First posted on the 8th of January 2021. Since then we’ve “celebrated” there now being 8,000,000,000 of us human monkeys with little thought to the actual number or the long term consequences in terms of what happens to the planet carrying that load.
In actual fact I took the idea for this post from an article about a second gorilla being born at Bristol Zoo Gardens in six months, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-55422900#:~:text=A%20baby%20gorilla%20has%20been,of%20the%20family%20troop%20nearby.. The birth of a gorilla in a zoo often makes a news story but what if an extra 80,000,000 of them were born in the space of the 366 days of 2020? Where would they all live and what would they all eat. Now in actual fact that’s the extra number of humans born in 2020, the equivalent population to ten countries the size of Switzerland. Few however question how they will be housed or how they will be fed or how many actual gorillas will die as the extra humans take over even more of the planet. It ‘s a story that really doesn’t make the news.
Quite simply we still have a very human centric view of the world very much like the world that Copernicus and Galileo inhabited when they proposed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Copernicus completed his “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in 1532 but did not publish it until two months before his death in 1543. The church eventually banned the book in 1616, https://www.space.com/15684-nicolaus-copernicus.html#:~:text=In%20it%2C%20he%20proposed%20that,by%20Earth’s%20revolutions%20around%20it.. In 1616 Galileo got his first comeuppance for suggesting that the Earth wasn’t as important as the church said it was and he again got his wrist slapped in 1633, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy. For some reason we often cannot see the problems that the human species is causing. Most people would be very concerned if in 2020 an extra 80,000,000 gorillas, elephants, tigers etc had been born. That concern should extend to there having been an extra 80,000,000 human monkeys born. We are not separate from nature, we are part of it and a combination of our numbers and lifestyle is endangering the very life support systems that we take for granted.
Paul Noël 