THE ESSENCE OF DAVIDISM IS THAT THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF LIFE ON EARTH. THEY ARE (1) THE UNNATURAL WORLD OF HUMANS THAT IS NOT A PART OF NATURE BUT SOMETHING EXTERNAL, FOREIGN, HARMFUL, AND A THREAT TO NATURE, AND (2) THE NATURAL WORLD CONSISTING OF INNOCENT AND LOVABLE CREATURES THAT LIVE IN AN OTHERWISE PERFECT WORLD BUT WITH THE EVER PRESENT THREAT OF THE HUMANS OF THE UNNATURAL WORLD.

THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF TWO YOUTUBE VIDEOS ON POPULATION DAVIDISM THAT REACHES BACK TO MALTHUS AND PAUL EHRLICH TO PREACH A HORRIFIC THREAT TO THE “NATURAL WORLD” POSED BY POPULATION GROWTH IN THE UNNATURAL WORLD WITH THE ENDLESSLY REPEATED DOGMA THAT GROWTH WITHOUT LIMITS IS NOT POSSIBLE “ON A FINITE PLANET“.

ABSTRACT: Population Davidism expressed in these videos is a mirror image of this sordid history of envronmentalism gone awry. Environmentalism, which started out as a movement to enhance the quality of life of humans by managing their environs (surroundings), has now been turned 180 degrees by Davidism. Here environmentalism is seen not as care of humans by humans but but the care by humans of the rest of nature other than humans. Davidism holds the rest of nature other than humans as the sacred NATURAL WORLD. In Davidism, as in Bambi-ism, the environmental ideal is a humanless world where Bambi and friends can frolic. LINK TO RELATED POST ON BAMBI: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/15/the-bambi-principle/ This fallacious anti-human view of environmentalism leads to fallacious anti-human conclusions and alarming observations that there are too many humans on earth. DAVIDISM is a flawed view of nature. Humans are part of nature and not an external evil force from which nature needs to be saved by DAVIDISM.

VIDEO#1

THE TRANSCRIPT

I have no doubt that the fundamental source of all our problems, particularly our environmental problems, is population growth. I can’t think of a single problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve if there were less people. And the projections now are … uh… awesome. In the time that I have been making these programs the population of the world has tripled – just in my lifetime! And we all know about geometric growth {the bigger it gets the faster it grows}. And that uh if you were able uh which obviously you can’t uh if we were able to stem it we might be able to have a better chance to grapple with the problem but we can’t. Uh the best we can do is to slow down the rate of increase. We certainly can’t stop it. The one source of comfort, it’s only a tiny thread, is that the knowledge that wherever you empower women, wherever they have the vote, wherever they’ve had the education wherever they have the free will and are in charge of their own lives not dictated to by men uh the birthrate falls. Which is a very good reason for getting rid of slums for increasing education and for for uh dealing with all the other social problems that many people uh many places have. Uh and if there is a shaft of light there but it’s only a very thin shaft.

VIDEO#2

THE TRANSCRIPT

Fifty years ago when the WWF was founded there were about 3 billion people on earth. Now there are almost 7 billion. Over twice as many. And every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food, or to get others to grow it for them, space to build schools, roads, and airfields. Where will that {all that space} come from? A little may be taken from land occupied by other people. But most of it could only come from the land which for millions of years animals and plants had for themselves. THE NATURAL WORLD. The impact of these extra millions of people will spread far beyond the space that they phusically claim. The spread of industrialization has changed the chemical consistency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. And the earth is warming. {The population bomb created the climate bomb}. We now realize that the disasters that have grown increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all. The unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet. There have been prophets that have warned us of this impending disaster. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. His most important book, Essay on the Principle of Population, was published almost 200 years ago in 1798. In it he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he called misery and vice. Today, for some reason, that prophecy appears to be largely ignored or generally disregarded. It is true that he did not foresee the so called Green Revolution which increased the amount of food that we could produce in any given area of arable land. And there may be other advances in our food producing skills that we ourselves can’t foresee. But such advances only delay the inevitable because the fundamental truth that Malthus established still remains the truth today and that is that there cannot be more prople on this earth than can be fed. Many people would like to deny that this is so. They would like to believe in that oxymoron called “Sustainable Growth“. Kenneth Bowling, President Kennedy’s Environmental Adviser 45 years ago said something about this. “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical ON A PHYSICALLY FINITE PLANET, he said is either mad or an economist. The population of the world is now is growing at nearly 80 million a year, 1.5 million per week, equivalent to 220,000 per day, 9132 per hour, 152 per minute or 2.5 per second. In this country (UK) it is projected to grow by 10 million in 22 years. All these people in this country and worldwide rich or poor need and deserve food, energy, water, and space. Will they be able to get it? I don’t know. I hope so. You may have seen the government’s foresight report on the future of food and ???. It shows how hard it is to feed the 7 billion of us who are alive today. There are many obstacles that are already making this hard to achieve. Soil erosion, suddelization??? , the depletion of aquifers, overgrazing, the spread of plant diseases as a result of globalization, the absurd use of food crops to turn into biofuels to feed motor cars instead of people. So we’ve underlined how desperately difficult it is going to be to feed a population that is projected to stabilize in the range of 8 to 10 billion peope by the year 2050. I suspect that you could read the scores of reports by bodies concerened with global problems and see that population is clearly the driver that underlies them all. And yet find no reference to this obvious fact in any of them. CLIMATE CHANGE tops the environmental agenda at present. We all know that every additional person needs to use some carbon energy if only for ????? and so therefore creates more carbon dioxide. But of course a rich person will produce vastly more than a poor man. Similarly we can see that every extra person is and will be an extra victim of climate change and the poor will suffer more than the rich. Why it is a strange silence? (??). I mean nobody disagrees that population growth is a problem. No one except flat earthers who deny that the planet is finite. We can all see it in that beautiful picture of our earth taken by the Apollo mission. It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human populations will quite definitely ?stop a topmite? And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner by fewer human births by contraception, the humane way, a powerful option that allows all of us to deal with the problem if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate the way in which all other creatures will suffer through famine or disease or predation. That, translated into human terms, means famine or disease. or war over oil or water or food or food or ?grazing rights? or just living space. There is alas no third alternative of indefinite growth. The sooner we stabilize our numbers the sooner we will running up the down escalator. Stop population increase, stop the escalator, and we have some chance to reach the top and that’s to say a decent life for all. To do that requires several things. First and foremost it needs a much wider understanding of the problem and that will not happen while the absurd taboo on discussing it remains such a powerful grip on the minds of so many otherwise worthy ???????. Then it needs a change in our culture so that while everyone retains the right to have as many children as they would like, they understand that having large families means compounding the problems for their children and everybody else’s children that they will face in the future. It needs action by governments. In my view all countries should develop a population policy. Some 70 countries already have them in one form or another and ?different? priorities. So now our destiny is in our hands. There is one glimmer of hope. Wherever women have the vote, wherever they are literate, and have the medical facilities to control the number of children. the birth rate falls. But what can each of us do? You or I. Well, there is just one thing I would ask. Break the taboo in public and in private as best you can and as you ?judge right? Until it’s broken here, until it’s broken there is no hope of the action we need. Wherever and whenever we speak of the environment add a few words to ensure that the population environment is not ignored. Every one of these global problems, social as well as environmental becomes more difficult and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more people. TEXT ON SCREEN: {Population is clearly one of the drivers that underlies all global problems. The sooner we stabilize our numbers the sooner we stop running up the down escalator. Our destiny is in our hands. Communication is the catalyst for change. http://www.theknowledgexchange.org}

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

PART-1: PAUL EHRLICH’S POPULATION BOMB BOMBED

In the Population growth data from the World Bank: LINK: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW we find that the annual rate of global population growth rose from 1.35% in 1960 to around 2.1% in the late 1960s and stayed at around 2.1% until 1970. This was the period when Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb was published. Its many apocalyptic forecasts by both the author of the book and by its many devotees have all been proven comically false. Some of these forecasts are listed below. Exactly the same arguments made in these DAVIDISM videos were made a few years ago by Paul Ehrlich in his now defunct population bomb hypothesis as seen in this video:

Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University: 1970a: Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born and by 1975 food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

1968a:  The battle to feed humanity has been lost. There will be a major food shortage in the US in the 1970s and hundreds of millions are going to starve to death and by the 1980s most of the world’s important resources will be depleted. 65 million Americans will die of starvation between 1980-1989 and that by 1999, the US population will decline to 22.6 million. The problems in the US will be relatively minor compared to those in the rest of the world.

1968b: By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

1970b: In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

1970c: Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born and by 1975 food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

1970d: Air pollution will take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone and 200,000 Americans will die in 1973 due to “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles. DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945 and these people have a life expectancy of only 49 years. Life expectancy will reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

1975:  Since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rain forests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.

2015:  Australia is working to become a third-world country through its economic dependence on mining natural resources for export and reliance on coal mining.

Denis Hayes, Organizer of Earth Day It is already too late to avoid mass starvation of all humans on earth.

Peter Gunter, Demography Professor, North Texas State University: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.

SOILENT GREEN: These apocalyptic scenarios led to the movie Soilent Green, the apex of this comical episode of an obsession with death by the population bomb. In the movie, the population bomb problem of too many people and not enough food is solved by turning people into food.

DECLINING GROWTH RATE: Yet, since that time, over the last 50 years, from 1970 to 2020 the rate of population growth has steadily declined from 2.1% in 1970 when the polulation was 3.7 billion to 1.1% in 2019 when the population was 7.7 billion. This observed decline is natural and understood in terms of population dynamics of any species. It is not a creation of population activism. We should also note that a declining growth rate in a growing population cannot be described as geometric growth as claimed in the video.

THE POPULATION BOMB: The continued obsession with the population bomb seen in the two Davidism videos above is also seen in a related post : LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/29/prophets-of-doom/ , where we find that the Ehrlichean population fearology continues unabated even though the rate of population growth has steadily declined and even though all population studies now forecast continued decline in population growth rate.

COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION: A new twist in population fearology that encompasses climate change fearology is the coming collapse of civilization to be caused by a growing population on a finite planet. It is proposed that our population and climate problems will cause human civilization to collapse just as it had collapsed in the past as for example in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This collapse of civilization has become a common theme in environmental doomology as seen in the two links below.

LINK#1 EHRLICHIAN collapse : https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/16/collapse/

LINK#2 DAVIDISM collapse: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/24/collapse-of-civilization-part-2/

PART-2: THE RESURRECTION OF FAILED MALTHUSIANISM

Both the Ehrlichian Population Bomb and the Population Davidism preached in the videos above are derived from a legacy of failed Malthusianism. Quite unlike the Ehrlichean Population Bomb where Malthus is cited but not brandished, the DAVIDISM presented in the videos above makes a point of citing Malthus as a way of validating the new population Davidism being preached. The DAVIDISM defense of Malthus is that yes he could not foresee the Green Revolution, but his theory is fundamentally sound and now that the Green Revolution has come and gone there is nothing left to save humanity from Malthusianism – growing population with a fixed agricultural food source. This argument contains a gross misunderstanding of the Green Revolution issue. That issue is that a failure to solve the projected problems of the future with technologies of the past is not a valid argument for forecasts of doom. As for example, our current reliance on land for food on a watery planet may change in the future.

As for the planet being overwhelmed with human population, we should also consider the relative insignificance of humans on a planetary scale that is inconsistent with the DAVIDISM horror of 7.8 billion humans on earth. Consider for example, that even as humans are worried about things like carbon pollution and the population bomb in terms of the planet being overwhelmed by the sheer number of humans on earth, humans, like all life on earth, are carbon life forms created from the carbon that came from the mantle of the planet, but a rather insignificant portion of it.

In terms of total weight, humans constitute 0.05212% of the total mass of life on earth. Yet we imagine that our numbers are so huge that the planet will be overwhelmed by our population bomb. All the life on earth taken together is 0.000002875065% of the crust of the planet by weight. The crust of the planet where we live and where we have things like land, ocean, atmosphere, climate, and carbon life forms, is 0.3203% of the planet by weight. The other 99.6797% of the planet, the mantle and core, is a place where we have never been and will never be and on which we have no impact whatsoever.

In terms of the much feared element carbon that is said to cause planetary devastation by way of climate change and ocean acidification, a mass balance shows that the crust of the planet where we live contains 0.201% of the planet’s carbon some of which appear as carbon lifeforms such as humans. The other 99.8% of the carbon inventory of the planet is in the mantle and core.

The crust of the planet where we live is an insignificant portion of the planet. Life on earth is an insignificant portion of the crust of the planet. Humans are an insignificant portion of life on earth. Although it is true that humans must take care of their environment, we propose that the environment should have a more rational definition because the mass balance above does not show that the whole of the planet is our environment.

The Malthusian and DAVIDISM views of our role on a planetary scale likely derives from the communal nature of humans. Like ants and bees, humans are social creatures that live in communities of humans so that when they look around they see humans everywhere. This is the likely source of our human oriented view of the world. Paul Ehrlich’s overpopulation theory is derived from his first visit to India which he described as “people people people people people!” This biased view makes it possible for us to extrapolate Calcutta to the planet and come up with the fearful image described by Jeff Gibbs as “Have you every wondered what would happen if a single species took over an entire planet?” What we see in these DAVIDISM videos is that DAVIDISM is based on this grossly fallacious view described by Jeff Gibbs.

THE DAVIDISM ASUMPTION THAT THE PLANET IS OVERLOADED WITH HUMANS IS ALSO UNDONE WITH A SIMPLE COMPARISON WITH OTHER LIFE FORMS. FOR EXAMPLE, POLAR KRILL SWARMS ARE TYPICALLY 500 MILLION TONNES IN WEIGHT. THE WEIGHT OF 7.8 BILLION HUMANS WITH AN AVERAGE WEIGHT OF 62KG IS 483 MILLION TONNES, LESS THAN A SINGLE SWARM OF POLAR KRILL.

YET ANOTHER CONCLUSION WE CAN DRAW FROM THIS COMPARISON IS THE ENORMOUS FOOD SOURCE IN THE OCEAN THAT IS OVERLOOKED IN THE LAND BASED ANALYSIS OF MALTHUSIANISM AND DAVIDISM.

IT TURNS OUT THAT THE FINITE PLANET IS A LITTLE BIGGER THAN DAVIDISM THINKS IT IS.

PART-3: THE CLIMATE AND BAMBI CONNECTIONS

The Green Revolution was not an isolated indicent that is now history. The point of the Green Revolution argument against Malthusianism is that Malthus saw doom and gloom ahead because he could not solve future problems with past technologies. This is the essential Malthusian fallacy in which we now find DAVIDISM. Future food issues will not be solved with the old Green Revolution technology but with new ideas and new technologies. The assumption that all food comes from land and that a greater demand for food on a finite land extent will blow up is a land centered view of earth which is mostly ocean. As land becomes scarce future food technologies may harvest the ocean to much greater extent even down to the bottom where a parallel system of life on earth exists drawing their carbon and their energy not from the sun but from the mantle of the planet. The land assumption in DAVIDISM is just as flawed as the fixed technology assumption of Malthus. LINK: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/11/967/251334 .

Food and Agriculture economist Jayson Lusk LINK: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/11/967/251334 Points out yet another flaw in Malthusianism exposed by the post war economic boom in Asia where we find Japan and South Korea are struggling with a declining population and having to import large numbers of workers from South Asia.

On the matter of the “absurd growing of food crops to turn into biofuels for motor cars“, we should point out that this initiative is one required by the “climate emergency” to which DAVIDISIM subscribes whole heartedly as a climate activist. Climate scientists want bofuels to replace fossil fuels and the IPCC had pushed hard for biofuels, a venture that eventually required Indonesia to burn down thousands of square km of forests to plant palm oil plantations for biofuels.

Large parts of DAVIDISM’S NATURAL WORLD, including orangutans and Sumatran Elephants were wiped out in this climate action venture, a venture promoted by DAVIDISM in numerous videos and lectures.

Population Davidism expressed in the videos above is a mirror image of this sordid history of envronmentalism gone awry. Environmentalism which started out as a movement to enhance the quality of life of humans by managing their environs (surroundings) has now been turned 180 degrees by Davidism . Here environmentalism is seen not as care of humans by humans but but the care by humans of the rest of nature other than humans. Davidism holds the rest of nature other than humans as sacred as THE NATURAL WORLD. In Davidism, as in Bambi-ism, the environmental ideal is a humanless world where Bambi and friends can frolic. LINK TO RELATED POST ON BAMBI: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/15/the-bambi-principle/ This fallacious anti-human view of environmentalism leads to fallacious anti-human conclusions. DAVIDISM is a flawed view of nature. Humans are part of nature and not an external evil force from which nature needs to be saved by DAVIDISM.

PART-4: THE BIBLICAL ROOTS OF DAVIDISM

The deeper roots of DAVIDISM and of the Bambi Principle in environmentalism likely derives from Biblical realities described in Genesis. The Biblical roots of the Bambism and DAVIDISM corruption of environmentalism is seen in this Earth Day sermon by Janet Parker:

“Today’s service is in honor of Earth Day, and yesterday the Rock Spring community came together in an extraordinary way to celebrate the goodness of God’s creation and to highlight our role as stewards of creation in our first-ever Earth Day festival. The Earth Day festival was a symphony of creative and inspiring activities that demonstrated our love for the Earth and various ways that we can care for creation and minimize our harmful impacts on the planet. Yet while the mood was celebratory and fun, close attention to the creative exhibits revealed some discordant notes. For example, one of the exhibits that generated interest was the “enviroscape,” an ingenious model that demonstrated how different forms of pollution like pesticides, animal waste, construction materials, litter, agricultural runoff, and oily residue from cars get flushed into our local streams and rivers and run down into the Chesapeake Bay. Exhibits like this reminded us that Earth Day is more than a celebration of nature, though it is surely that. But Earth Day is also implicitly a recognition that something has gone wrong in our relationship with the natural world, something that needs fixing — something that we might describe in religious terms as a call to repentance, and even conversion. Yet here we begin to tread on treacherous ground, because acknowledging the depth of the planetary crisis human beings have created is fraught with danger. I’m not speaking here of political danger, of the suppression of ecological truth by political leaders. I’m speaking of emotional and spiritual danger — the danger that recognition of the true magnitude of our ecological crisis will lead to paralysis and despair. If we are really paying attention, the drumbeat of news about ecological degradation and climate change not only evokes fear, but also a deep sadness. Because if we are tuned in, we sense on some level that the Earth that we know and enjoy right now will not be the Earth that our children and grandchildren inherit. The signs are everywhere. Headlines scream at us: three-fourths of the rockfish in the Chesapeake Bay are diseased. The Shenandoah River is now listed as one of the top ten most endangered rivers in the nation. Glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are melting much faster than expected. Warming temperatures over the next century could turn rich agricultural land into desert, dry out the rainforests, raise sea levels, extinguish countless species, and cause disastrous storms. In fact, most scientists now say that climate change is not some- thing facing us in the future, but is already here. The debate over whether global warming is happening is over. The only question is how bad will it get? Dr. Gustave Speth, dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale, was asked recently if environmental damage due to climate change could be prevented. No, he replied, it’s too late for that. But we may still be able to prevent catastrophic damage. He concluded, “This is our last chance to get it right. We have run out of time.”

This is a reference to the Bible. It is the language of apocalypse — the imagery of the end times and the mysteries of God. The environmental challenges that face us are beginning to look apocalyptic, except now the apocalypse is not a fantasy of fundamentalists, or the stuff of science fiction, but the edge of an abyss that clear- eyed scientists peer over and tremble at. And the threats we face are not orchestrated by God but self-inflicted.

RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/23/apocalyptic-environmentalism-and-climate-change/

ANY HUMAN WHO THINKS THAT THERE TOO MANY HUMANS HERE SHOULD LOOK IN THE MIRROR TO FIND ONE OF THOSE HUMANS THAT SHOULD NOT BE HERE.