In an essay by Bromwell Ault, 82, West Palm Beach, Florida, director of www.centerforpublicconscience.org, he said, "It is no exaggeration to say that there is no major issue today that is not exacerbated by the effects of our geometrically increasing population within the confines of our limited physical space. Our rapidly increasing world and national population is the "mother of all" issues and is reflected in its derivatives such as public health, species loss, environmental degradation, aquifer depletion, climate destabilization, economics, diminishing natural resources, population migrations, religious conflicts, political wars, expansion of contagious diseases and many other aspects of our global and local society."
As I gaze over Denver, I cannot help but wonder what goes on in Governor Bill Ritter's mind and the other 49 state governors. They all call for growth. They applaud growth. They worship growth. They encourage more jobs and population growth in their states. Even the astute mind of President Obama applauds growth and voted to double legal immigration from 1.2 million annually to 2.5 million while a U.S. Senator with his vote for S.1639 in June 2007.
It's almost as if the miseries of Mexico City, Mexico; Mumbai, India; Shanghai, China; Dhaka, Bangladesh and San Paulo, Brazil do not count, do not register-in fact, expressly avoided at all costs. Those things cannot happen in America! I try to think about what thoughts run through Obama, UK's Brown, Mexico's Calderon, Australia's Rudd, Russia's Putin, France's Sarkozy and other world leaders' minds? Why aren't the leaders of China and India screaming out to the other world leaders that overpopulation fails on every level for humans and animals alike? Why the silence?
"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste." ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, 3 December 1960
I hope you ponder this essay deeper than a glancing moment. I hope you take action with your mind and body. I hope you become aware and appreciative. I hope you join me in driving America's overpopulation crisis to the front pages of our newspapers and onto the tongues of our radio talk show hosts and all the way to the national TV shows. And finally, to the U.S. Congress and president! We cannot afford to ignore it any longer if we hope to bequeath a sustainable future to our children.
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