Let’s leave some room for everybody else. Photo: Robin PittmanMore of our kind means fewer wild things. A stabilized human population means hope for wild things. A shrinking human population means a better world for wild things — and for men and women and children.
It’s that straightforward.
The human population grew more in the last 40 years than in the previous 3 million. The population bomb has blown up — but the shrapnel hasn’t yet hit us hard. What it has hit hard are wild things.
The outcomes of humanity’s growth yesterday, today, and tomorrow are scalped wildlands, endangered and extinct wildlife, and sweeping climatic upset. Since 1700, the amount of cultivated land on the planet has increased from 7 to 40 percent, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Spin a globe. More than a third of what you see that is not water or ice has gone from neighborhoods for wildlife to croplands for humans or grazing lands for our livestock.
The mind-numbing, heart-breaking wreckage of the wild is the main driver for the extinction of heaps of other beings worldwide. When Americans shove new ho... Read more
