A new book skips over the statistics and gets right to the emotional core of overpopulation
The more than 7 billion humans alive right now are, by virtue of our very existence, contributing to a problem of a planetary scale — and we could number as many as 5 billion more by this century’s end. We’re taking up so much space, and so quickly, that the planet lost half of its total population of wildlife in just four decades. Climate change, spurred on by our voracious appetite for fossil fuels, is threatening Earth’s very future.
The logical arguments for getting population under control are compelling, says Tom Butler, editorial director at the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Yet somehow, they just aren’t working.
So, Butler tried a picture book — a large-format coffee-table book, more like, featuring images of a world overrun by human activity, produced as part of the Global Population Speak Out Campaign. (You can read it online, for free, here.)
“We wanted to jump over those old and rational arguments and try to go straight to the emotional center of a viewer, someone who has never thought about the population question, and say: Here is how the earth has been transformed,” Butler explained. “Take a look: 7.3 billion people on the planet, trying to get by, living as they do, have profoundly altered the planet and here’s what it looks like.”