This will be the last CSR Newsletter of the Fall semester.
Have a great holiday season and I will see you in 2014!
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Some stark quotes from a review of the book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? that appeared recently in The New York Times Book Review:
“If we wanted to bring about the extinction of the human race as quickly as possible, how might we proceed? … the most effective measure, counterintuitive as it may be, would be to increase our numbers. … The more people, the greater the likelihood of ecological collapse, nuclear war, plague.”
“Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably — would be 1.5 billion.”
“[The author’s] dire warnings, and the warnings of the scientists and government officials he interviews, are unrelenting, with variations of the following sentence appearing at regular intervals: ‘In the entire history of biology, every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.’”
“From Thomas Malthus to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of The Population Bomb (1968), population doomsayers have endured ridicule and vilification, largely because their predictions of imminent doom fail to materialize on schedule. In our own time, there are a few mitigating indicators. Much of the current population growth comes in the developing world, where carbon consumption remains low, so the environmental effect is relatively muted. The next thousand Americans will do more than twice as much damage as the next hundred thousand Nigeriens.”
“The grim prophecies are illustrated with statistics. Each year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt; by 2040, China will have more than 100 million 80-year-olds. We add another million people every four and a half days.”
Thoughts worth pondering as we enter the most materialistic (sorry, I meant ‘festive’) time of the year!
Take care
David
David Chandler & Bill Werther
Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: http://www.sagepub.com/chandler3e/
Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
Earth Control
By Nathaniel Rich
October 13, 2013
The New York Times Book Review
Late Edition – Final
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