Is humankind worth it?

Humans are not one among millions of species on earth. We are, from our planet’s point of view, an out-of-control pestilence like a swarm of locusts. From earth’s point of view, our population needs to be culled to one-tenth or less for the good of the majority of species. I endorse that point of view, regardless of what it implies for my family’s future – regardless of the untold sufferings that must follow when such a culling happens.

Let us estimate our growing collective burden on earth. Our numbers grew from an estimated 200 million in the year 1 AD to 275 million in 1000 AD. This crossed one billion by 1850. This grew to 4 billion by 1975, which grew to 6.6 billion in 2006. By the year 2050, We are likely to cross the nine billion mark.

This means that a population of 75 million – the increase in the entire first millennium after Christ – is added to the global population every year currently!

Worse still, what each individual consumes is also sharply on the rise. The amount of earth’s resources that each individual currently consumes in one year would have been enough to sustain him/her over an entire lifetime a century ago! So, thanks to our continuing technological advancements, the ‘footprint’ of each human being on this planet is thousands of times larger and heavier than originally ‘intended’.

The price is paid by other species. The natural level of extinction is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria and fungi... and not just vertebrates). As against this, going by the rate at which the area of tropical forests are being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, we are currently losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone. Another similar number of species are being driven to extinction in other habitats, such as the seas.

Is the life of homo sapiens worth the lives of so many species? Are we so much superior to the rest of creation?

No, I sincerely believe we are not worth it.