Tag Archives: Overpopulation

Arts, Environment, Opinion

Turning Down the Heat

By Maureen Williams and the FOCI Climate Action Committee

In early July of 2024, a small group of Cortes Islanders, supported by Friends Of Cortes Island (FOCI), screened the film “How to Boil a Frog” for the community. The film is about the five-pronged problem life on Earth is currently facing — overpopulation, a war on nature, wealth disparity, peak oil, and climate change—and offers five actions that can help—boycott Exxon, change your “life” bulb (reduce consumption), a change of heart, one kid per couple, and kick some ass. This article is the first in a series focused on each of these five solutions from the film, and more. You can learn more about the film and the filmmaker, Jon Cooksey, here and here. You can even watch the film, here.

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Environment, Opinion

The Quada Project: Beyond 1.5°C

The consensus of scientists is that limiting the global temperature rise of 1.5°C is no longer reachable, but limiting it to below 2.0°C is possible, according to an analysis of global information undertaken by the Inevitable Policy Response study from Britain (Jacob Thomae, New Scientist, 2 December 2023, “Keeping our Cool”). We were once on a path to 3.5°C, which has been reduced to 2.4°C by 2100. But the IPR study thinks that we have a 90% chance of holding the temperature increase to between 1.7 and 1.8°C, primarily because of the progress that has been made on green energy since the Paris Agreement in 2015. This is the good news.

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Environment, Opinion

The Quadra Project: Welcome to 2024

Unless you’re brave enough to consider the reality of our global environmental situation, don’t read this. Confronting it is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic, but of being realistic—of assessing what we’re doing on our planet, what we want to avoid, what we want to accomplish, and what we can do both collectively and individually to have a more promising future. In one more year we will have reached a quarter of the way to 2100, and we are well on our way to creating conditions that we will either applaud or bemoan.

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Environment, Opinion

The Quadra Project: Polycrisis

A new word, “polycrisis”, has entered the vocabulary of ecologists, particularly those scientists who are monitoring the health of the entire planet. Some of these scientists are uncomfortable with the word, arguing that it is an alarmist term. They believe that we have various crises, in the plural, but they are not indicative of the widespread description that is implicit in such a cataclysmic term as polycrisis. Some historians say that what we are experiencing “is just history happening.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the relationship between ecology and human behaviour, argues that such a term as polycrisis is an apt description of what is actually happening on our planet, and it is the result of multiple factors. The word, he says, was first coined in the 1990s at the World Economic Forum to describe the “tangled mess of problems” that seemed to be occurring—“pandemic, war, climate extremes, energy shortages, inflation, rising authoritarianism, and the like.” The term, however, proved useful.

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Disaster

The Quadra Project: Overshoot – Part 2

The essence of the proposition that Professor William Rees presents in The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable, is that human population, consumption and pollution have combined to exceed the ability of our planet’s limited ecological systems to sustain it. This situation is not unusual. It has commonly happened in the past with other civilizations, and is a frequent and natural occurrence in all biological systems. Overshoot, then, is just the inability of species to be supported by their environment if they exceed its carrying capacity. This, Professor Rees suggests, is now the condition in which humanity finds itself. Earth is not big enough, rich enough, or regenerative enough to deal with the impact of more than 8 billion people who are hungry, materialistic, wasteful and unrestrained. The result, he suggests, will be a major “population correction” by the end of this century.

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