The U.N.’s high-fertility projections, for example, (which may well be the numbers that threaten to emerge) show us on-track toward our eighth, ninth, tenth, ELEVENTH, TWELFTH, THIRTEENTH, FOURTEENTH, and 15.8 billion by the close of this century.

In that case, the 15.8 billion near-earth asteroid analogy becomes operative, for conservation efforts have no chance whatsoever of success in the face of such numbers. If, for example, astronomers were to discover a near-earth asteroid on a collision trajectory with our planet, NASA and international space agencies would IMMEDIATELY initiate efforts to “nudge” the object out of its collisions trajectory, but that “nudging” effort would have to BEGIN when the object is still far enough way for the efforts to have an effect. If we are to avoid the 15.8 billion humanitarian, civilizational, and biospheric outcomes, the emergency demographic efforts that are needed now are NOT articles like the one above, but immediate steps to ensure that voluntary and ethical family planning programs are universally accessible in the world’s poorest and highest-fertility LDCs – for with every hour, day, and week that current high-fertility rates persist have the effect, due to population momentum, of locking the entirety of humankind, civilization, and the biosphere more and more inescapably into the collision trajectory.)

Speaking as a biologist, earth’s planetary carrying capacity for a modern industrialized humanity with everyone on earth enjoying a U.S. / Western European standard of living is on the order of TWO billion on less and the U.N.’s most recent medium-fertility population projections show humankind to be on-track toward ten billion by the end of this century. We know that humanity was already inflicting damage on earth’s ecosystems, biota, and planetary life support machinery back in 1987 with five billion and 1999 with six billion – when less than half of us were industrialized. Now we are at SEVEN billion and ocean dead zones are spreading, bluefin tuna and shark populations are plunging, deforestation in Sumatra reached rates of 61% over a period of twelve years in the 1980s, and on and on.

Graphs depicting human population growth over the past 10,000 years are accessible at http://www.flickr.com/photos./pali_nalu and readers will notice that they are not JUST J-curves (like those J-curve events the world witnessed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but they are extreme and pronounced J-curves. (Population is not just affected by birth rates – think about mortality reductions; biologists have already achieved SIX-FOLD life-extensions in laboratory organisms – that would be a 500-year extension in humans – and even a tiny, tiny fractional such increase in humans would send us careening toward 15.8 billion.

For a short freely-downloadable downloadable PDF on population and the implications of our sheer physical eradication of natural systems (Conservation – Why 10% goals are not enough”) – readers are invited to visit http://www.scribd.com/TheWecskaopProject (What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet).

so what can we do as a conservationists? should we just accept the absolute rule of humanity over nature and turn into a fancy landscaping service? or should we try to keep the dream of a natural world alive?

The general state of global issues in terms of massive unemployment, loss of livelihoods, uncertainess of the future for my own child. When people have these immediate concerns to deal with just to survive on a daily basis, how can they be truly concerned about the environment?

It’s a vicious circle.