Overpopulation

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

Panicking over the planet and population is pointless

One sign of moral panic is that when the facts change, the fears remain the same. In the 1970s, the Washington Post, TIME and Newsweek stoked fears of “a new ice age.” As soon as scientists updated their models to show a trend in the other direction, “global warming” became as threatening as global cooling. And when winters stubbornly kept happening and the direst predictions of new-age prophets like Al Gore failed to come to pass, the whole thing was rebranded as “climate change.” Whatever the label, and whatever the underlying phenomenon was thought to be, the moral implication remained the same — human beings were ruining the earth and must curtail their comforts to save the planet. Bad weather used to be God’s punishment for human sinfulness.

panic

Wednesday

Cockburn

Leonardo DiCaprio only dates women under twenty-five BECAUSE he’s an eco-warrior

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend being shoved overboard as soon as she reaches the ripe age of twenty-five. But while killjoys are moaning online about the actor’s disposition, Cockburn believes that DiCaprio is actually carrying out God’s work. Climate change, pollution, the energy crisis — the reason for these disasters is simple: there are just too many people on earth. How does this relate to a middle-aged actor dating young supermodels, you ask? Simple: Leo is stealing their best child-bearing years one at a time without impregnating them. Now, Cockburn is no scientist — but he bets that if Leo keeps this up for a few more decades, you will literally see the oceans get clearer. He’s done the math.

leonardo dicaprio

Thursday

Tom Meek

How green is your Soylent?

In 1966, when Harry Harrison penned his dystopian thriller Make Room! Make Room!, which began life as a serial in Impulse magazine, he predicted that by 1999, there would be more than 7 billion people on earth, and a robust 35 million in New York City alone. The 1973 film adaptation of Harrison’s novel, Soylent Green, altered several aspects of Harrison’s novel, including the year in which the thriller is set: 2022. Now that we’re there (and decades past 1999), it’s worth asking: did Soylent Green director Richard Fleischer and his writer, Stanley R. Greenberg, get things right?

Soylent

Sunday

Vijai Maheshwari

Back to Bangalore

India’s fast-growing population now stands at 1.38 billion, just shy of China’s ginormous 1.4 billion. China’s population is rapidly aging, so it’s only a matter of time before a youthful India —average age twenty-nine to China’s thirty-seven — overtakes its communist neighbor and becomes the most populous nation on the planet. I left India as a child, and just spent two months in Bangalore, selling some ancestral property. Bangalore is India’s booming tech hub and Silicon Valley; most major American tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have opened large offices there to manage their back-end operations.

india