On the Survival of Humanity E-Book

Risteárd Mulcahy

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Now that he has reached his tenth decade, Risteárd Mulcahy is issuing his twelfth and last book. He has always been interested in the relationshop between population and the planet and is deeply concerned about the future of mankind as it ignores the wellbeing of our planet home. As in previous publications, he warns us about the limitations of Planet Earth as the home of man and other living creatures. Whilst he takes a gloomy view of our future on this earth, he puts forward solutions that might prevent the final cataclysm.

Leseprobe

ON THE SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY

Risteárd Mulcahy (Prof) MD FRCP FRCPI

For the children.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my two daughters, Barbara and Lisa, for their assistance during the production of this essay, and to my son Richard for his consistent interest and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Karena Walshe for her guidance and her encouragement while I was writing the text. I am grateful to my wife Louise for her patience and tolerance. I am grateful to Seán O’Keeffe and his staff for their assistance and guidance during the production of this essay.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsIntroductionJoe Garland in Tigroney: A FableCopyright

Introduction

There were 966 million people in the world in 1800, according to Wikipedia. By 1900, the number had increased to 1.6 billion. By 2013, it had increased to 7 billion. The population is still increasing by about 80 million every year, according to recent data. The World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people die every day, whilst more than 300,000 are born.

Life expectancy has increased remarkably during the last century, mainly because of the elimination of epidemic diseases, medical and technical advances and the advantages derived from improved health and education. The huge recent changes in human population are having a profound effect on the planet in terms of CO2, temperature, changes in the oceans, rivers and lakes, and other aspects of the planet’s flora and fauna, all too clear to us today.

Joe Garland in Tigroney: A Fable

In 2050, Joe Garland talks to his five-year-old boy about birdlife. Joe Garland was born on 24 March 2010. He was born and bred in his parents’ house in the townland of Tigroney in the hills above the village of Avoca in County Wicklow in Ireland. When he reached the age of eighteen, his parents and twin sister, Rosie, moved to a more commodious house with a fairly large kitchen garden close to the old motorway near Arklow. Joe remained in the family home in Tigroney and was to continue there during his years of apprenticeship and after he was appointed to a position in an internet company, where he was to remain for the rest of his working life.

The area in which he lived had been quite isolated when he was born but is now, at midcentury, fairly densely populated by new houses and shacks, because of the major shift in population caused by the disastrous flooding of our lowlying towns and cities and the more than doubling of the Irish population as a result of migration during the last fifty years. This rapid increase in population was partly due to the arrival of some of the millions of people who were forced out of their coastal homes by the rising oceans, as well as by the ever more frequent and severe storms

Most of the countryside in Ireland provides opportunities for people to grow their own food and vegetables, so that by midcentury they are not too greatly affected by the increasing shortage of commercially produced goods. The building of numerous country habitations is widespread: old estates, wasteland, deserted golf courses, unused aerodromes, old public parks and some divided farms have all been put to use. There is also a great deal of linear housing built along parts of the motorways and main roads, now that motor traffic is no longer a feature of the countryside.

Joe seldom leaves the house, as his occupation is entirely conducted by electronic means. Shopping is almost solely local or internet-based, and smart phones and subsequent advances have eliminated the use of cash and postage. The prohibition of private cars using unsustainable energy has been effective, and anyway it and train travel are prohibitively expensive. You can travel to Dublin from Avoca by bike on the old Wexford motorway or by cycling to Rathdrum or Rathnew to catch a train, but there are only two trains every week connecting the port of Rosslare and Dublin, one on Wednesday and the other on Saturday. They are mostly used for transporting goods, or the rare traveller from abroad.

It was at an international meeting in Paris in the winter of 2015 that the world’s political leaders and governmental authorities took the first serious steps to reverse the damage to the environment and the great loss of flora and fauna caused by human greed and behaviour. These policies were at last accepted by the world’s leaders as the basis of the destruction of the natural world. It was realised that we were faced with the danger of creating a planet which might no longer be consistent with human habitation. The advances in the internet have greatly contributed to the virtual abolition of motor traffic and all unnecessary flying.

There is now an emphasis on human life based on local and community structures freed from the use of non-sustainable energy, rather than a worldwide community based on the abuse of nature’s limited resources. There is an increasing emphasis too on the urgency of human population control: the world’s population has already reached 9 billion, a level which is at last widely accepted as unsustainable, given the Earth’s limited resources.

Important changes in community life have taken place, at least in Ireland and other developed countries. The old established motorways are now used largely by cyclists, and the horse is once again coming into its own for shorter journeys. There has also been remarkable developmont in bicycle, skate and scooter technology. Happily this progress continues. A recent scooter is believed to have done the trip of 60 kilometres from Arklow to Dun Laoghaire in Dublin in less than two hours, and to have returned on the same day!

Timber has almost entirely replaced metal for bicycle frames, but its use is a further drain on our vital but inadequate sources of timber, despite the efforts of the government and local people to ban all efforts to burn wood for heating and cooking purposes. The shortage of timber is a reason why we need a permit to cut trees, while small new plantations are encouraged by government grants. No acorn must be allowed to rot!

There are still a few bogs, but the use of turf for fires and heating in general has long since passed. The remaining bogs, still under the control of the Irish Peatland Association, are strictly preserved as a reminder of our traditional dependence on turf as fuel and of peatland as part of our countrywide heritage. The widespread areas of cutaway bog are increasingly being used for certain aspects of food production.

Added to his work, Joe has a great influence as founder and chairman of the local Tigroney Allotments and Tree Committee, which is concerned with providing advice to local people on growing their own vegetables and fruit. Joe also organises a weekly market to arrange the distribution of produce among the inhabitants and to ensure that the less able are also cared for. By 2050, there is little opportunity to eat meat in the form of lamb or beef, because of insufficient availability of land, but the pig still survives, and the recovery of the horse trade has popularised the eating of horse meat. The big supermarkets Joe knew as a child are long since gone, at least in the countryside and most of the towns.

The Tigroney Committee is also concerned with the building of new cottages and country houses. Local trees and stone must be the main sources for building and other utility purposes. Every effort is being made to ensure that trees are being planted and cared for in available sites in the area. The use of timber as a source of heat is strongly discouraged, and domestic heating is now largely dependent on adequate clothing and passive houses that require no heat. We are back to drying clothes on the line and are learning once more to use the skills of the seamstress or of family members to repair all our serviceable clothes. The collection and storage of water for washing and cleaning is routine since the introduction of a law requiring all citizens to have a rainwater butt installed.

The increasing use of e-reading devices have left us with millions of books which are no longer of much use, and publishers of hard-copy books have largely gone out of business. These books are now increasingly being used in cottage walls to retain heat, in the absence of artificial heating. Some day, our prestigious libraries may end up as the contents of our walls rather than our shelves! The use of nuclear energy is developing but, unlike other countries, we have been somewhat reluctant to develop nuclear power. Nonetheless, the use of this form of energy is likely to increase in the future.

Joe married at the age of thirty-five and has one child, a boy of five also named Joe. Like nearly all women between the ages of fourteen and fifty, his wife is on the long-acting anovular pill, which is distributed free of charge by the government and is supplied every six months to each household. Among the forty-odd habitations in Tigroney, only one house has two children less than ten years of age, and fewer than half of the others have only one child in this age group. With the increasing concern about the excess of human population, hopefully the majority of young people will make the supreme sacrifice of remaining childless. Apart from free education, the government no longer provides child benefits as it used to do in the past.

Like many other people, by midcentury Joe’s house has become the repository of many portraits and figures of animals, and particularly birds – reminders of our depleted wildlife. He has one elaborate figure in bronze of six birds close together in flight. One day recently, Joe junior was looking at the bronze figure and said to his dad: ‘And used they be able to fly like that?’

‘Yes,’ said his dad with a note of sadness, ‘all these birds used to fly like the big pigeon which you saw over the river a few weeks back when we were walking near Avoca, and the couple of white birds we saw near Arklow which I said were seagulls.

‘Some birds used to spend most of their waking hours flying, seeking the company of other birds, and food and shelter. They used to sleep in nests in the trees and bushes, and sometimes in the roofs of houses. There were many different birds, from tiny sparrows to large swans, two of which you see in that picture. When your grandfather was young, they had a lot of birds around the house, flying all over the place, and all with different cries and sounds which were easy to recognise among the different species. One bird which used to come to Ireland during the early summer was called the cuckoo because it made a cuckoo sound, which I am copying exactly when I say “cuckoo”.

‘It was possible for most people to recognise the different birds by their sounds. The birds laid eggs in their nests, and after looking after the eggs and keeping them warm for some time a young bird was born when the egg cracked.’

‘What happened to the birds? Why are they not still here?’ asked Joe.

‘It was already happening about the time I was a boy, and the reasons are not easy to explain, but my granddad once told my dad that when he was young, the air in the atmosphere was full of flies, bees, wasps, ladybirds and other insects. A hundred years ago it was necessary to use sticky hangers in the kitchen to catch the flies in the house, and when you were driving a car in the countryside you had to stop to clean off all the insects which had stuck to the car windscreen. Because people began to use all kinds of newly invented chemicals in gardens and farms and other places to encourage growth and prevent new plant diseases, nearly all the insects disappeared. The flies and insects were the most important source of food for the birds, so they eventually starved and could not survive.

‘There were other causes too, such as the use of chemicals for other reasons, and the loss of nests because of the construction of so many new buildings. As a result of all the flying and foreign travel which was popular in the past, many foreign animals and insects which arrived in Ireland from America, Australia and Africa had no natural enemies to control them and started to compete with the birds and our own native animals, such as the red squirrels, which did no harm to birds or trees. For example, the grey squirrel arrived in Ireland from America more than a hundred years ago; they used to attack the harmless red squirrels and eat the birds’ eggs which they found in the trees.

‘There may be other causes which we do not understand. For instance, in the old days we had complete darkness at night in most places, but artificial light may have upset the habits of birds, insects and other wildlife. But the main cause was probably the chemicals which we were using to get rid of the insects in the air, in our houses, farms, towns and countryside, and the loss of suitable areas for birds to nest in.

‘We also used to have bees in special boxes called beehives where the bees collected honey from flowers in the gardens and countryside. Honey was like jam and was very popular everywhere. The bees disappeared gradually over the last fifty years and can only be found now in a few areas in the world. Your great-grandfather told your grandfather that they used to have beehives in their garden in their home in Rathmines in Dublin a hundred years ago. You could find beehives all over Ireland at that time. They also had a big kitchen garden in Rathmines, a lot of fruit trees, some hens for eggs, chickens, and lots of flowers to feed the bees – all right in the middle of this inner suburb of the city!

‘There were other common birds who visited Ireland at certain times of the year. Some of these came in huge numbers but they too have almost disappeared because of serious changes in the weather, like heat-waves and severe storms, and because of water shortage caused by the drying up of rivers and lakes in other countries where the water was overused by farmers and industry. The migrant birds depended on these rivers and lakes to survive on their journeys to and back from Ireland. These foreign birds were mostly found near the coast here. Your grandfather was telling me that when they arrived from Greenland to winter in Ireland, they could be found in their thousands on golf courses, in fields and on the farms close to the sea.

‘We used to have many sorts of sea birds. They were called seagulls and were seen in great numbers by the sea. They lived mostly on fish. They used to nest on rocks and islands all over the country beside the sea, and only came inland when the weather was very bad. The Saltee Islands, not far from here in Wexford, used to have thousands of birds’ nests on the cliffs and rocks, but most of these nests were destroyed by the storms and hurricanes which started to become more severe when I was growing up. You can still see a few of these birds, but they are much less common than when I was born. They were also affected by a shortage of fish on which they depended and, in the Saltees at least, by hungry wild cats.

This is the story of Joe and his family living in the countryside in 2050.

THOMAS Robert Malthus was born in 1766. After schooling, he had a brilliant academic career in philosophy and science in Cambridge. He later became a priest in the Anglican Church, a profession which allowed him time to read, write, correspond widely and travel. He published his first book on population, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798 and subsequently published five further editions up to 1820, as well as A Summary View of the Principles on Political Economy and Social Philosophy, which included various additions and emendations. I first read An Essay on the Principle of Population in an edition published by Penguin in 1970.

No work, apart from Darwin’s The Origin of Species, received so much attention, both approbation and criticism, as this first essay, and Darwin and other evolutionists acknowledged the considerable influence Malthus had on their opinions and conclusions. In 1820 a bibliography of titles dealing with his views on population required more than thirty pages of text. It is a testament to Malthus’s abiding importance that editions of his manuscript have been reprinted in both the United States and the United Kingdom up to the present day. The substance of Malthus’s writings was based on his belief that every animal species, including man, will increase in numbers by geometric progression every generation if humans exist in an optimal milieu where checks on survival do not exist. Geometric progression implies doubling in numbers every generation (2, 4, 8, 16, and so on).

An optimal milieu exists for humans where there is an absence of civil strife, war and epidemic diseases, and adequate nutrition for the entire index population. Malthus also wrote about factors which adversely influence population growth. These include sexual restraint, celibacy, late marriage, infanticide, poor community organisation, and what he euphemistically describes as ‘corruption of morals and vice’, which includes contraception, abortion, homosexuality, sterilisation and ‘illicit’ sexual activities. He did not envision the prospect of the current high level of extramarital births and believed that sexual restraint was the only method of control consistent with virtue, happiness and good health.

There is a logical basis for Malthus’s population hypothesis: he provides a number of circumstances during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where, under appropriate conditions, the population increased close to the point of geometric progression. The white population of the American colonies was one such example; he also quotes Humboldt, who reported a doubling of the non-indigenous population in South America every thirty-seven years.

In the summary of his writings published in 1830, Malthus refers to the population increase in Ireland from about 1 million in the late seventeenth century to 6 million in 1820 (and close to 8 million at the time of the Famine in 1847). The Irish peasant lived in the countryside, where they were free from the massive deadly epidemics of the city people, and they were well supported at the time by the potato. He refers to a few other examples in Europe where similar increases in population occurred.

Malthus believed that population increase depended on a corresponding increase in food supply but that, because of crop failures, soil exhaustion, the limits on the amount of arable land, and the finite space on the planet suitable for agriculture, food production could only increase at the most by arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on). He undoubtedly underestimated increases in agricultural productivity which we have seen since his time through as a result of scientific advances and globalisation. However, it is certain that eventually there must be a final limit to food production if the human population continues to increase at its present rate and if our environment deteriorates, particularly as it is unlikely that problems of distribution can be easily solved.

Perhaps more important than the influence of food production, it is understandable that Malthus did not anticipate the adverse effect an increasing population has had on the environment. Our well-being and even survival must be affected by climate change, CO2 accumulation, shortage of fresh water, the dwindling of lakes and glaciers, the invasion of alien species, overfishing, the destruction of rainforests, and the continuous loss of many species of flora and fauna.

According to the United Nations, the population of the world passed the 6.5 billion mark in 2006. It was over 7 billion by 2012 and is likely to reach 8 billion by 2035. The gradual increase in world population during the last two centuries can be attributed to the control of epidemic diseases, which started in the eighteenth century, when smallpox and other epidemic diseases were gradually brought under control. In more recent years, we have seen rises in human longevity as we adopt healthy lifestyle and dietary changes and take advantage of new means of health promotion and medical treatment.