The population explosion – a problem kept secret

As has been previously mentioned, the earth’s population is currently growing by 1.2 percent annually, an increase which, if it continues, will double the number of people in two generations – or in 58 years to be exact.

The population explosion is one of the main reasons behind climate change and it also accelerates the process. For example, growing population increases demands for energy and food production, which means greater need for farming land and pastures, resulting in deforestation, which causes increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmental damage, the second of our megaproblems, is also affected by population growth. For example, when population increases there is automatically less per person of already over-utilized renewable natural resources. There is the threat of famine, and more severe water shortages. Other consequences of a greater population will be greater pollution, more damage to nature and faster depletion of biodiversity.

In addition, a sharp increase in population can transform normally useful and desirable advances into negative or dangerous changes. This could mean that technological developments and improved living standards – both of which are generally viewed as most advantageous – could increase demand for more energy and natural resources. If these normally positive developments occur simultaneously with a great increase in population the consequences can obviously be serious environmental damage.

Sharp population growth also increases hostility between ethnic groups and nations, as they clash over diminished resources. This would contribute to the weakening of political stability and lead to greater risk of political violence. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is a terrifying example.

The final point in this brief inventory: the population explosion is the most important cause of poverty. Poverty and population growth together create a vicious cycle. A small family farm can possibly support one family, but when land is inherited and divided up by several children, each with his own family, it can no longer support everyone. The result is worse poverty in the farmlands or in shanty-towns outside large cities. Measures against poverty are offset by greater population, which, in some nations – especially in southern Africa – result in a decrease in the percentage of poor while the actual numbers of the poor continue to increase.

It should be emphasized that most problems do not grow proportionally with the increase of population but much faster. For example, if there is a 10 percent water shortage in an area to start with – that is, water supply is 10 percent below that which is needed – then a 50 percent increase in population would mean the water shortage climbs by 500 percent to 60 percent.

What is the reason behind the obviously detrimental population explosion and why have we not taken serious measures to stop the growth (with the exception of the actions taken in China)?

One of the most important reasons for the rapid increase in population in poor nations seems to be poverty in itself, with its resultant low education level and non-existent family planning, due to ignorance and/or traditional and sometimes religious reasons.

Lack of equality between the sexes in many developing nations can also greatly contribute to high birth rates. Many young women become pregnant against their will, and parents may place greater value on sons than daughters, with births continuing until the desired number of sons is reached. High unemployment rates among women in developing nations also contribute to high birth rates.
At the start of this discussion, we noted that three closely linked critical explanatory factors are behind mankind’s four mega-problems. The population explosion – the invisible, rarely discussed basic villain in the drama – illustrates this thesis. Lack of understanding of the problems, faulty deliberations and flawed judgment are the main reasons why political leaders have never seriously attempted to halt the extremely rapid growth of population in a number of nations, despite the fact that it has created many severe problems.

To be more specific, we can point to some plausible reasons:
• The public underestimates the significance of population growth. Some even view it as positive. Some see the increased number of people primarily as a growing market for their products.
• Many believe it is not politically correct to demand and take measures to limit population growth. Some seem to believe it is a human right to bring as many children as possible into the world.
• Politicians seem to consider population growth as a natural phenomenon that mankind should expect and that nothing can be done about it.

Even the present world political system with sovereign national states contributes to population growth since the system can effectively stop any outside attempts to influence growth. All nations today can insist that population developments and high birth rates are matters of internal state affairs.

Obviously, nobody knows today how many people can live on the earth and enjoy decent living standards in harmony with the environment. This depends, among other things, on developments in agricultural technology, future energy and water supplies, what is meant by “decent living standards”, and, not the least, on the effects of climate change. But we do know that based on existing knowledge and technology the earth cannot in the long term support today’s population enjoying standards that the “wealthy” nations’ inhabitants are accustomed to and which all others try to attain. This means that the only rational development would be to try to adjust the number of people in relation to existing and foreseeable opportunities. Allowing wishful thinking or being resigned to the situation to guide decisions in this question means inexcusable risk-taking.

If allowed to continue, the population explosion can very well be a main cause for mankind’s devastation by enormous catastrophes.
…
What can be done about rapid population growth? Indeed, the key to the solution is obviously the general public’s understanding of and attitude to the problem. Therefore, in the near future, the worldwide public must be conscious not only of the dangerous consequences of the population explosion described earlier but should also know:
• that the rapid population growth is not any one nation’s “internal domestic affair” but something that can harm humanity’s most important interests,
• that it cannot be considered a human right for a woman to have more than two children,
• that the earth’s resources are not even enough for the existing population if all were to enjoy industrialized nations’ living standards – and that the situation will be much worse as early as within two generations if the world population has increased by several billion,
• that we cannot count on people in the poorest nations continuing to accept living on so much fewer resources than people of industrialized nations,
• that a “normalization” of average life expectancy to that of industrialized nations would in itself mean that the number of people on earth would increase from today’s 6.8 billion to 8.0 billion.

It is unrealistic to believe that such an educational campaign would be undertaken by political initiative, given the nonchalance with which this problem has been treated so far. Instead, the public must first be clearly aware of the great risks connected to the population explosion and demand counter-measures before the matter finally gets priority on the political leaders’ international agenda.

Only then can we hope for an action program worth the name; that negotiators from the rich nations agree with colleagues from the fast-growing nations to adopt the most effective efforts in education, improved health care, greater employment for women, family planning and other measures to curb the birth rate.

https://globalchallenges.org//app/uploads/2023/06/The-Greatest-Challenges-of-Our-Time-2009.pdf

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The direction of human evolution is to cheat brutal earth evolution with contraception and euthanasia!

1.

Have you ever been fooled by this materialistically misinterpreted Gandhi quote a million times? “The world is enough for everyone’s needs, but not for their greed.”

It is completely false to understand this in material terms alone. Greed in Gandhi means also the multiplication of subjects! In addition to the powers, religions, ideologies that force procreation, parents are also greedy when they procreate irresponsibly (clumsily in sexual greed) or selfishly (their child’s labour, elderly caretaker)!

Gandhi was not an ignorant warmonger, and although there were no precise ecological data at the time, he never thought the world’s resources were sufficient for an exploding human population if it did not consume greedily (i.e. sink into world oppression).
India’s population has exploded more than fourfold since then, so that its per capita subsistence is only one-ninth that of Hungary. In other words, the poverty trap is closed for them, and their current poverty is no longer sustainable! Although the average Indian has an ecological footprint of only about a quarter of the Hungarian average, India’s population is more than three times overburdened and is rapidly depleting its land.

The lesson: those who do not work primarily for the human right to contraception, but who preach about reducing consumption by quoting Gandhi’s materialistic phrase, not only do not understand ecology, but have no heart (or idea of poverty), since access to contraception is the key to lifting people out of poverty.

See also: Antinatalism – Gandhi’s Gait

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2.

The “nature”
– is a resource to be exploited by the exploiters,
– boring, inconvenient and prickly to the non-nature walkers,
– a nostalgic beauty to those who miss it,
– for the conservationists, the basis of human life, but also a value in itself,
– for science, a brutal state of being, evolution: forced unlimited reproduction, scarcity, struggle, suffering,
– for the mystic, a low rung in the universe.

A beautiful ring of galaxies on every finger, even on every toe. And on every finger of all 8 billion people, since we already detect more than 200 billion galaxies.
The average galaxy contains more than a hundred billion stars. That’s more than 2 trillion stars for every person living on Earth today in the universe as we know it. And we’ve already detected more than 200 exoplanets nearby in the last two decades, where life could be possible.
What advanced life systems could there be in this vast cosmos?

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3.
The earthly order of being, evolution, is rather low, brutal:
– all beings must reproduce in a forced and unlimited way,

– so it must constantly encounter resource constraints (scarcity) and competition (struggle, suffering),

– it must strive to differ, to modify, to mutate, to somehow overtake its competitors, but most of these modifications lead to destruction, descharge,

– for many creatures to survive, to reproduce, they have to cause suffering, to kill, to defraud, (and the sadism of evolution programs eternal struggle even into mating relationships, since the strategy of successful gene propagation is both male and female cheating + jealousy, i.e. deceiving and restricting each other at the same time)

– and then evolution selects for the “fall of the worm” brutality, moreover selects for indifference to suffering, ruthlessness (those who cannot expel the horrors of life on earth from their psyche become depressed, not winners),

– and what few survive successfully flourish on the skeletal heaps of failure, suffering, death, destruction.

– but we who have survived for the time being do not grasp the brutality of evolution, because the vast majority of the extinct no longer have any news or lessons to learn, because history is written by the victors, the wailing of the suffering is not heard in the cheers of the victors.

“Evolution is an amoral, heartless process that proceeds pragmatically, without concern for ethical preferences, codes of honour or value systems. Of course, it does not distinguish between prosocial cooperation and antisocial manipulation, because only what works for survival and reproduction matters.” (Lixing Sun)

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4.
Do procreationist religions worship evolution (“natural law”) as their god? (While even denying evolution, lest their idolatry be exposed.)
Evolution doesn’t care how much is lost in horrible suffering, only the most productive ones who make it to further reproduction matter.
Humanity forces reproduction at the expense of quality and suffering, humanity does the opposite.

Even though gene evolution was preceded by meme evolution (since changes in behaviour under the influence of memes are much faster than mutations in genes), it is also contaminated by forced reproduction. The family or ethnic group that was better able to push its daughters and wives into the birth machine (through memes, religion, socialisation, violence) gained the advantage.
Carelessness and interest dance around procreation, but the music is played by evil, which brutally enforces (public thinking, social pressure, law, education, socialisation…) the gene-evolution reproduction in the meme-world as well.

In brutal evolution, life is generally not pretty. That it is beautiful is what the reproductionists would have the masses believe. Otherwise people would not want to pass on a life that is not nice. And for the few, having many servants is what makes life somewhat beautiful. So many must live a not-nice life for the few to live a nice life.

And the production of slaves produces sacrifices: not only are the vast majority of the children born slave labourers for the rest of their lives, but the earth’s ability to support itself collapses underneath.

In recent decades, masses of people have been able to rise out of poverty, seemingly to the benefit of all. Who suffers the price? Children, the poor, wildlife and future generations. They are the most vulnerable, their voices are not heard, they cannot defend their interests.

For it is not only the human slave army of the population explosion that serves the somewhat beautiful lives of the few, but also an army of machine slaves. They are eating up the future as fuel. They destroy the climate, the soils, the forests, the waters, the wildlife, they pollute and poison the biosphere.

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5.
Only goodness that helps those without contraception! Without this chariity is ignorance or hypocrisy.
It doesn’t really matter if you responsibly procreate a little, because you can help prevent ten or a hundred times more by helping those with unmet need of contraceptives.

The human race has evolved in evolution, but it is outgrowing it, it is already in dissonance with it, it considers the need to reproduce, scarcity, struggle, suffering, brutal. Even primitive peoples have apologised to the soul of the hunted beast and explained to it that, unfortunately, they have to kill to feed.
Why are we in the world? To recognize the lowliness of the earthly order and to ascend to a higher level.

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6.
Contraception is the most crucial element of becoming human, a way to override instinctive reproduction, the driving force behind the brutality of evolution. The more evolved man can achieve pleasure without reproduction. It is the separation of fertility from sex that has set man apart from the animal world. Animals do not have sex, they only procreate (with a few advanced exceptions).

What is it that makes responsible procreation (and nonprocreation, childfree) so widespread in our time? What is the unlucky-luck that has pushed the human species beyond evolution? Already five major (and many minor) extinctions in the history of life on Earth have been caused by catastrophes: asteroid impacts, series of supervolcano eruptions. The current sixth great extinction is the first caused by evolution itself.
So far, the incessant population explosions have been self-correcting, e.g. locusts multiply, devour everything, then die out en masse. Now, however, the overpopulation of the human species has triggered a super-volcanic eruption-like catastrophe: it has punctured the Earth in millions of places and blasted the extracted fossil energy, underworldly envy, back into the biosphere, into the surface.

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7.
Thus humanity is well on its way to the higher level envisioned by Gandhi, to extinction from the brutal Earth, i.e. to “ascend” to a more advanced cosmic existence. The question is how much of this ascension will be humane and how much of it will be horrible.

A higher moral, humane ascension might work something like this:
– Responsible procreation (see below), so few offspring, for whom it is not an overload, but much joy, little suffering.

– Many manage to enjoy life, but are responsible, so they don’t want to procreate because they know their offspring will probably not be so lucky, but may sink into the vast majority of sufferers. Fortunately, the childfree choice also makes life more enjoyable.

– For the vast majority, life is largely suffering, so they would not procrea tewithout the social pressure, brainwashing and heartwashing that reproduction forces. Hundreds of millions can resist even this pressure, but they are brutally pushed into a birth machine queue, deprived of the human right, knowledge and means of contraception. Morality begins by mitigating the deprivation of contraception

– It is part of human dignity to be able to choose to end one’s life on earth. Jesus also taught that one must be ready to give up life on earth (bios) in order to gain a higher life (dzoé). Even today, a significant number of people commit “suicide”, but the slave-producing society does not let them escape from slavery so easily, ninety-nine percent of them are pulled back (“rescued”, so that they can then mostly fight to die again). The adoption of euthanasia (good death) can help the poor to have the opportunity to do what is still mostly the privilege of the rich: to have the legal and health care to make their own choices and to move on under appropriate conditions.

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8.
Unfortunately, it is possible that the majority of humanity will not die out of the Earth in such a “die-off”, but
– suffering individually, eagerly waiting for death to “lift our brother who opens the gates” (St. Francis of Assisi: Hymn to the Sun), and in the meantime suffering accidents, sometimes even accidental death, so that they cannot break the eternal cycle of procreation, suffering and death,
– and, as a human species, according to the rules of brutal evolution: the misery of civilizational collapse, climate catastrophe, nuclear war, etc., caused by overpopulation.
But goodness is effective even in such cases: the amount of suffering in the greatest catastrophe can be alleviated by supporting contraception.

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9.
No one has the right to procreate! Unless …

Only women can decide if, when and by whom they want to get pregnant. But they can only say NO on their own, not YES!

No one has the right to procreate without fulfilling the rights of a potential future child:

● the right to conceive by responsible choice, not by accident

● the decision of a well-prepared couple

● who are mature in their personalities

● who are raising children in a stable parental relationship

● the right to a loving home and community

● to a small age group, where there are as few as possible psychologically damaged, destitute children unwanted by their parents, where people are rare treasures, not overproduced, expendable slaves, and do not have to fight in droves for increasingly scarce water, land, shelter, shade… (so only those who help those without contraception procreate responsibly!)

● a healthy nature, an Earth that can live for at least a century

● where you will receive the spiritual and material resources necessary for a happy life.

So only those who help those who do not use contraception are responsible!

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10.
Contraception is a fundamental human right (UN, 1968)!
A child is not a tool, but a person. It should not be conceived for any nationalistic, religious, economic, political, family, military, family, relationship, psychological, individual, etc. interest, but only for the sake of the future child. E.g. those who panic about depopulation do not consider future children as persons, only as a means to their quantitative ends.

No one has the right to procreate! Meditation before the most serious decision:

Do you really want to have a child with us and conceive now?

(This is the title of our collection of texts on responsible procreation.)

“There is nothing so deceptive as human life, nothing so deceitful. Surely no one would accept it if it were not given without his knowledge. Therefore, too, if the greatest fortune be not born, hold it nearest to that, after a short life to be speedily restored to the former state.” (Seneca: Consolations)

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11.

“The man and the woman were both naked, yet they felt no shame. But the phallus was more  crafty  than any animal the God created.

The phallus said to the woman, “Did God really say that you, being already distinguished among the animals, can now no longer enjoy each other’s bodies?”

The woman replied, “We may still enjoy each other’s bodies, caressing, kissing, licking, sucking and fucking what we have. God only said about the sperm: ‘From now on, don’t let it into the vagina, or you will die.’”

Then the phallus said to the woman, “You will not certainly die any more violently than you did before, like animals. God knows well that your eyes have been opened, you have become like gods  knowing good and evil. So if the sperm enters your vagina, you humans will create, rule, decide on life and death. God wants you to procreate and multiply and rule over every living creature on earth.”

She knew that the phallus was pleasurable, pleasing to the eye, and she loved to feel it in her vagina when he orgasmed. So she was still not careful, and she told the man that there was no need to be careful. So the sperm got into her vagina and she was now pregnant as a human.

But with their eyes already open, they were shaken by the heavy responsibility of becoming parents. They realised they were naked and that they had become like gods, knowing good and evil. They can multiply, create humans on Earth, and decide which beings they want to displace from existence. What they had experienced with animal unconsciousness, the relentless cycle of procreation, suffering, death, now horrified them. They sensed the low brutality of earthly evolution, driven by forced reproduction.

They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then they heard the sound of the God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the God among the trees of the garden. But God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

But he said: “Who told you that you were naked? Though you have risen above the animal level, have you ejaculated into her vagina, which I forbade?” The man replied, “The woman you put here with me, still did not want to take care, so didn’t I.” God asked the woman, “What is this you have done?” She replied, “The phallus deceived me, that’s why I did it.”

So the God said to the phallus, “Because you have deceived human, you have lied that evolution is God, you have encouraged procreation and domination, you will be cursed, the plague of overpopulation on the world. I will put opposition between you and woman, she will shrink from even pleasure, terrified of pregnancy. She will not trust you and you will have to trick, brainwash and force to get her pregnant.”

And to the woman God said: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you, especially if he has already made you pregnant.”

To the man God said, “Because you have continued in animal negligence with the woman and ejaculated into her vagina, although I have forbidden it, cursed is the ground because of your overpopulation. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. You cannot reach the Garden of Eden until you have tamed your phallus, which evolution’s reproductive compulsion has mastered, into a human penis, a player of pleasure.”

Then the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. But he will not easily give up the destructive power of procreation. Let us see how long it takes him to recognize the brutal inferiority of earthly evolution driven by the compulsion to reproduce. Then he will again abstain from irresponsible procreation, break the inexorable cycle of procreation-suffer-death, die out from the Earth, die up to the Garden of Eden.”

(Based on Genesis 2-3 chapters, by Gyula I. Simonyi)

Simonyi, Gyula I.

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Being a poor Catholic is tragic. The horrendous social and ecological and climate-changing devastation of the Vatican’s contraception ban can be seen in a comparison between successful Buddhist Thailand and the failed Catholic Philippines.

Thailand’s per capita land area fell by 40% from 1960 to 1990 (from 1.7 gha to 1.0 gha) due to the population explosion, but has since risen slightly to 1.2 global hectares. Look at this miracle (with Hungarian subtitles). I did some work on this myself in Thailand in 1992 ​

https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_made_thailand_a_better_place

In contrast, the Philippines’ per capita subsistence level has fallen from 1.0 gha in 1960 to 0.5 gha today, and continues to decline due to the population explosion. They are already locked in the poverty trap: their country does not have the carrying capacity to have a chance to rise with such a large population.

Thailand has come from a huge disadvantage to a staggering lead: its GDP per capita in 1960 was half that of the Philippines, and today it is more than double! Both countries are more than twice as overstretched, but Thailand has a chance to become sustainable from twice the level and with its population explosion under control. The population of the two countries was about the same in 1960. Since then, Thailand’s has swelled two and a half times but is barely growing (at 0.25% per year), while the Philippines’ has exploded almost four times and is still exploding (at 1.52% per year, six times the rate).

The BOCS Civilisation Planning Foundation in Székesfehérvár has been working since 1975 to abolish the Catholic ban on contraception and to help the hundreds of millions of people who are without contraception! (Note: gha = one hectare of average carrying capacity. Data source http://footprintnetwork.org ).

A cluster analysis of 60 years of 103 countries (published in English, German and Hungarian) demonstrates that the key to lifting girls out of poverty is access to contraception, curbing the population explosion through girls’ education and women’s liberation. Find out more: https://afrika.bocs.eu

Simonyi, Gyula I.

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UPDATE: The BOCS Civilisation Planning Foundation is one of the main signatories of a similar letter to COP28!

NEW COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FAMILY PLANNING IN FACE OF CLIMATE CRISIS

National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable

San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:

• Is human-rights centered
• Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
• Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights

On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Here are the facts:

• The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, like climate change, is by choosing smaller families. It’s up to 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.
• By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime.
• Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalised human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”

Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model. 

Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.

Source: Fair Start Movement | Carter Dillard | 27 Okt. 2021

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1. You have suerely heard it a lot to consume less, because the Earth is overburdened. Well, who thinks that the overshoot is caused by too high individual consumption (and refers to Overshoot Day as „overconsumption day” for this reason), doesn’t understand ecology!

2. The ecological footprint of the average person is the same as it was in 1970.[1] Moreover, there are positive changes behind this unchanging average: the ecological footprint of the well-off countries is decreasing, and that of the poor countries is increasing, which allows for a higher quality of life.[2]

3. If the ecological footprint of the average person hasn’t increased, then why do we overburden the Earth by 170% now, which only started in 1970? Has the Earth shrunk by 40% in half a century? In a way, it has…

4. Before anyone would think about some cosmic catastrophe, let’s be clear: the „per capita Earth” has shrunk by 40%. And the reason is that human population has more than doubled since 1970.[3]

5. Today, there is only 1.63 gha biocapacity for a person, which is little more than half of the average global per capita ecological footprint.[4] Moreover, there is less and less each year due to the ongoing population explosion.

The eco-dictators (if there would be such) who don’t care about population could only end the global ecological overshoot by forcing everyone into global destitution.

6. Those who hope that the scientific-technological development will solve everything, will be gravely disappointed: in half a century, all science and technology could achieve was that th per capita biocapacity of Earth only decreased by 40% and not more.[5] (They couldn’t stop its decline, and are far from turning it into growth, even by relying on nonrenewable resources)

7. Humanity overburdens the Earth, today at a level of 170%. This means that we have used up its yields by July 29. In other words, from this day till the end of the year, we will use up the natural capital that has bee accumulating over millions of years. This is why the forests, soils and wildlife is disappearing, freshwater is dwindling, the climate is going nuts, and poison and filth floods the waters and the lands.

8. If everyone on Earth lived like the Hungarians, for example, then the humanity would have come out of the ecological crisis by the turn of the century. If everyone followed the consumption and reproductive pattersns of the Hungarians since the very beginning of the calculation of ecological footprint (1961), then there would only be about 3 billion people on Earth, which wouldn’t be overburdened by everyone living in decent prosperity.[6]

9. So the ecological crisis is caused by overpopulation, which is worsening with the ongoing population expkosion: every year, the human population of Earth increases by 80 million. It’s not that people consume too much individually, it’s just that the „per capita Earth” is shrinking below the level of global destitution.

10. Why is there a population explosion? Well, it’s not like anyone wanted it, it’s just a taboo, so misconceptions are rampant in this topic. Almost half of the pregnancies are unintended by the couples.[7][8] Every day, 100.000 children are born whom their parents didn’t want. At least 214 million fertile wives would desperately want to use contraception, but they don’t have the rights, knowledge and means to it.[7]

11. The UN has alredy declared contraception a human right back in 1968,[9] and on the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, 179 countries signed a Programme of Action. It was supposed to be completed in 20 years, but unfortunately it wasn’t, so it was extended.[10] This was translated to Hungarian by the BOCS Foundation, which is the Hungarian member of the Inspire European NGO alliance since 2006. The ICPD+25 world conference to renew the Programme of Action will be held in Nairobi.[11]

12. Moreover, the goal of securing universal access to contraception to all was also among the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 5.B) The UN General Assembly declared in 2005 that „an unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals”.[12]

13. In 2015, the UN declared 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, where universal access to contraception is featured in the topic of health, and of women’s equality as well (SDG 3.7 and 5.6). Because even if there was no ecological crisis, overpopopulation, poverty, violence, so even in an ideal world, it is the right of every child to be conceived to prepared parents, as a result of a responsible decision.

14. Numerous examples prove that access to contraception leads to exceptionally fast reductions in birthrates. Globally, there is a huge umnet need for contraception, both in the developing, and developed countries.[7][8] Wherever women can have a word in ther fate, birthrates are low, even if they cannot study. And educated women plan even less children.[13]

15. So what’s the key to move the Ecological Overshoot day back to the end of the year? Compassion! To have mercy on those who lack contraception!

The reason is because the ecological crisis is caused by a humanitarian catastrophe: that the without the rights to-, knowledge about, and means of contraception, in every second, 3 women cry out desperately that „I’m pregnant!”.

16. This might be the only point where the interests of the poor and the rich are the same. Offer your help for the sake of yourself, for the sake of the poor, and most importantly, for the sake of the children to be born, whom would otherwise be dragged out to Earth before their time, in a forced march, unprepared, as an accident, or for thousands of other reasons.

17. According to the esimates of the UN’s Population Program, the sum needed for the solution can be collected even if only every 30th person helps those lacking contraception by 10 euros (spending it on programs making it available). Can you convince at least one of 30 of your friends? Who break the taboo of population as Climate Heroes, don’t just shave off a few percents of the ecological footprints by insignificant greening, but 100% of it. Because by continuously preventing an unintended pregnancy, they prevent a lifetime’s worth of ecological footprint (moreover, potentially multiple lifetimes’ worth of it).

18. The beneficial effects of sum that makes contraception available are 120 times more potent than conventional charity.[14] It is the most effective humanitarian aid, the most effective form of climate-, and environmental protection,[15] the key of getting out of poverty,[16] that of womens’s equality, the healthy development of children, and of peace and security.

19. The more unintended pregnancies we can prevent, the less people will suffer less; less people will be subject to destructive heat waves, starvation, epidemics and the increasing risk of wars, and the severity of these calamities will be lighter as well. Contraception is the best way to mitigate the climate crisis, and also the key to adapting to the worsening conditions.

20. Let’s push back the date of Ecological Overshoot Day to the end of the year! One of the points of the Global Footprint Network’s MoveTheDate campaign serves this goal as well. Join the Climate Heroes, carbon offset your lifestile using QFPC™, with which you can also help the hundreds of millions of women who lack contraception.

Live as you wish to, just break the taboo with compassion! Preventing a lifetime’s worth of ecological burden, you can float as an angel, not weighing down on the Earth. https://bocs.cf/

[1] https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/
[2] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/sustainableDevelopment?cn=all&type=BCpc,EFCpc&yr=2016
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.pop.totl
[4] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/
[5] http://footprintnetwork.org/
[6] https://climenews.com/a-wwf-vakon-hibaztatja-a-magyarokat
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017
[8] https://www.contraceptioninfo.eu/node/71
[9] http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/rights/
[10] https://www.unfpa.org/publications/international-conference-population-and-development-programme-action
[11] https://www.unfpa.org/press/nairobi-summit-advance-icpd-programme-action
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/l12kristof.html
[13] http://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/girls-factsheet-en.pdf
[14] http://res.cloudinary.com/bocs/raw/upload/v1557231981/population_assessment_-_kohler_behrman_0_dumwz7.pdf (6.o)
[15] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
[16] https://afrika.bocs.eu

Gyula I. Simonyi

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