We Humans Are Incompatible With The Planet

I love to write angry essays about how climate change will wreck our world and destroy our life support systems, but there’s a more insidious killer lurking in our human closet. The killer is us, and we’re responsible for driving a massive extinction of flora and fauna.

Why? Because we’re over-consuming and we have exceeded our carrying capacity severalfold. We are incompatible with our earth, nature, and the environment. We are viruses that are consuming resources with abandon and not giving a shit because we’re Amazon Prime members.

Carrying capacity

For the longest time, I’ve been wondering just how many of us humans can live on this planet. How many of us are “too many?” This is often referred to as the carrying capacity of the planet. How many humans can the planet sustain without destroying itself in the process?

It would appear that I am not the first person to wonder about this. Thomas Malthus and his population model first looked at how many humans can be reasonably sustained on this earth. More scientists are working hard on this question now.

What’s the answer? Just how many humans can the Earth sustain? The answers are all over the map.

If you were to take the mode of the number of observations of reports, I’d say the answer is less than 8 billion.

However, I’d like to hypothesize that these reports look at the carrying capacity of humans only; we’re only in this for ourselves. We’re not looking at how we’re affecting the floral and fauna populations because we see them as resources to be consumed by us. We don’t give a shit about them.

Leaving the sage grouse behind

I was doom scrolling through TikTok the other day and came across a clip from some movie. The new governor of a desert state was wondering why one policy was protecting the endangered sage grouse and another policy was building a solar farm to fight climate change in the area where the sage grouse lives.

Granted, this was a movie or TV show, but we all know what happens. In the end, the sage grouse gets fucked so we can keep our Christmas lights on overnight and feel good about fighting climate change because our electricity comes from solar panels.