Ease planetary burden by curbing overpopulation

Current inventory: six billion, seven hundred twenty million, eighty-four thousand and fifty-three units.

With a combined weight of more than a trillion pounds, if my guess of 150 pounds per unit is close, or good enough for government work. This also makes each, as chance would have it, about halfway in size between the largest and smallest things in the universe.

Now let’s consider a timeline of the cosmos (thanks to krysstal.com) that’s really mind-blowing: If we compress events into a single year, the Big Bang occurred right after midnight, naturally, and it took until Sept. 12 for the Earth to form.

The units didn’t make their appearance until about 11:25 p.m. on Dec. 31. I’m sure you’ve guessed what they are, but here’s the giveaway: Some of them invented Christianity, just a few seconds shy of the end of the year.

People, people, just too many people, to borrow from Melissa Manchester.

That figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population clock, is the world’s weigh-in as I’m writing this. We’re breeding like bunnies, too, and will double our current numbers by 2067, unless something drastic happens.

If you think it’s bad now, what will it be like when we hit 13 billion? And if you don’t think six and a half billion is bad, never mind what’s to come, why not?

I’d like to return to the book “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman, which I briefly mentioned in last month’s column.

Weisman imagines a world in which we suddenly disappear – no cause given – and then does the investigative legwork to see how quickly the world might rebound, and what we bequeath to its other denizens.

In this scenario we have no chance to shut things down, and hence, a couple of the immediate disasters we bestow involve petroleum and nuclear facilities that, needless to say, wreak havoc.

Longer lasting are our toxic offspring – PCBs, dioxins and the like – the king of which is uranium-238. U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, about the same amount of time the Earth has left, so it will be emitting radiation literally until the end of planetary time.

Just how devastating has our impact on the Earth been? Weisman offers a whole array of examples, in language that’s both plain yet evocative: “We don’t actually have to shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.”

Two examples, one of what we’ve taken, and one of what we’re leaving:

The last passenger pigeon died in 1914, following the mass slaughter of the previous century. Weisman writes, “Its flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming.”

And we killed them all, every last one. Glorious, no?

But we give, too, so let’s look at one of our recent endowments. “Nurdles” are the building blocks of plastics, little melted-down pellets that make the entire panoply of all those oh-so-convenient products – everything from paint to PVC to polyethylene bottles. We produce around 5.5 quadrillion nurdles, some 250 billion pounds, annually.

If you or I were to visit the North Pacific Gyre, or “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” we could make our stunned way through a thousand-mile crossing of millions and millions of tons of plastic debris, much of it – the nurdles – “perfectly bite-sized for the little creatures that bigger creatures eat.”

And there are six more of these gyres, planet-wide, all collecting our trash, to who knows what environmental cost.

Do we really need to add to the planetary burden by adding more billions of us?

Not so long ago, 800-pound groupers swam with 1,000-pound sea turtles, so many of them that Columbus’s galleons nearly beached upon them. You could have all the cod you wanted with the dip of a bucket. And now?

It’s time, once and for all, to denounce teachings that avoid, deny or abdicate responsibility for overpopulation. The Catholic Church, anyone? How about the “Quiverfull” followers, who think any form of family planning goes against God’s will?

Or those who fear the “Brown Threat,” like John Gibson, from Fox News, who warned: “Twenty-five years and the majority population is Hispanic. The rest of you: Get busy. Make babies.”

I say, “Make a baby. Just one.”