For every opinion there is a diametrically opposed and equally valid opinion. Take death. Death is bad, right? If someone you like, such as your grandpa, dies, it's sad. You mourn and your family mourns. You look at pictures and reminisce and touch his armchair and during the funeral you lay your hand on the coffin, stifling your sobs as it is lowered into the earth. Oh, it's sad alright. Every death is a tragedy and I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes as I think about it.
But what if there were no death? What if suddenly people stopped dying? What if people lived on forever? Gramps would stick around. So would all the other old folks. People would live on past 100, past 200, past the age of 1,000! The population of your town would grow, and grow, and grow... Pretty soon, we'd have a billion people who are 100 years old, all of them requiring health care and pensions and polka classes. The human population would continue to surge until there are so many people on the planet that each one of us has barely enough room to stand.
Clearly, then, death is good. Or at least as good as it is bad.
Most people do not get this. As I am typing this, the news channels are abuzz with swine flu. All across the world, health officials and politicians are scrambling to introduce measures to protect their wards from swine flu. After all, lives are precious, and the job of the authorities is to save precious lives.
They're quite good at that. When the latest cross-over strain of avian flu emerged a few years ago, modern communications systems and cutting-edge biotechnology were able to help contain the disease in just a few months. The bird flu never got going, and less than 500 precious lives were lost.
Our success at containing bird flu is just one example of the expertise we have developed. Over the past few decades, the dedicated scientists at the WHO and other institutions have done such a good job of saving lives and keeping diseases at bay, that the global human population has surged from less than a billion to seven billion, in just a century.
As precious as they may be, 7,000,000,000 human lives put a lot of pressure on natural resources. The relentless expansion of the human population means that we have had to encroach into more and more habitats. Rainforest is disappearing at the rate of 80,000 football pitches a day, fish stocks are being depleted, and ecosystems are being destroyed as species after species is sent into extinction.
Removing a species from an ecosystem is a risky business.
If the species removed served as a predator on another species, the latter will no longer have a check on its numbers and undergo a population boom. It will ravage the ecosystem, decimate the species below it on the food chain until there's nothing left to decimate, and pretty soon starvation will set in.
Unless, of course, the species in question has somehow figured out how to make combines and fertilizer and genetically modified crops, and a faith-based approach to sending the harvest to those who are starving to death.
Over the years, human beings - those very same disorganized demi-apes obsessed with karaoke and low-rider jeans and Twitter - have proven themselves to be remarkably adept at removing threats to their existence. Officials and scientists have eradicated scores of diseases - smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, to name a few - which have long acted as natural checks and balances on the human population.
Malaria, one of our last remaining predators, suffered a major blow recently when philanthrophist Bill Gates put up $500 million for mosquito nets. This means that populations in Africa will swell, and swell, and swell, reaching a level far beyond what the land can sustain. This will inevitably lead to famines, and the aid organizations - well-meaning people, all of them - will leverage pictures and video footage of starving African children to raise funds and ship in more aid.
And the populations will continue to swell.
The population of Ethiopia at the height of the famine in the 1980's was 47 million. Today, in 2009, there are 84 million people living in Ethiopia, a country that didn't have enough resources to feed half that number.
Throughout the centuries, wars and plagues have served to keep the human population in check. But ever since 1946, wars have turned into contained, minor affairs, and plagues have become a thing of the past. Populations are no longer culled by ravaging and pillaging invaders. The wars that do occur take out less than 0.03 percent of the population, at best. Modern plagues manage to take out no more than a few hundred individuals.
While the odds are against it, I hope that swine flu will break the mold and win one for the gipper. Perhaps this will be the little virus that could. Maybe it will defy the odds and mutate and spread at a faster pace than the scientists can handle. Maybe swine flu will succeed where SARS and ebola failed - and reduce the human population by about a billion.
That would still leave six billion - still far too many, but better by far than seven billion.
The odds are against it, but I'm rooting for the swine flu.
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Contributor's Note
Whenever I make this point, the immediate reaction is often something along the lines of, "What if YOU were to die from swine flu???" I hope that's not your reaction, my friend, because if it were, I would be inclined to accuse you of missing the point entirely.
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