We stand before a raging conflagration of our own making, desperately pouring fuel upon it while believing ourselves to be firefighters. The fire is global human population growth; the fuel is industrially produced food. For many generations, we have operated under a single, compelling directive: to feed a growing population, we must produce more food. This seems self-evident, a moral imperative. Yet this foundational belief is catastrophically inverted. Our relentless drive to increase the food supply is not dousing the flames of hunger but is the very act of feeding the fire that creates more hunger, overwhelming our planet’s capacity to sustain life.
This tragic error stems from a profound cognitive disconnect: we have replaced the reality of the finite biosphere with the fiction of the infinite marketplace. Our economic models, built on logically contrived abstractions of perpetual growth and demand, treat food as a dependent variable --- a commodity that must scale to meet human wants. Ecology and population biology reveal the opposite truth: food is the independent variable, the primary lever of carrying capacity. By flooding the system with fossil-fuel-powered abundance, we have poured accelerant on the human population for two centuries, creating a vicious positive feedback loop. More food allows more people to live; more people are then cited as the reason to produce even more food. We are not solving hunger; we are stoking the fire, ensuring the absolute number of the vulnerable grows with the swelling base population.
The repercussions of this biologically inverted logic are the pillars of our polycrisis. The population explosion --- from one to eight billion in a geological instant --- is the multiplier of every ecological breakdown. Feeding this fire demands the conversion of wild lands into monocultures, mining ancient aquifers, saturating the soil with fertilizers and filling the atmosphere with carbon emissions which in turn fuels climate destabilization, biodiversity collapse and environmental degradation. The marketplace sees this as increased productivity and gross domestic product (GDP). The biosphere registers it as systemic liquidation, a drawdown of finite natural capital for transient surplus.
Acknowledging this is the first, non-negotiable step toward a habitable future. It demands a fundamental re-orientation of our civilization’s goal: from maximizing market exchange within an imaginary Cornucopian fantasy-world to optimizing human wellbeing within a finite and fragile planetary home. This means consciously and humanely beginning to reduce the global fuel supply --- the scale of industrial food production—to a level the planet can sustain indefinitely, while ensuring equitable distribution of what is produced to all those in need of sustenance. In other words, the imperative is to provide sustenance consciously and humanely, which requires scaling down the global fuel supply --- the vast engine of industrial food production --- to a sustainable level, ensuring that what we produce is equitably shared by all in need.
This is not austerity; it is the responsible management of abundance to prevent a future of irreversible, catastrophic scarcity. Concomitantly, we must empower every person with the means and rights to control their own reproduction. Universal access to voluntary contraception and the elevation of women’s rights are not separate issues; they are essential partners in damping the fire’s core drivers.
Transforming our economic system from a market-based engine of plunder, extraction and liquidation of earth's limited resources into a biosphere-based framework for stewardship is the monumental task. Finance, currently a fiat money circulation system concerned only with its own velocity and volume, must be recalibrated to serve the metabolic health of the planet. This requires true cost accounting that internalizes the price of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, soil erosion and water depletion. Capital must flow toward regeneration, not short-sighted, destructive raids on the earth's reserves. Economic success must be measured not by GDP but by indicators of ecological integrity, climate stability, and genuine human welfare.
Culturally, we must replace the hubris of human exceptionalism with ecological literacy and a recognition of our embedded creatureliness as human animals within the web of life of earth. Education must pivot from ideologically driven, preternatural, neoclassical economic and demographic theories to ground leaders and citizens in the scientific laws of thermodynamics and principles of population ecology. We need stewards, not masters; citizens who see themselves as creatures of earth, not as rulers of the universe or detached comptrollers of a lifeless ledger.
The forces of denial in society at many levels of influence are powerful, invested in a status quo that promises technological salvation or fortified escape for a privileged few. But no bunker is deep enough, no island remote enough, no mountaintop hideaway high enough to evade the consequences of a collapsing biosphere. The moment for complacency is gone.
Our generation bears a unique burden: we are the first to see the crisis of the entire earth system clearly, and we may be the last with the agency to alter its trajectory. The equation is stark. We have fed the fire to the brink of planetary burnout. Paths to equilibrium necessarily include the management of the fuel supply with courageous humility—not to create suffering, but to end the cycle that guarantees it. Coupled with justice, empowerment, and a re-founded economics of the biosphere, we can extinguish the flames. We must choose to stop feeding the fire and start tending the only garden we have.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A. is a retired practicing psychologist. In 2001 Steve founded the AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population to raise consciousness of the colossal threat that the unbridled, near exponential growth of absolute global human population numbers poses for life as it is known to us. His campaign has focused upon the best available science of human population dynamics and the topic of human overpopulation of earth in our time. He can be reached at sesalmony@aol.com.
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