Overpopulation

January 16, 2007

I'm not the world's biggest fan of people, except for many of the people I happen to actually know—either in real life or through recordings or books. The people I don't happen to know may be okay, especially the extremely attractive ones, if I happen to have occasion to see them, or the people who provide some necessary service that in one way or another I need, but as for the rest, they don't really loom all that large for me. The bulk of humanity is a little like the rain forest. People always talk about the rain forest and how pretty or fascinating it is. Fine. But it's only pretty to someone of my culture (North American) in photographs, and it's only fascinating on cable TV or in the pages of Scientific American. In person it's apparently hot and slimy and full of bugs and snakes. Mankind was not meant to live in such an environment. We're far more suited to extremely large and well-staffed apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Back to Lagos. I don't know anything about that city other than what I read in a recent (and since discarded) New Yorker article explaining that architect Rem Koolhaas's admiration for the city was misplaced or, worse, hypocritical. The author of the article (George Packer) painted a hellish picture of the city.

Lagos is only a case study. But the huge population surge over the last sixty years there and elsewhere on the planet is similar to the multiplication of the ocean's dead zones, where mammoth blooms of microscopic life, fed by runoff from industrial fertilizers, choke out all the higher life forms. Large sectors of today's urban humanity are essentially like so many algal blooms on the periphery of petroleum-fueled prosperity. But the difference is that algae or phytoplankton or what have you doesn't know not to bloom, whereas people can decide when to reproduce and when not to. Fortunately, all the people who are alive today will eventually die, maybe in large numbers, swiftly, from an avian flu, or else eventually, from natural causes. In the meantime, there are many practical solutions to . . .

Um, sorry. I got carried away. I was reading the news again. When I read the news I get depressed about things like overpopulation and global warming. I mean, I'm a guy who likes the idea of huge, snowy fields and towns with no more than quadruple- or quintuple-digit populations and plenty of colonial homes on large lots with huge trees. For me, the prospects in the twenty-first century are more than a little alarming. I'm inclined to quit striving altogether. To spend my days drinking beer and watching DVDs and VHS tapes or listening to great music on the turntable for the rest of my life (supporting myself with odd jobs in the service sector or at some sort of help-desk), helpless in the face of the apocalypse. Another thing I turn to is daydreaming. Here's an example of one of my daydreams.

© 2010 Russell David Harper