A stark message was given at an Energy Alton talk recently from the national charity ‘Population Matters’, represented by Eric Rimmer.  He challenged those at the meeting to face up to some uncomfortable facts. Quoting the great naturalist Sir David Attenborough, he said that all environmental problems and many social problems will become impossible to solve with ever more people on the planet.

Eric Rimmer said “The world population has doubled in fifty years. It is now growing by one billion every 12 years. By 2100 it will be 11 billion. And that spells disaster”.

The planet’s resources will be insufficient to keep that number of people alive – there will not be enough soil for crops, water to drink and for farming, oil and gas for power.   Climate change will have forced mass migration in search of places to live that are free of floods or drought. There will be much more human conflict, more disease and more starvation.

‘Population Matters’ offers two solutions:  less consumption to reduce people’s impact on finite natural resources, and smaller families, globally. It may be possible to avert the crisis. But it will be too little, too late if we don’t act now.

We are already seeing less of our precious wildlife, more traffic on the roads and starvation riots abroad. Air pollution affects cities, along with over-crowding and rising inequalities.  About 85% of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change have been emitted since we became 3 billion people in 1960.  The rate of greenhouse gas emissions continues to increase.

Sir David Attenborough says there is a taboo on bringing the subject into the open.   If we are to avoid large numbers of human deaths, we must talk about over-population.

One way forward lies in education and support for women and easy access to family planning around the world.  But the most important thing is to talk about it.

Naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham says, “There’s no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we’re not addressing the one single factor that’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever-increasing size of the world’s population.”

See www.populationmatters.org/ or http://steadystate.org/ for more information.  And do email Energy Alton on energyalton@gmail.com to share your views on this most vital, and most difficult, of subjects.