Steven Earl Salmony

If scientists will choose to speak truth to the powerful, perhaps they will encourage other stonewalling leaders to do the right thing. At the moment many too many elders are remaining electively mute and appear unwilling to confront ‘the powers that be’ with the best science available regarding either the ‘placement’ of the human species within the order of living things on Earth or the most adequate understandings of the way the world we inhabit actually works. Such willful refusals by so many knowledgeable elders to assume their individual responsiblities to science and fulfill their well-established, collective duties to humanity are indefensible.

Before it is too late for human action to change the perilous, human-induced course of unfolding and fulminating ecological events in our planetary home, perhaps enough people will speak out loudly and clearly in ‘one voice’ about what they believe to be real (according to the knowledge and the ‘lights’ they possess) regarding clear and imminent dangers to future human well being and environmental health that are visible on our watch. By so doing a global, internet-driven transformation of consciousness could literally spring up, as if out of nowhere, among human beings with feet of clay.

Because the finite and frangible reality of the natural world we inhabit has got to become more evident to people everywhere, day by day, and because the biological and physical limitations of the natural world will become obvious to people everywhere during the timeframe when humanity will face ‘peak everything’, humankind could sooner rather than later reach a point in space-time when a critical mass of people see and agree that ‘the endless growth’ paradigm that is so powerful and prominent in the human world in our time is, in fact, the telltale mark of insanity. Then the human (not the natural) world will have to change, the seemingly unassailable force of self-proclaimed masters of the universe, their global political/economic endless growth regime and mass media notwithstanding. Human overpopulation, overproduction and overconsumption activities would be reasonably, sensibly and humanely regulated worldwide. Human beings with feet of clay would not even be able to think in good faith of ourselves as Homo sapiens, much less behave as if there were no limits to growth on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth. Such circumstances would compel all of us at least to try and change behavior that can be seen readily as distinctly human and patently unsustainable lunacy.

With regard to the construction of the ‘economic colossus’ we call a global political economy, the outrageous per capita over-consumption of limited resources and the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers, change toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises would begin to occur ubiquitously. After all, there have got to be limits to the insanity of constructing any unsustainable human world by a species calling itself Homo sapiens sapiens. Somehow, somewhere, at some moment the leading elders in the human community must agree to limit something, some human activity. Any activity at all will work well. By so doing we change the endless growth paradigm and choose a new path, ‘a road less traveled by’, to the future. Until at least one human activity is meaningfully restrained, if not altogether halted from growing (at least momentarily), the unsustainable game of Ponzi we are recklessly and relentlessly playing will eventually lead to global destruction and degradation of a colossal, incalculable sort, I suppose.

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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