Remember when you had to clean splattered flying insects off your windshield? What happened? Surely that alone should give us a clue that something is going on. It is reported that in the last 40 years there has been a 50% decline in wildlife. During the same time the human population has increased by 75%. Surely it is impossible to deny that there must be some kind of a connection between these two statistics.

Our natural systems, developed over millions of years, had a lot of checks and balances. No individual species was able to gain dominance over others because, as its population grew, it ran out of resources and/or became a target for other species. The classic example is that if there are too many rabbits the fox population will grow and vice versa.

Then along came humans. Humans needed wood to keep warm and trees became scarce. You would have expected the human population to decrease? Enter coal. If humans needed fertile land to grow food and land became run down, you would expect the human population to decrease. Enter fertilizer. Back in the 1950s there was talk of the world running out of food. Enter biotechnology. Normally large populations will develop diseases allowed to spread by overcrowding. Enter antibiotics.

There are said to be 8.7 billion species on earth and only 1.3 billion have been identified. We can think of this as a pyramid where each element is one of the building blocks. If the pyramid is damaged, normally it is able to repair that damage itself and remain relatively intact. The problem comes if the pyramid receives more damage than it can handle. This means that in the short term (1,000 years?) you might be stuck with a damaged pyramid. The problem is further compounded if the repair tools the pyramid uses are damaged as well.

Until recently humans have been able to justify continuing to damage the pyramid by presuming that a damaged pyramid will do just fine. Only recently does there appear to be a tipping point where damage that might originally have needed just a little bit of repair now might cause a landslide.

Unlike Alfred E. Neuman it does worry me. We need Alfred E. Neuman buttons for climate change deniers.

Bill Moses
Owen Sound