Letter: Overpopulation needs to be addressed now

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Editor,

It’s a whole different world than it was when I was young some 80 short years ago. Back then Paul Bunyan and his forest decimating Blue Ox were heroes of progress. But not anymore. Has anyone noticed that all the environmental concerns we’re faced with now weren’t even imagined back then.

Interestingly, exploding population density is one no one wants to face, but it’s the bottom line causing every environmental concern. Is ignoring it going to resolve it?

It was only 50 years ago when deep thinkers sounded the alarm enough that Republicans made it a party platform. That was Ronald Reagan and Charleton Heston’s thought-provoking heyday. Some 30 years later Democrat Al Gore rang the bell with statistical emphasis when he presented his “Inconvenient Truth” revelation… for which he was reviled with thundering denouncement.

But most recently there is Republican Donald Trump’s Great Mexican Border Wall that pretty well intends to do what legislators couldn’t. Did anyone think that wall was intended to stop seasonal farm workers from improving our food supply?

Population copulation is increasingly becoming the reality no one wants to face. Republicans jostle with it and throw it like a hot potato into Democrat’s laps… and vice versa. Worse is that in the intervening half century, no one yet has come up with an acceptable solution. It needs to be discussed and faced.

China’s Great Wall didn’t work for them any more than ours will. So they became a nation that tackled it in more rational terms than famine, pestilence and war, which incidentally we didn’t like one bit. But take a look at the effects! They came from being an abysmal “Third World” nation that our compassionate churches sent missionaries to, to being an 800-pound gorilla in the room that we now bow to.

Can we keep compassionately looking away and making excuses for immature, ignorant, aberrant and destructive behavior within our ranks?When will we realize that every living creature lives by devouring other forms of life?Who shall we blame for that?

We can argue until the sun sets (and we will) about where population density lines need to be drawn, but unless we find some agreed guiding light by nightfall the only light will be instant flashes from exploding population, the crime it begets and invasions it invites.

Ask a Ukranian?

Al Williams

Oak Harbor