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DB Lampoon! In The Mood For Love

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So you’re sure to get lucky on Valentine’s Day, right?
Peter Sherwood urges you to take precautions

Not long after Sir David Attenborough said of humanity, “We are a plague upon the Ear th – four billion too many,” I started looking at overpopulation, as I am, I admit, part of the problem. Anecdotal evidence (mine) and empirical proof (also mine) shows that 250 million people died of unnatural causes (read: were killed) in the 20th century, ergo, populations were controlled – a bit. Yet we were 3 billion in 1900 and 7.5 billion
100 years later.

Logically that demonstrates murder is good for growth. We breed like hamsters, the result of which – with more global warming, pollution and, as Professor Stephen Hawking noted, greed and stupidity – will likely be game, set and match. The future? Drought and famine aside, you won’t be able to get a cold beer. The incredible speed of climate change is now exponential, or as climate scientists say, “the hotter it gets, the hotter it gets.”

Meanwhile we sit around watching reruns of Game of Thrones. Look at the Philippines (you look, it’s too depressing). It’s so jam-packed that people are living on active volcanoes. Pretty soon they’ll have to sleep standing up. (Not so the Japanese who’ll be extinct after the tuna pleaded for a bit of a break and were ignored). India’s pollution will soon be so thick you can cut it off in blocks. This will make it harder to get into the national cricket team.

In China, there’ll be fewer babies as people finally understand the relationship between income and university fees. Less so in Africa and the Middle East, and good luck with that. Sea levels will rise dramatically and Abu Dhabi and Dubai will be under water (seriously) within a century. The Maldives – all of it – will be a massive wreck dive long before that. Lagos, Dhaka, Jakarta, Bangkok, Alexandria, Venice, Rotterdam, New Orleans, Miami and Houston are sinking too.

Lawrence Durrell in his book, Spirit of Place, writes that people are an expression of their landscape. He romances that if France, for example, lost its entire population it would over time be re-populated by strangers who would eventually become French people doing French things, like having seven week holidays and holding unannounced strikes. If all Australians moved to France, Australia would fill up with Peruvians in flip-flops shouting “Ponerotro camaron en la barbacoa!” in tourism ads.

Science says we’re the most successful species but try telling that to a crocodile or a gorilla – to a passenger pigeon, woolly mammoth, or sabre-toothed tiger for that matter. Just how successful are we? Well, we’re succeeding in wiping ourselves off the face of the planet, and that’s a first.

We’re in the middle of the Sixth Extinction, the first extinction of life on Earth by a single species, us. Despite our high intelligence, we are, based on results, quite mad. We race to reproduce into a furnace future, while selling vast shiploads of stuff to each other to pay for the environmental damage and keep landfills and incinerators in business. Professor Hawking had a point.

Peter Sherwood has lived in DB for 20+ years. The former head of an international public relations firm, he is the author of 15 books and has written around 400 satirical columns for the South China Morning Post.

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