Steven Earl Salmony

By 'kicking all cans down the road' and confronting no present dangers, perhaps the human community is about to come face to face with the worst of two worlds: the results of a human population explosion and a human population crash. The leviathan-like size of the human population in our time puts Earth's finite resources and its frangible environs at risk because the exploding human population worldwide dissipates resources and pollutes the environment faster than the Earth can replenish itself for human benefit. As a consequence of the 'politically correct' denial of a human population explosion, many too many human beings are invited by their leaders to engage in rapacious per capita consumption and excessive individual hoarding of Earth's body, and to recklessly degrade its ecology with pollutants. Soon to become patently unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species appear to be fast approaching a point in history when the monstrous size of the human population so overspreads the Earth that the human species itself ends up being the precipitant of an unimaginable sort of global ecological wreckage and a human population crash. Where are the stewards of the Earth?

If avaricious leaders and followers keep ignoring responsibilities and failing to perform duties in the face of emerging and converging, human-driven, global ecological challenges, then who among us is rightly called a steward of the Earth? Mother Nature will most assuredly take matters into Her own hands by limiting human excesses of all kinds, according to well-established, immutable "rules of the house" (ie, laws of the biophysical world we inhabit). At some moment in space-time, possibly sooner than any one of us imagines, children everywhere could 'reap a whirlwind' and confront a cataclysmic situation similar to the terrible one a King of kings (of many ancient petty kings/keepers of the golden calf of Sinai and even more modern self-proclaimed masters of the universe/beholders of the raging bull on Wall Street) named Ozymandias did witness. If and when that time comes, perhaps the children will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the ruinous ecological effects of unsustainable over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by their selfish elders, the ones who are consciously turning a blind eye to expressions of intellectual honesty, moral courage and calls for bold action as well as abjectly losing the nerve required to acknowledge, address and overcome extant threats to human well being and environmental health on our watch. As an alternative, the children will be served better by representatives in governments and international organizations as well as the mass media moguls who choose to stop colluding with other like-minded leaders and conspicuously denying what is real and already visible on the horizon. Too many leaders today are deliberate participants in the institutional avoidance of a fulminating global situation, the effects of which could be profound and earth-shaking. The current circumstances are unacceptable because the children are not being prepared for recognizable dangers and dramatic changes that could occur in the not too distant future both in the global political economy and Earth’s ecology.

A tiny minority, their sycophants and many minions who rule the world in our time appear to be adamantly advocating and relentlessly pursuing a primrose path marked by unsustainable human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that could give rise to a catastrophic global wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen. Who speaks out in support of stewardship? Who acts accordingly? Whatever happened to leaders and followers who champion the right thing in word and deed by being stewards of the Earth?

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Steven Earl Salmony is a self-proclaimed global citizen, a psychologist and father of three grown children. Married nearly 40 years. In 2001 Steve founded the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population to raise consciousness of the colossal threat that the unbridled, near exponential growth of absolute global human population numbers poses for all great and small living things on Earth in our time. His quixotic campaign focuses upon the best available science of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth in order to save the planet as a place fit for habitation by children everywhere. He can be reached at SESALMONY@aol.com