There is a excellent letter in The Times today (3rd Jan, 2023) written by Brian Aldred. He is not, as far as I know, anybody special in terms of celebrity but a person like you and me who is concerned about human population growth and how humans are pushing wild animals off the planet metaphorically speaking.
This it is letter in response to Roger Boyes’s essay, which I have not read but that doesn’t alter the interpretation of the letter.
“Roger Boyes’s essay was dominated by an anthropocentric perspective [human perspective]. The fact that there are over three times more human beings on the planet than there were in 1950 cannot be assessed solely in terms of the impact on humans. What about the effects on all the other species being inexorably crowded out by our growth? For us it may be apocalypse deferred, but for everything else on earth it is apocalypse now.”
He is, of course, referring to the present rapid decline in biodiversity, the chronic damage being done to the forests and the wildlife that lives within them, the horrendous plastic pollution of the oceans and other waterways which is endemic across the entire planet to name three example of what it means about apocalypse now for everything else other than humans.
Another letter written by David Evans in The Times today also caught my eye. It’s about the same problem and it is a response to the above essay by Roger Boyes.
“To disregard the 8 billion people in the world as no longer spelling disaster is in my view overly optimistic. The world’s population will grow to want more Western-style consumer living – clean water, raw materials, cars, houses, sustainable energy, food, clothes, computers, mobiles et cetera. It will certainly require great human ingenuity (letter January 2) and cooperation if all countries are to deliver a level of consumer society without worsening climate change.”
Mr Evans makes another good point. If human population growth is going to decline as we head towards 2050 as I believe Mr Boyce states in this essay, and if the citizens of developed countries procreate less for various reasons (unpleasant world), the developing countries will still need to up their game and develop themselves to a higher standard of living which will require, as Mr Evans states, all those items and accoutrements that people love so much, which will result in more global warming.
Below are some more articles on human behaviour.