By LEONARDO BOFF*
From homicides, ethnocides and ecocides we became biocides because we are the ones that most threaten and destroy the life of nature
Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, notable scientists, in the well-known book Microcosmos (1990) state with data from fossil records and evolutionary biology itself that one of the signs of the imminent collapse of a species is its rapid overpopulation.
Such collapse can be verified with microorganisms placed in the Petri dish (glass plates overlaid with colonies of bacteria and nutrients). By a kind of instinct, just before they reach the edges of the plate and run out of nutrients, they multiply exponentially. And suddenly they all die. Wouldn't we be on this path of exponential human population growth and exposed to disappearing? The data points to this eventuality.
It took humanity a million years to reach a billion people in 1850. The two billion mark was reached in 1927; three billion in 1960; four billion in 1974; five billion in 1987; six billion in 1999; seven billion in 2011; and finally eight billion in 2023. It is estimated that around 2050 we will reach the target limit of 10-11 billion inhabitants. This means that humanity grew by one billion inhabitants every 12 to 13 years, a growth that makes you think.
It is the undeniable triumph of our species. But it is a triumph that could threaten our survival on planet Earth, due to overpopulation and because we have exceeded the regeneration capacity of the living planet, Earth, by 64%.
For humanity, the authors comment, as a result of the growing and rapid growth of the population, planet Earth may be made up of a Petri dish. In fact, we occupy almost the entire earth's surface, leaving only 17% free, as it is inhospitable like the deserts and high snowy or rocky mountains.
Unfortunately, according to several scientists, we have inaugurated a new geological era, the Anthropocene. From homicides, ethnocides and ecocides we became biocides because we are the ones who most threaten and destroy the life of nature. We know from life and Earth sciences that every year hundreds of species disappear naturally or through human aggression, after having lived millions of years on the planet.
The extinction of species belongs to the evolution of the Earth itself, which has known at least six major mysterious mass extinctions. Notable are the Devonian 370-360 million years ago it wiped 70-80% of all species off the map and that of Permian, from 250 million years ago, is also called “The Great Death” in which 95% of living organisms became extinct. The last, the sixth, is taking place before our eyes under the Anthropocene in which we humans, according to the late great biologist EO Wilson, extinguished between 70-100 thousand species of living organisms.
The fact is that human overpopulation has touched the limits of the Earth. We would also know the same fate of the bacteria inside the Petri Dish, that when a high point of overpopulation is reached, they suddenly end up dying?
One wonders, has it not been our turn in the evolutionary process to disappear from the face of the Earth? The hypothesis that the planet is so rapidly inhabited by so many billions of humans and has effectively become a Petri Dish makes perfect sense.
Only this time the extinction would not be due to a natural process, even if mysterious, but by human action itself. Our industrialist and heartless civilization, in its desire for power and domination, has created something absolutely irrational: the principle of self-destruction by various types of lethal weapons of all life as well as ours.
We have already done the worst: when the Son of God became incarnate in our hot and mortal flesh, we rejected him, condemned him by a double judgment, one religious and the other political, and murdered him, nailing him to the cross outside the city, as curse sign.
After this nefarious and ominous act, anything is possible, even our own self-destruction. Exterminating ourselves is less serious than killing the Son of God himself who passed through this world only doing good. “He came to his own and his own did not receive him” states with infinite sadness the evangelist John (Jo 1,11).
But let us console ourselves: he was resurrected, he showed himself as “the new being” (novissimus Adam: 2Cor 15,45:XNUMX), now free from having to die and in the fullness of his humanity. It would be a revolution in evolution and the early sampling of the good end of all life.
For professors of faith, we believe and hope that the Spiritus Creator, can still enlighten human minds so that they become aware of the risk of disappearing and end up returning to cordial rationality, knowing how to retreat and defining a path of love, pity and compassion towards all their fellow human beings, towards nature and towards Mother Earth . And then we would still have a future. This is how we want it and the Creator also wants it.
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our Common Home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes).
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