Dorothy Bradley: Climate and population - Missoulian

Dorothy Bradley: Climate and population

Last evening, we drove up to Cottonwood Bench, turned off the headlights and waited for the Northern Lights. I suppose we thought they would just show up, like turning on the 10 o’clock news, but they were not to be seen this particular evening. However, exiting the car back at the house, we suddenly heard that astonishing sound — a rapid wawawawa — down in the marsh. The Snipes had returned! And in the deep dusk they were doing their power dives for insects, creating a beautiful, haunting sound called winnowing.

We stood still in the dark, listening to this unique welcome of spring. And then, of course, in a pattern I am perfecting in my 70s, I started worrying. Where are the insects? I have seen nothing except two ants. Not a single splat on my windshield. And what about the hummingbirds who will be punctually arriving in two weeks? I have only seen one single dandelion peek out of the ground, which is still wet from the glacier that covered it all winter. And add to that, will the Tree Swallows be back after a three-year hiatus caused by a migration starvation?

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Carl Sagan, the brilliant planetary scientist, astrophysicist and author who died way too young but made complicated science understandable and vividly exciting for the rest of us mere mortals, said, “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

So in his honor, and the Snipes, I pose my own courageous question. Are there too many people on our planet Earth?

When I was 12, my geologist father published an article in Science Magazine predicting that fresh water would be the first natural resource our planet would run short of, and it would be impacting our standard of living by the year 2000. He wasn’t far off. That prediction, plus Paul Ehrlich’s book, "The Population Bomb," a college graduation gift in 1969, brought me up short. The population then was a little over 3 billion. And suddenly, this year of 2023, it just passed 8 billion! A couple of mischievous friends, remembering my obsession, sent me sympathy cards.

We hear many governments fretting about declining birthrates and the shifting demographic balance, which is impairing our traditional system of supporting the elderly. But logic would tell us that we are supporting an unsustainable proposition. Infinite population growth is not compatible with a finite planet.

Are we willing to support policy changes which recognize these realities? Is maintaining or decreasing the planetary population a sound goal, particularly in the face of today’s natural and human disasters, which the younger population will also have to pay for?

I wish that restoring planetary health was as simple as giving everyone an electric car, but even that idea has convoluted implications. Ending human population growth is at least one key to fighting climate change, bizarre weather patterns, species loss, mass migration, and natural resource depletion.

I don’t have a lot to pin my hopes to, but the human willingness to ask and answer courageous questions is at the top of the list.