God bless America

The population of America has passed 300 million. To be sure, this is a momentous achievement. As a way to acknowledge the event, papers around the world wrote articles and each appears to have had a different view. There seem to be two major viewpoints--the view from America and the view from the rest of the world. The first view is that of America as reported by the New York Times. The NY Times in it's report of this historic event lauded this population benchmark as something positive. It extolled the impact of all of these additional people on the economy; being more productive and consuming more goods. And as this population explosion is made up mostly of immigrants (illegal, that is) from Mexico, my guess is that they will be able to work cheaper (that's the idea, right?).

The other view is from The Independent, a liberal newspaper in the UK. In it's acknowledgement of the passing of the 300 million mark it had a slightly different view (see picture). It told of the troubled future, the reality that the Earth can't support it's inhabitants, and that already America has a bit over 20 percent of the world's population, but consumes over 80 percent of the the earth's resources. Hardly something to celebrate, it seems.

It's funny how a difference of perspective, i.e. whether the chair you sit in faces London or New York, can change how something is interpreted and the meaning we take from it. Whatever way you choose to understand the information is up to you, but what can't be denied is that there are a lot of people in America, and with more coming everyday something has to change. The world can't continue on the course it is headed and if we are going to give anything to our children and their children, then we need to think about the next time we turn on the water, start our cars, and buy food grown in New Zealand.

And now that I am on my high-horse, looking down at the rest of the world, and the next episode of Hell's Kitchen has not yet started, I will just say this: Not only do things have to change in the way we consume, but we also have to change the way we think. Think about this, if global warming is not stopped, it is expected that the ice caps will melt (which they have started to do), which means that the polar bears will be extinct (which is expected in the next 10 years), the melting will result in the seas rising by 6 meters, which will result in places like coastal India and most of the UK being totally underwater. Even from a capitalistic model, this is a bad thing. If these places become unlivable, such as might be the case if they are under 6 meters of water, that will mean that all those people will converge on more and more central places and thus less and less space will be devoted to manufacturing, and as a result less and less will be produced, meaning that less will be consumed, which means that less money will be made.

Whether you believe this or not, the point of this is that the more I read the more I become concerned about the future that I am leaving Mia. I just hope that I can do a little bit to ensure that our world goes to Mia and not the slugs currently dining on our plants.