Nah.
The other species are being driven to extinction in direct proportion to our success. We have wiped out far more species than the commercially important ones you mention. But there is no food production problem in world (for human beings). There are pockets of starvation - as there always have been - but the vast majority of people in the world have enough to eat, and a sizeable (pun?) number are concerned about the opposite problem, i.e. overeating.
AIDS is taking its toll, as diseases always have, but I think populations are still increasing in all countries where it is a significant problem.
The ocean is being fucked over the way the land has been, but this will not slow us down much. The Chinese eat a lot of fish, but very little comes from the ocean. They farm fish, and that is what the rest of the world will be doing when the wild stocks are destroyed.
The idea that global warming will cause human beings to disappear is a joke. It will require adjustments, changes in agricultural practices, some relocation. This is business as usual for the human species. I predict that food production will increase as atmospheric CO2 and temperatures rise, because plants like this.
Soil exhaustion will presumably also force changes in the way we grow food, but in the worst case this will probably just mean we get by with less. There are great food production surpluses worldwide and tremendous waste in the food system - e.g. growing beef is very expensive in terms of land, water and energy. If we had to (perish the thought) we could cut out most meat and supply all most of our protein needs from plants at a great increase in efficiency.
No doubt there will be wars - as always - but war has never been a really effective way to cut the population.
Apart from dramatic events like meteor-strike, the main possible cause of large-scale loss of life is an epidemic. There have always been epidemics, and it would be foolish to believe they will not continue to occur. But with our scientific and medical knowledge and all the other technological tools at our disposal I think we are better equipped to withstand an epidemic than ever. Even when we had no understanding and only primitive means of communication epidemics didn't make a serious dent in the global population. It's very hard to imagine a disease wiping us out.
Here's my prediction. The human species will continue to flourish on earth for a long time to come, taking climatic changes, diseases, disasters, wars, etc in its stride. We will find ways to live in places that are currently inhospitable, if necessary. We will clear the planet of most of the human-scale species that are not useful to us (clearly we will have little impact on microscopic life, or even on ant-scale life). For example, mammalian species that are not amenable to domestication, or not worth domesticating, will be wiped out (except for the lucky few who get to live in zoos or reserves). We will keep those life-forms that are important to us, for food, fibre, and other purposes.
In other words, we will fulfil the biblical injunction to go forth and multiply. In the words of someone in Catch 22 (Colonel Cathcart?), why did God give us two good hands if it wasn't to grab everything we could with them?
Does this make me an optimist, or a pessimist? |
