Spirituality on a crowded lifeboat

Spiritual values have helped our species pull through, time after time, during our 100,000 or so years on Earth. And sociobiologists will tell you that this tender regard for our tribe is built into our DNA.

Sadly, few go on to confront the spiritual challenge our species now faces: how to continue to be kind and loving, yet at the same time incorporate the stark necessity of reducing our numbers.

Some of this goes with our tender loving instincts. For example, the more rights and opportunities women have, the few the children they have, on average.

But that will only slow the rate of growth, not get our total numbers down to the point where a billion of us aren't starving and 16,000 children (according to the UN) die of starvation-related causes every day. And down to the point where we aren't emptying the oceans of edible fish, stripping the land of its fertility, outstripping the supply of drinkable water, destroying the tropical forests that generate two thirds of the oxygen we need, and stop amping up the climate through such massive greenhouse gas production.

To accomplish all that we need less "we." A lot less. Like the one billion or so that existed around 1900.

But how to do that and stay human? It goes against our fiber to celebrate every disaster that kills people by the thousands, to encourage abortion and sterilization, to celebrate war and death (I know, Al Qaeda does most of this with gusto, but they're aberrant).

The world--especially the poor countries--needs to adopt China's One Child law. The world needs to make responsible family planning a core value. Large families need to come to be regarded as a crime against humanity.

I realize how terrible this all sounds. And we don't have to do any of this. You're free to deny the truth of what I'm saying, to extemporize and equivocate, to demand yet more "studies" be done to see if we're really in this much trouble. You can denounce people like me as Enviro-nut Jeremiahs.

But then Nature will solve our problem, and you'll like Nature's blind, brutal solutions a whole lot less that what I'm proposing here.

Want a sneak preview? Visit Haiti, where the population has quadrupled since 1950 and they've chopped down 98% of their trees for firewood, leaving the denuded land to turn into desert as each winters' rains wash away more and more topsoil.

Things don't always work out. The dinosaurs reigned for 100 million years, but then an asteroid took them out. The tragedy is that we don't need an asteroid. We've figured out how to do it ourselves.

So now we have to sacrifice part of what we hold dearest, in order to leave our future generations a place to live that isn't a hellhhole.

Remember, to paraphrase someone, "Civilization exists by Nature's consent--revocable without notice."