The Population Bomb Is Real — But It’s Not What You Think

The imminent explosion of humanity.

I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth today, and we humans have become a disease, the Human pox.

David Foreman, hardcore American environmentalist and cofounder of Earth First! who passed away last year at the age of 75.

Foreman’s dour assessment stands in contrast to the optimistic tone struck by God in His exhortation to Adam and Eve at the dawn of time, after He willed the Earth into existence (as Biblical creationists would have us believe):

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

We’ve ignored God’s instructions in countless ways in the six thousand years since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for biting into the wrong apple. But on this issue, at least, we’ve mostly heeded His counsel: the seed of the First Couple gave rise to the more than eight billion humans alive on the planet today.

Evolutionary theory, the more mainstream view of our beginnings, provides substantially more runway for population growth. By that construct it’s been 350,000 years since the modern version of humans showed up in Africa (as improvements on apelike creatures which five million years earlier took it into their heads to toddle about on…