaken or strengthen the monsoon.  Either effect is potentially catastrophic for more than half the world’s population adapted to and reliant on the monsoon.  This is another tipping point.”

What we’re doing to our planet home is described by Garrett Hardin as the paradox of the “Tragedy of the Commons.”  As to the use of the land, i.e., our planetary resources, if an altruist and a cheater go one-on-one, the cheater wins consistently, but in the end, everyone loses.  You might call the many facets or “tipping points” of global warming as the growing common denominators of the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

“In the end, this recent melting may be caused by the Antarctic Oscillation a kind of on/off switch affecting pressure gradients in the Southern Hemisphere,” Julia Whitty reported.  “The cooler stratosphere caused by the ozone hole produces weather changes at ground level now threatening to turn Antarctica’s icescape into a continent swallowing seascape.  In less than 200 years, armed with fossil fuel burning, humans donned the acrobat’s tights, wrested hold of the spinning plates and initiated their own wobbly circus. Nature, impassive and potent, waits to reward or punish us.”

The final “tipping points” affecting our planet consist of our destroying the Amazon rainforests which cascade into changing the North Atlantic current, melting the Greenland ice sheet, destroying the ozone layer, disrupting the Circumpolar Current, changing precipitation on the Tibetan Plateau, affecting Asian monsoons, increasing methane clathrates, changing salinity valves, offsetting El Nino, and liquefying the West Antarctic ice sheet.

What can change our fate?  Who or what is the antidote to global warming? What is the 13th tipping point back toward planetary balance?

You!  You and your actions!  Your actions combined with everyone as knowledgeable as you!  Everything you do, counts!  Gandhi marched for freedom.  Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of his “dream” for equality.  Susan B. Anthony marched for suffrage for women.  Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.  Go to www.stopglobalwarming.org for more ideas on how you can take action.  You possess every gift of all your heroes.  Common citizens with uncommon determination change the course of history.  The next president of the United States might be another Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson or Madison. 

We’ve all got a stake in the outcome.  Let’s get busy!

“The 13th tipping point is humanity changing back to a balanced interaction with earth that will allow our planet home to support all life in perpetuity.”  Sandra Lynn

Part 9: Crossing Our Agricultural Rubicon

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar defied the Roman senate by crossing the Rubicon River to wage civil war against another Roman, Pompey the Great.  By crossing the Rubicon, Caesar made a decision whereby he could not turn back.

Today, “Crossing the Rubicon” means no way to change, repair or undo your destiny.  Yes, Caesar conquered Pompey, but the Roman senate, along with Brutus, stabbed Caesar to death.

If President Bush signs an amnesty or bill similar to S.B. 2611, he casts the dye; he crosses the Rubicon of America’s death knell.  Bush ensures 100 million more people added to our country that explodes our nation to 400 million in the next 34 years on our way to a half billion.  Once manifested, we will not be able to turn back.

In a crystal clear expose’, “Crossing the Agricultural Rubicon”, Dr. John Tanton, Spring 2005, The Social Contract Quarterly, presented harsh realities as to America’s food supply. 

“We export immense quantities of corn, wheat, soybeans, etc., but much of this crop is fed to animals or processed into food that we then re-import as higher-value agricultural products,” Tanton said.  “It is the dollar value of imports that is projected to be equal to exports for 2005.”

He continued, “The U.S. consumes two-thirds of its own grown food.  As population grows, more agricultural land will be converted to non-agricultural uses—roads, hospitals, schools, parking lots, shopping malls and housing projects.  Our expanding population will cause us to import more food.  The net result will be the gradual decline of our agricultural trade surpluses.  We are already in energy deficit as we import 12 million of the 20 millions barrels of oil we burn each day.  Now we have a diminishing agricultural exchange surplus with which to buy fuel to facilitate that very agriculture.”

The United States feeds the world, but as Tanton exposes in his excellent graphs and charts, we’re already importing as much as we’re exporting: “We won’t feed people around the world much longer,” Tanton said.

For example, Colorado’s population will add 1.5 million by 2022.  That increase means, according to the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, that 3.1 million acres of prime farm land suffer development into homes, roads, malls, schools and other development.

Whatever your population expansion in your state, commensurate farm acreage will be destroyed.  For example, by 2050, Texas will grow from 21 million to 48.1 million, which means millions of acres of land will be taken out of farming for development.  No one knows the disaster that awaits them as to water usage. “Crossing the Rubicon” via farmland destruction brings yours and all states closer to Caesar’s fate.

Another aspect of this “Agricultural Rubicon” manifests itself in Eric Schlosser’s “FAST FOOD NATION” where he exposes the chemicalization of our foods by hundreds of additives, colors, preservatives and poisons like the sweetener aspartame.  If you see any food that says, “Sugar Free” or “Diet Soda”, run, don’t walk away from it. 

Since 1950, farmers have sprayed their crops with herbicides and pesticides while injecting soils with dozens of chemical fertilizers that destroy nitrogen fixing bacteria and poison earthworms, bees and birds into early graves.   Today, we force genetically modified seeds to produce unnatural harvests while we clone many vegetables and create perfect apples.  No one has bought a ‘real’ strawberry from a major grocery store chain in the last 20 years.  Those genetically manufactured berries are big, fat and white with some red coloring, and taste like chalk.  The United States Department of Agriculture states that because of depletion of micro-nutrients, you must eat 49 servings of spinach in 2006 to gain the same amount of micro-nutrient value as one serving of spinach in 1949.

In conjunction with fertilizers draining into rivers which poison the fish we eat, farm land suffers acid rain from chemical contaminants raining down from the sky from tens of thousands of industrial smoke stacks spewing sulphur, ammonia, incinerated plastics, mercury and other toxic amalgamations into the air.

In a report, “U.S. Pesticide Stockpile Under Scrutiny” by Rita Beamish of the Associated Press, she said, “The Bush administration is seeking world permission to produce thousands of tons of a pesticide that an international treaty banned
nearly two years ago, even though U.S. companies already have assembled huge stockpiles of the chemical.

“Methyl bromide has been used for decades by farmers to help grow plump, sweet strawberries, robust peppers and other crops, but it also depletes the Earth's protective ozone. The United States and other countries signed a 1987 treaty promising to end its use by 2005.

If you think our government tells the unvarnished truth, think again.

Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said he was informed that the Inspector General for the Commerce Department and NASA had begun "coordinated, sweeping investigations of the Bush administration's censorship and suppression" of federal research into global warming.  But the total U.S. emissions, now more than seven billion tons a year, are projected to rise 14 percent from 2002 to 2012.  In other words, everything that goes up must come down.  When it does, it’s a disaster for the entire web of life on our planet home.

In a recent report by Lester Brown, publisher of “State of the World”, he notes that farming causes the loss of 26 billion tons of topsoil annually worldwide.  Once soils suffer depletion, chemical fertilizers may allow crops to grow, but a consumer may as well be eating cotton candy for the lack of micro-nutrient value in foods.

What about water for irrigation?  At the moment, farmers from Iowa to California draw down underground aquifers faster than they can recharge.  Farmers suck billions of gallons of water from the great Ogallala Aquifer beneath Nebraska. What happens when it dries up?

Dr. David Pimentel, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, says that if we ever think growing huge amounts of corn for ethanol fuel, we need to think that over.  He writes:

“Our up-to-date analysis of the 14 energy inputs that typically go into corn production and the nine invested in fermentation and distillation operations confirms that 29 percent more energy (derived from fossil fuels) is required to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than is contained in the ethanol. Ethanol from cellulosic biomass is worse: with current technology, 50 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon than the product can deliver. In any event, biomass ethanol is a bad choice from an energy standpoint.

 “The environmental impacts of corn ethanol are enormous. They include severe soil erosion, heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides, and a significant contribution to global warming. In addition, each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water (to grow the corn) and produces six to 12 gallons of noxious organic effluent.

“Using food crops, such as corn grain, to produce ethanol also raises major ethical concerns. More than 3.7 billion humans in the world are currently malnourished, so the need for grains and other foods is critical. Growing crops to provide fuel squanders resources. Energy conservation and development of renewable energy sources, such as solar cells and solar-based methanol synthesis, should be given priority.”

If we add another 100 million Americans, our impact and consequences multiply by 100 million. That much more chemical spray, fertilizer and water must be used.  Remember: for each American added to the United States, 12 acres of land must be developed.  That’s 1.2 billion acres of land used up that can’t produce food.  Experts tell us that by 2040, we’ll be a net importer of food.

What if our food source can’t or won’t provide for us?  What if we can’t economically transport the food to our shores? 

As you read this series, I hope you understand our country heads into dangerous waters.  Have you heard the expression, “Up the creek without a paddle?”  Whether it’s “Crossing the Rubicon” of agricultural destruction of our food supply or using up our oil reserves without sufficient alternatives or exceeding our carrying capacity as to water—we’re driving our nation into grave consequences.

Yet, you won’t see the president, his cabinet, Congress or all 50 governors speak about it or address it. Our captains of corporations and industry think they can keep revving the engine of consumption without end.  It’s like they’re all brain dead.  They lack insight, understanding, intelligence or common sense.   Most possess a paradigm of ‘economic growth at any cost’; most cannot comprehend their folly as their ‘capitalism god of growth’ dominates their world view; most think they can ‘red line’ the engine of growth by encouraging population without consequences.

However, no matter how much they ignore it, like the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka last year and Hurricane Katrina that hit our Gulf Coast, this 100,000,000 “human tsunami” injects itself into America with accelerating penalties.

As my 50 years in farming grandfather Jesse Ward Johnson used to say, “You’re a bunch of damned fools if you think it’s going to work out all right.  Horses got more common sense than humans!”


Part 10: Fracturing America

Today, California sloshes knee deep in its 37.5 million population overload.  It grows by 1,650 people daily!  Do the math.  By 2050, if this immigration-driven population phenomenon continues, California explodes to 79.1 million people. Source: “Projecting the U.S. Population to 2050” by Jack Martin and Stanley Fogel, March 2006.

If you think Los Angeles’ smog, traffic, water and power shortages create problems today, hold on to your girdle because you ain’t seen nothing yet!

In Dr. Otis Graham’s “Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis”, he writes, “Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all--ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.”

In literary terms, it’s called ‘hubris’ or false pride.  Many of Shakespeare’s protagonists suffered this self-destructing trait.  Today, President Bush, his cabinet and Congress maximize ‘hubris’ through their actions. 

You may wonder how completely out of their minds 100 members of the U.S. Senate could be to pass S.B. 2611 that jumps current legal immigration from 1.1 million annually to 2.0 million.  That’s like seeing your child with his clothes on fire running out of a burning building, but instead of spraying him with water, the firemen spray gasoline on your child.  In this case, Bush and Congress pour more ‘gasoline’ onto the fire by adding millions of immigrants into our country. There is nothing rational about what they are doing to this nation.

What are some of the results?  When we add 100 million people from foreign countries to the United States within 34 years--we gang-tackle our civilization by adding incompatible cultures, religions and languages.  We kill our educational system.  We overload our infrastructure.  We demean citizenship.  Assimilation cannot occur.  We fracture our identity.  We devolve our nation.  For a simple example: France burned last December when immigrants firebombed 10,000 cars, burned houses, killed French citizens and caused three weeks of mayhem.

With that child on fire illustration, what’s burning in this country?  For starters, we’re burning the foundation of our society by destroying our most precious bond—our English language.  Without a single language, we shall cease to continue as a cohesive civilization.

Samuel Huntington wrote the best seller: “Who Are We?”  He states, “By 2001 Congress appropriated $446 million for bilingual programs, supplemented by huge amounts of state funding.”  Ironically, so many legal and illegal immigrants find they don’t have to speak English because none of their friends speak it.  Koreans, Vietnamese, Hmongs, Middle Easterners, Russians and dozens of other immigrants can’t speak English and won’t invest in becoming Americans. 

Thus, these new immigrants live in America, but they cannot speak and don’t think like Americans.  What’s more, they don’t care.  They’re not invested.  They enclave themselves into their separate groups.  Los Angeles stands as a polyglot of seething anti-American bias by Mexicans and their children.  One look at Detroit’s growing Muslim population illustrates what happened to Paris, France, i.e., complete separation from the host country by new immigrants. 

When you add millions of immigrants that can’t speak our national language, they emotionally, physically and intellectually separate.  A nation cannot long survive when its citizens cannot speak to one another.

As we spin ourselves into a massive population load from Third World countries, the labor pool generates millions of unskilled bodies that depress wages.  Dr. Vernon Briggs of Cornell University said, “Efforts in the United States to reduce the incidence of poverty have been hampered, since 1965, by the parallel revival from out of the nation’s distant past of the phenomenon of mass immigration.

“Unless comprehensive immigration reforms are added to the arsenal of anti-poverty policies, efforts to reduce poverty in the country in the twenty-first century will be little more than a ride on a squirrel wheel—a lot of effort expended but little progress achieved.”

As these people pile up on our shores, can’t speak English and possess no skills, we engender separation.  They succumb to a profound racism and distrust against their host country. “Immigrants devoted to their own cultures and religions are not influenced by the secular politically correct façade that dominates academia, news-media, entertainment, education, religious and political thinking today,” said James Walsh, former Associate General Counsel of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. “They claim the right not to assimilate, and the day is coming when the question will be how can the United States regulate the defiantly unassimilated cultures, religions and mores of foreign lands?  Such immigrants say their traditions trump the U.S. legal system.  Balkanization of the United States has begun.”

For example, Muslims practice female genital mutilation. It’s 4th century Dark Ages barbarism in the 21st century.  It’s occurs today in Detroit and Colorado and wherever Islam grows in America.  Five years ago, so many cases of infected little girls’ genitalia from razor and glass cuts, landed in Colorado hospitals from the ritual that lawmakers passed a new law to stop it.  The practice didn’t stop; it torpedoed underground.  What happens when Muslims become the majority and vote it into legal practice?  What happens when Mexicans vote horse tripping, cock fighting, bull fighting, Santeria (animal sacrifice already occurring in Florida) and dog fighting into law?

Have you seen a country devolve?  In the Middle East, Muslims stone women to death for adultery.  They won’t let women drive.  Women can’t go out in public without a male relative at their side.  They demand separate swimming pool times for men and women. They make women hide their faces via a burka into “non-beingness.”  Unfortunately for most people, Islam is a very aggressive religion with a prime directive to become “THE” world religion.

The new House of Representatives-elect, Muslim Keith Ellison (D-MN) will not swear into office on the Bible this January 20, 2007.  He will place his hand and allegiance on the Koran.  The irony of this stems from the fact that the Koran stands in direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution.  Minnesota voters elected a man whose prime directive from his Koran is to convert or kill all non-believers. Specifically, that’s all Jews and Christians.  He exemplifies the beginning salvo in the disintegration of America.

How far do we want to travel back into that religious hell-hole here in America? One look at the sectarian violence by the Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites should give you pause for concern.  One look at the unending violence between Israel and Palestine should give you a clue as to our fate.  If you didn’t catch what happened last December in Paris, France, you will experience it when it happens here, too.

As to the “lifeboat” metaphor for America, how many people does it take to sink a lifeboat?  Short answer: the last one to come aboard that overwhelms the craft’s ability to remain afloat.  If you look around, countries like China, Africa, India, Mexico, Bangladesh, Darfur, Sudan, Somalia and dozens of others already exceed “lifeboat” capacity.

That brings us, fellow Americans, to the dilemma of adding 100 million more people to the United States by 2040.  As we degrade our ability to maintain our civilization by adding disparate cultures, languages and the least educated and poorest of the planet, we reduce ourselves into the same kind of conditions they fled.  At the same time, not one, single core problem has been solved in their countries.  We import their dilemmas into our country.

You can become emotional about this, but that won’t solve their problems or ours.  You can apply your greatest sympathy about their plight, but it won’t change facts as to carrying capacity.  Even if you send food through church group outreach programs, you exacerbate the problem because that food allows Third World people to multiply their numbers—causing greater starvation down the road.  Another 100 million people careens our country into the same consequences as their countries.  At that point, we’ll all be in the same boat—as it sinks.

“Noble intentions are a poor cause for stupid actions.  Man is the only species that calls some suicidal actions ‘noble.’  The rest of creation knows better.” Garret Hardin author of “Stalking the Wild Taboo”

Part 11: Crowding of America

Have you ever seen a tsunami?  Probably not!  Fact is, no one ever saw a tsunami--until it hit!  Earthquakes deep under the ocean occur when tectonic plates shift, crash and reposition.  In the process, a huge energy wave releases.  That energy rips under the ocean’s surface for hours and countless miles until, as you saw in Sri Lanka last year, it slams into beaches with astonishing force.  No one could sense, touch, feel, hear or see it.  In Sri Lanka, over 100,000 people died in a few minutes.

While living in Hawaii as a kid, I saw a tidal wave while my dad and I stood on high ground.  The one I saw rose out of the surf like a giant 60 foot high watery claw.  It slammed down on the beach with a sickening “whomp” while it smashed palm trees and demolished an entire campground.  Once it hit, nothing could be saved.  It destroyed everything in its path. 

Hurricanes, Natural Forces and Bad Decisions

Have you experienced a Category 5 hurricane?  Do you remember Katrina?  Do you remember different personal actions by Americans along the coast?  They knew it was coming 10 days before it hit.  They saw it on TV swirling ominously in the Gulf of Mexico.  They heard about its 200 mile per hour winds.  Television, radio and newspapers warned residents of the coast to move inland away from its deadly clutches.

Nonetheless, some hoped it would downgrade to a Category 1; others prayed it would change direction; still others felt they could ride it out; thousands of others waited until two days or even one day before they decided to flee; smart Americans fled a week before and enjoyed their safety out of harms way.

What happened?  It hit!  Those who stayed died or suffered horrible consequences.  Those who were too poor to leave became victims with no way out.  Those who waited until the last two days suffered traffic jams, panic, no gas, burning busses, hopelessness on freeways, accidents from sheer frustration, angry fellow Americans and complete chaos.

What do the Sri Lanka tsunami and Katrina have to do with population?  Let’s connect the dots!

More Bad Decisions, Indifference and other Un-Natural Forces

As with everything in this series, it pertains to the national nightmare caused by adding 100 million Americans to the United States by 2040--which is 34 years from now.  What if, much like Katrina, we added those 100 million people in the next 14 days?  Or next year?  Or even five years?  Any takers?  You’d have to be a fool or an idiot to choose adding 100 million people in the next five years or less. Or, ever!

Yet, no one utters a peep about the “Human Katrina” of the next added 100 million Americans that will hit in the blink of 34 years!  It’s not “if” it’s going to hit folks; it’s “when” it’s going to hit.  And, once it hits, you won’t be able to run, hide, escape or hope it vanishes.  Once 100 million added Americans settle into this country to create 400 million of us, we all become victims.

In history such as Hitler’s rise to power, no one stood up against him.  On this issue everyone waits for the first person to stand up.  I’m standing up!  I’m speaking out.  Meanwhile the media, your president and Congress accelerate this “Human Katrina.”  I invite you to stand with me and speak out with me.  Why?  If not you, then who?  If not now, then when?  Everything you do, counts!

CROWDING OF AMERICA 

Each year close to where I live, Rocky Mountain National Park entertains 1,000,000 people on the highest continuous highway in America, Trail Ridge Road at 12,082 feet, with a total length of 30 miles.  It’s jammed, crammed and hammered all summer long.  People pack into campgrounds and motels with no relief.  You must reserve a spot months ahead.  The “wilderness experience” is a joke!  The animals run for their lives to get away from hordes of tourists. Boom-box noise ricochets off mountain sides.  Fumes coalesce into killer smog in paradise.

Can you imagine 100 million people added to America when they try to visit all our national parks to get away from it all?

Last summer, I visited Yellowstone, Great Smoky, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Arches National Parks.  Each park suffers one, two to three million people every summer.  They’re so full of people; no one enjoys a “wilderness” experience.  Today, park rangers carry side arms; some get killed by criminals.  Why is that?  Drug pedaling villains and others toss trash and human waste everywhere in our parks.  Again, imagine what an added 100 million people will do to everyone visiting those parks.

I’ve rafted the Grand Canyon from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek take-out.  Today, it takes 10 to 12 years to gain a permit to raft the Colorado River.  With an added 100 million people, it’ll take 20 to a lifetime to gain a permit.  The more extreme our numbers the more extreme our limitations.

Back in Denver, 10 years ago, it took me 1.5 hours to go skiing and camping in the High Country.  Plentiful campgrounds; safe ski slopes!  Today, after Colorado added 1.3 million in a decade, campgrounds and rivers suffer overload. Ski slopes feature humans as pin balls from too many people.  It takes me three to four hours to return home through grid-locked traffic. Interstate 70 is already a grid-locked parking lot 90 miles long!  Guess what?  Colorado expects to add five million.

In Denver, I-25 and 6th Avenue gridlock from 6:00 a.m. to 8 p.m.  We suffer 25 accidents each day from stop and go traffic.  Major smash-ups happen EVERY DAY from rush hour.  Can you imagine what another two to three million more cars in Denver will do to people and their lives?

National Population Policy

In 1963, we housed 196 million people.  As a math and science teacher in the 70s, 80s and 90s--to supplement my miserable teaching salary--my summer job involved driving an 18 wheeler for United Van Lines through 48 states and Canada.  Except for NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, I rolled through most cities with relative ease.  By 2000, we added nearly 100 million people.  Those added millions impacted every city.

It takes up to four hours to get across the Washington Bridge in New York City.  Freeways jam 15 hours a day.  Millions suffer “road rage” in bumper to bumper traffic every day of the week.  Millions go to work daily, but 44,000 die in traffic annually.  As the bumper to bumper traffic increases, billions of gallons of gasoline burn to create ever greater air pollution.  So, while you stew with an ulcer and Excedrin headache in traffic, you breathe toxic air created by your own idling engine.  How will another 100 million Americans improve that nightmare?

To give you an idea where we’re headed, while in Japan, I watched baseball games.  They endure so little space; they construct four ball diamonds in a box of land all facing inward toward each other.  All the outfielders mingle with outfielders from four other teams.  You can’t believe it unless you see it.  What benefit has overpopulation given the Japanese?  China?  Depressing doesn’t begin to describe their population plight.

If you sat on a geo-stationary earth-satellite and watch the activities on earth over time, you would see drastic changes.  You might notice that more and more long haul trucking companies send their freight-trailers by railroad.  Why? Gridlocked highways coast to coast!  However, railroads suffer more and more crowding; tracking systems break down and staging yards bulge with too many train cars.

From your perch, you see California building one new school daily, I repeat, ONE SCHOOL DAILY, to keep up with its 1,700 people added daily.  They can’t keep qualified teachers in classrooms; thus they rank in the last five states in educational competence.  Additionally, California adds 400-500 cars daily.

When I was a kid in LeRoy, Michigan, we owned a lot at a cost of $3,000.00 on Hogback Lake.  The lake enjoyed a total of 10 cottages on it.  You might see three fishing boats on the whole lake at one time.  Today, over 200 cottages swamp the lake while speedboats destroy any fishing.  Each lot costs $100,000.00.  Can you imagine what will happen with 100 million people added to the USA? 

This happens all over America.  We’re clearing forests, draining wetlands, paving wilderness and eating up the land as we explode our population.  This series only touches the tip of the iceberg.  In your state, you’re experiencing everything I’m writing about.  The question is: how far do you want to sink into this quicksand?  How long will you remain silent?  How long will you do nothing?

In every realm of everything we do in America, this population invasion “Human Katrina” will wreak havoc on the American Dream.  Just like the Sri Lanka tsunami and Katrina, once it hits our children will become victims.

A ten year moratorium on all immigration and stopping of illegal migration may give us a chance.  After the moratorium, we accept a maximum of 100,000 annually, IF, and only IF, that creates a “zero growth” population.  We must implement a National Population Policy with a cabinet post; it’s that important.

We’re in trouble.  We must change course.  We must stop this population Katrina.  We must do it today.  We must do it together.

“What will we do: debate immigration policy, unborn fetus rights, whether God will come to our aid, gay rights issues and many other superfluous issues?  The blind bus driver and his bus are about to smack the ground as it plunges off Vail Pass and the skiers are still arguing about the seating arrangements.  What is truly ironic is that no one noticed the cane and dark glasses as they got on the bus.  What is also amazing is that the bus got that far and along the way he picked up more and more passengers.”  Reid

Part 12: Poverty in America

Last week, while attending a conference in Denver, Colorado, I noticed dozens of beggars on the streets.  They stood at intersections carrying cardboard signs that read, “Homeless, anything will help, God bless.”

As I walked out of the Colorado Convention Center, one man, wrapped in rags, curled himself around a steam vent on the sidewalk.   A cardboard box served as a pillow.  Cement became his mattress.  I sickened at the thought of his night in 15 degree freezing cold.  Along Colfax Avenue, hundreds of homeless begged for food or money.  They slept in huddled misery under the loading docks and in doorways.

The National Coalition for the Homeless, www.nationalhomeless.org reported  3.5 million homeless people struggled for survival in the streets of America in 2005.  Of that number, 1.35 million consist of homeless children.  Reports show 13 million American children suffer daily from malnutrition and hunger in America.  A shocking 37 million Americans live below the poverty line, which is 12.7 percent of our population.

Educational experts estimate over 30 million people in American suffer functional illiteracy.  They can’t read, write or perform simple math.  They offer no skills other than the labor of their hands.

Twenty million illegal aliens residing in America make up the largest high school drop out population in the history of the nation.

Over half of all black and Hispanic babies originate from unmarried mothers that lack high school diplomas.   Fifty to 70 percent of blacks and Hispanics do not graduate from high school.  Thirty percent of whites do not graduate from high school. 

In the last century, Mexico grew from 50 to 104 million people.  Current demographic figures show Mexico growing to 300 million in the 21st century.  Since 85 percent of all immigration into the United States originates from Mexico, we face a striking dilemma. 

How will we deal with a massive and growing illiterate population?  How will we contend with the next added 100 million Americans featuring scant educational skills?  How will we deal with millions of babies from their ranks?  If we can’t educate half of our own minorities, how will we educate this massive overload as it grows by 100 million?

If Mexicans can’t maintain a successful society with 104 million people, how do you think they will sustain their country with triple their population?

To give you a harsh view of our future, I’ve traveled throughout Mexico.  On the outskirts of Mexico City with 22 million people, in excess of four million people live in cardboard shacks.  They squat for their morning constitutional with their chickens.  They live in abject misery, filth, disease and hopelessness.

Guess what?  They’re moving to America.  Millions of them!

Third world slums began appearing along our borders from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California in the 80s.  They’re called “Colonias,” which is Spanish for new neighborhoods.  They feature shacks, no sewers, no streets, no running water, no electricity, toilet facilities or waste pickup. 

The New York Times, March 3, 1988, “Along the US Border, a Third World is Reborn,” reported, “Colonias are rusted trailers and shacks nailed together from tar paper and packing pallets without indoor toilets…with mounds of uncollected trash that attract rats…the lack of sanitation has polluted the ground water to the point where many residents drink their own waste…the colonias feature Third World levels of hepatitis, dysentery, diarrhea, skin rashes, cholera and tuberculosis…they are contaminated, explosive, fecal, filthy, illegal, miserable, polluted, powder kegs, putrid, shocking, sick, stench filled, suffering and wrenching.”

Since their appearance in the early 80s, according to the Times, the 1988 population totaled 185,000; the 1995 population exceeded 500,000; the 2005 population exceeded 1.5 million.  At the current rate of growth, these human misery settlements shall reach 20 million by 2021.

I spent two weeks filming colonias in Texas.  I haven’t been as sickened to my stomach since my travels in Asia.  It’s worse than any description the New York Times or I could give you.  It is human misery at its disturbing worst levels.

These slums represent a health hazard of unprecedented dimensions.  Given enough time, large areas of southern California will resemble the outskirts of Mexico City.  Two decades of denial has not stopped this travesty from proliferating. 

We cannot import millions of desperately poor, illiterate, hard working people from Third World countries and think they will become functioning, positive aspects in a First World country.  Holland, France and Great Britain’s immigration policies fail on every level.  Ours will, too!

What of our working poor?  What about degraded educational opportunities for our children?

As we choke on millions of immigrants from other countries, they displace our working poor as immigrants depress wages.  What are we creating?  A permanent poor class!  In reality, a growing and dangerous slave class!

As it stands today, millions of Americans can’t pay for heating and electricity bills.  They rely on ‘donations’ by other Americans to cover those bills.  At some point, as this new poor class expands into millions upon millions—something will fail.  What is that?  Our ability to deal with it or solve it.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense or economic intelligence knows that prices in the coming years will grow as oil becomes more expensive.  This translates into diesel that drives trains that bring coal to the electrical plants. Thus energy at every level will become more expensive.  The caveat enters the picture as these millions of poor cannot and will not be able to command higher wages.

The American Dream degrades into the American Nightmare.

On the world stage, 57 million people died in 2005.  According to Time Magazine, eight million starved to death.  Of the total number of deaths, 10.5 million children under the age of five years old died from starvation and diseases.

To bring it into sharper focus, current world population at 6.5 billion will hit 9.8 billion at mid century.   That’s 80 million people added annually.  They multiply so fast, no education is possible.  However, they’re flooding into First World countries.

No one, I repeat, no world leader addresses this “human dilemma.”  The Catholic Church won’t allow or talk about birth control—though it correlates to accelerating poverty.  Church leaders of all the major religions deny any problem.  It’s almost as if, in the 21st century, they prefer remaining in the 1st century.  But, via their actions, millions of adults and children starve to death annually.

We better deal with it: today!  America must implement a national population policy.  We must call for a 10 year moratorium on all immigration.  We must work for a sustainable society.  To continue on our current path is as stupid as the captain of the Titanic.

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from the microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?”  Dr. Albert Bartlett

Part 13: Piling Up on the Rocks

The first 12 parts of this series sobered countless readers.  It depressed many and caused despair for the faint of heart. However, most Americans can’t or refuse to grasp our dilemma.  By checking our growth rates, not only will we add 100 million in three decades, we’ll add another 100 million on top of that, and do it again until we become one billion people by the start of the next century. 

No one wants to discuss it.  Everyone hush-hushes about the preacher’s daughter being pregnant.  No one wants to talk about sexual or domestic abuse now epidemic in America.  No one talks about 18 teenagers committing suicide every day in this country.  Better not talk about the 22,000 deaths by drunken drivers annually!  Let’s pretend it’s not happening.

China’s and India’s leaders did the same thing 50 years ago.  They didn’t talk about their exploding populations.   Guess what?   They got what they didn’t talk about.   Can you imagine what it means to the billions of Chinese and Indians now living within the clutches of overpopulation?

Adding 100 million people to the United States in 34 years might not be so bad if there weren’t 300 million already here.  But they are here!  And, if nothing is done, we will add 100 million people to our country in the blink of three decades.

What do you think the newspapers will feature in 2040?  Better news than today?  Perhaps you’ll read flowery reports on human progress.  How about glowing editorials on our expanding “American Dream?”   On the contrary, you’ll read, “Water wars pit farmers against city folks for diminishing supplies.”  “Gas prices hit $12 a gallon. “  “Rolling blackouts can’t save homes from freezing in New York City.”  “Food costs soaring due to transportation and production costs.”  “In Los Angeles today, a 100 vehicle pileup caused the deaths of 40, dozens of injuries and created a 50 mile long gridlock on I-10.”  “Riots in area high school caused by students’ inability to communicate with one another because of language differences.”  “Tuberculosis continues its climb as the worst disease outbreak in decades in the United States.”  “Millions of Americans moving to Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota to escape overcrowding in Los Angeles, New York and Houston.”

It won’t do them much good because the west is running out of water.  Yet, California expects an added 20 million by 2035.  Arizona expects an added five million.  Texas will add 12 million by 2025.    A sobering report in the New York Times, September 30, 2006, said, “India with 1.1 billion people, is running through its ground water so fast that scarcity could threaten whole regions.  India has 19 million wells, some of them tapping deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs.”  Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that are over-pumping aquifers, which includes our own. 

Mike Davis wrote in “Planet of Slums” that urbanization of world poverty boils down to this, “Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.”

Michael Specter, “The Last Drop,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, said, “Nearly half the people in the world don’t have the kind of clean water and sanitation services that were available two thousands years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome.  More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet.  In the past decade, more people have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all the armed conflicts since World War II.”

China, at 1.3 billion people, numbs my mind’s ability to comprehend their problems. The Wall Street Journal headlined “A Poison Spreads amid China’s Boom” September 30, 2006, “Toxic sludge sinks villages and people die without recourse.  The lack of pollution controls has contaminated China’s soil, water and air with lead, mercury and other pollutants and left millions of children with dangerously high levels of toxic metals in their blood.”

Every consequence experienced by India, China and Bangladesh stems from hyper-overpopulation.  Every aspect of their human suffering stems from too many people.  Every condition heaped upon their citizens stems from disregard of a rational and sustainable population policy.  All the while, the elites live above it while the people sink deeper into its clutches.

As William B. Dickinson said, “Our cavalier attitude toward big population increases never ceases to amaze.  When the U.S. hit 300 million in October, the New York Times concluded in an editorial, October 11, 2006, that, ‘In America, growth and vitality are the same thing…our population issues have mysterious ways of working themselves out.”  That’s like saying if we can put 10 basketball players onto one court to play a game, we surely could put 100 on the court and we’re sure everything will mysteriously work out.”

If the New York Times expresses that kind of stupidity with their statement on “mysterious ways of working themselves out,” we might as well return to the Dark Ages where reason and critical thinking suffered under religious dogma.

E.O. Wilson wrote “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.”  He describes humanity as “the giant meteorite of our time…a species blinded by ignorance and self-absorption.”

Which brings me to the question:  Are Americans as dumb and docile as the Chinese and Indians, or citizens of Bangladesh fifty years ago?  How far down the population rabbit hole will we allow our nation to dive?  At what point on the misery scale will we begin to say, “Enough population is enough!”  How far into the negative headlines do we want our children to suffer for our folly?

I still don’t think anyone in America ‘gets it’ as to our perilous path.  I’ve attempted to become a guest on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, Night Line, Larry King Live, Date Line, Good Morning America, Today and The Early Show. I’ve tried to interview on Hannity, Colmes, Situation Room, Cavuto, Russert, Mathews, Carlson, Face the Nation, Meet the Press and dozens of other programs. I’ve sent graphs, facts, figures and information sheets to top newspaper publishers across the country.  No response!  They choose brain death over critical thinking. 

In 34 years, it will be too late to wake up.  It will be too late to change course.  It will be too late to take action.  That 100 million people will manifest within our borders.  The first 12 parts of this series shall become our reality times 100 million. 

Our water crisis shall be horribly multiplied by 100 million people.  Our grid-locked traffic the same.  Our crowding multiplied by 100 million.  What is it that few understand about this vast, accelerating ‘American dilemma’ that already plays out in much of the world?

As 100 million more people add to America, you or your offspring will be slogging through the consequential muck created by that added human deluge.

Part 14:  Sustainable Grow