Dr Gabriel UguruWildfires in Australia, Canada and the USA, flooding in Germany and Belgium, famine in Somalia, cattle rearers clashing with farmers in Nigeria, Arctic polar ice caps melting, Tsunami in Indonesia, elephants and tigers hustling with farmers for space in India, air pollution in China, etc., all attributed to a phenomenon, which the religious minded people called signs of the end of days.
The scientists simply called it climate change caused by our abuse of the environment. While the politicians (Trumpian politicians, I mean) called it a hoax and denied it ever existed.
The mainstream consensus is that the phenomenon was climate change, and ever since this realisation, the world has been running around like a headless chicken trying to find a solution to fixing the environment.
Terms like global warming, net zero emissions, carbon footprints, greenhouse emissions, carbon trade, carbon neutral, etc., have graced our vocabulary since we began our quest for the magic wand to heal the environment.
Let’s cast our minds back to the good old days. In those days, the environment was self-regulatory and clean. There were no automobiles and heavy machinery to pollute the environment, the world population was small and also self-regulatory through wars and diseases. Oh yes, in those good old days, wars were fought at the drop of a hat, diseases were rampant as hygiene was virtually non existent and medicine still in its infancy.
You can walk for miles before you meet anyone, the streams, rivers and seas were clear and blue, we lived in harmony with nature. In fact the waters did not only provide us with drinking water, cooking, bathing and nourishing our plants, we also use them as toilets and for laundry without any adverse effects on the water quality.
But now, what do we have? The waters are all so polluted that we have to pay water companies to provide us with drinkable water! Advances in science and medicine meant that hygiene and disease management have improved.
The world population is ca. 7.9 billion. Have you any idea the amount of gases emitted at both ends of the anatomies of these 7.9 billion people on a daily basis? These gases are only from flatulence and normal exhalation of carbon dioxide through the nose. Add to these the other bodily functions (e.g. faeces, urine, sweat, etc.) we produce on a daily basis.
No wonder the environment is knackered. Then we have other animals to worry about especially cows, who fart like they have a patent to flatulence. On top of the aforementioned, we have pollution coming from automobiles, aeroplanes, ships and all whatnots.
The size of the Earth is 510.1 million km² made up of approximately 29% land surface area and 71% water. The habitable land mass out of this 29% is only ca. 39.7 million km². Compare this to our current population of ca. 7.9 billion. And when you factor in the animal population, we hardly have an elbow room, let alone room enough to swing a cat. The world truly is overpopulated. Our resource needs are outstripping the Earth’s bio-capacity; in order words, we are in ecological overshoot!
Wars and pandemics are some of nature’s population regulatory strategies. But the last major war in the world was the Second World War, which ended more than three-quarters of a century ago! Lions and other carnivores used to hunt us for food, but now the few we have not hunted to extinction are caged in zoos. What about COVID-19? You would ask. Good old Coronavirus tried to contribute to healing the environment by reducing the world population but no sooner did it start to make inroads into this “laudable” venture than we produced vaccines to checkmate it!
For the environment to recover and become self-regulatory as in the good old days, some schools of thought have advocated that we all become vegans and stop eating meats! But that’s absolutely nonsense, no offence to the vegans, but I like my meat, thank you.
I was born an omnivore and I am not about changing my lifestyle for nobody or for anything, saving the environment or not. The amount of greenhouse emissions from cows and their kins are admittedly high, but our sum total carbon footprints pale in comparison to those of the animals! If we need to get rid of anything, we should get rid of ourselves first! We love our automobiles and fitting our new automobiles with batteries so that they run on electricity is just dumb to me.
What would you do with billions of the old automobiles? How are you going to compensate and secure jobs for millions of people affected by such a move away from carbon-dependent industries to the so-called cleaner energy? What about countries like Nigeria, Russia, Venezuela, the Middle East, etc., whose main, if not the only, source of income is oil? And what would you do with the oil in the ground? Allow it to seep back into the ground when it bubbles up and pollute the soil and rivers? What those who are trying desperately to sell us electric cars are forgetting or conveniently chose to ignore is that production of automobile batteries leaves a massive carbon footprint as well! In effect we are exchanging one pollutant for the other!
My motto is, if you are going to die, you would die of something; so why not live your life in full today and not worry about tomorrow? Changing our lifestyles so as to sustain the environment is not a smart move.
I like to drive my Hummer, eat meat, fart resoundingly, burn gas to heat my house, travel round the world in aeroplanes, clear and burn the forests to make way for my mansions; in short I want to live life to the full and not worry about the stupid environment.
It is not how long you lived that counts, but the quality of life you led! What about the younger and future generations? Sod them! They just have to take their chances as we did, and are still doing. If they don’t, tough luck to them!
We are living longer, which means that our carbon footprints will last longer. The world is overcrowded as it is and we need to prune the population to a manageable size. In view of this, we should discourage people from exercising, and instead promote junk foods.
It’s been reported that our carbon footprints contracted during the COVID-19 lockdowns, therefore we should stop vaccinating people against COVID-19 and let Coronavirus continue its “good” work. And by all means we should rediscover our primitive natures and wage wars! I am not talking about crappy wars like the ones going on in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, etc., but a real world war where we beat the crap out of each other and slaughter millions of people.
These measures will significantly reduce the world population to a level that the environment will recover and begin to self-regulate again. The message here is, drastically get the world population down in order to save the environment. Don’t you think so? 😂😂😂
P/S: Before you write a lengthy rejoinder, this is a satire!
Though this is a satirical prose, it reflects the views of many who believe that nature is self regulating.