Frank Greenall
EVERY four-and-a-half days, planet Earth's population goes up by a million. Whoa!
Yes, we're well and truly in a new age. Some call it the Anthropocene epoch -- "anthro" just means human, so it's to mark the period since man started making serious marks on the globe.
And so far, it's just a blink of an eye.
If a 12-hour clock represented the lifetime of this third rock from the sun, then the last second of the last minute of the last hour on the clock is the Anthropocene period -- just one little "tick". It's a moot point if we're even ever going to get to hear a contrapuntal "tock" -- despite this gnat's-blink of existence, the amount of eco damage we've already racked up is truly impressive.
True, nature is pretty good at self-trashing, too. So far there have been about five major extinction periods, through asteroid impact, hyper volcanoes and so forth.
But self-inflicted is another matter. After all, so far there's no proof there's anyone else out there but us, and do we want it said that we screwed up perhaps the universe's one and only chance of producing and maintaining sentient beings capable of creating a great show like Mr Ed?
To a certain extent, we're victims of our own success -- at last count we numbered about seven billion, all of whom have to be fed, watered, housed, infra-structured and the whole nine yards. But it's pressure cooker stuff. Just look at the way a supposed first-world city like Auckland is suddenly popping at the seams after a relatively small population burst. And don't even mention sub-Sahara Africa.
These pressures have long been recognised. Back in the 60s and 70s there were serious science-based movements like Zero Population Growth that garnered substantial support as new urban conglomerates started to wreak scary new stresses and strains. Their doomsday scenarios failed to come to pass, yet nevertheless many of the less fatal, but still pernicious, consequences have more or less panned out.
It is amazing how, despite the exponential population explosion in the interim, the whole population question has slipped off the public debate agenda. It almost seems to have become a taboo subject, perhaps implying sinister connotations of coercive social engineering as with China's 36-year one-child experiment. The limit has since been raised to two kids, which is still less than replacement rate ... but at least China's trying.
Coupled with this is a mindset that conjoins the whole concept of economic "growth" with a corresponding population increase. We've all heard the mantra: We need more jobs, therefore more consumers to buy the products, etc etc, endlessly and exponentially. In a finite world, it's all a nonsense, of course.
Even in such a relatively low populated neck of the woods as New Zealand, with its short industrial level manufacturing and agrarian history, we're already struggling to mitigate a rapidly growing catalogue of nasty downstream damage, including some of the worst soil erosion rates in the Western world. It's going to take more than a few pines to pull up the Tarndale Slip.
But until we acknowledge that real growth is all about quality and not just quantity, then we'll continue to exert all manner of undue pressures on ourselves. As I said, we can't even manage what is in effect -- in world terms -- a one-horse town like Auckland.
Top that off with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world and growing ghettoes of inter-generationally disenfranchised, and it's a sorry, unnecessary situation.
Given all our rich natural resources and relative prosperity -- and a degree of isolation that creates a healthy buffer between us and the extremes elsewhere -- we should be the exemplar for the rest of the planet for balanced population and sustainable living.
It's almost as if we're trying to keep down with the Joneses. Sometimes I'm tempted to agree with Dame Edna's appraisal of New Zealand as a land of 30 million sheep, four million of whom are human.