The day planet Earth was hit by a huge asteroid (which finished off the dinosaurs) was “one terrible afternoon of immense stress” according to Palaeontologist Andrew Knoll, “but it was short-lived stress and things soon got better.”
“Today it is not like we have stress and the stress is released and recovery starts. Now the stress is bad, and it keeps being bad because the stress doesn’t go away” he said, “because the stress is us. It’s people!”
In the 20th century, the global population went from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. Now in 2021, it is over eight billion. What does the 21st century hold for us? The evidence is all around us. We are destroying the planet. Are we on the brink of Earth’s sixth mass extinction?
Do we as a species have the right to kill? To kill anything? We are killing everything and there is no sign of it abating. Judging from fossil records, it is estimated that more than 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct.
It has been estimated that by the year 2090, humans will be the only animal left on Earth (apart from animals produced to feed us).
When I arrived by ship in Durban, South Africa in the late sixties, the inhabitants of Johannesburg were proud that their city was the only one in Africa with a population over one million. I privately thought this figure was probably incorrect as Cairo was growing rapidly. Now fifty years later, Johannesburg has 5.6 million and Cairo has 18 million.
“What have we done, you ask again?” How many cities are there in Africa alone? Kinshasa, Giza and Algiers have each passed 2 million. There is in excess of 15 cities in Africa alone and there are more than seven cities just in Nigeria with over 2 million. Nigeria’s population will reach 380 million by 2048 and will become the third most populated country in the world. Currently, China, India, and the USA (in that order) are the most populated. We continue to obliterate our planet. This is what we have done and continue to do.
John A Wilson, Gold Coast, December 2020
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