Moral indignation

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) realized that population growth would have to end at some point, as its exponential tendency ran up against the linear growth of the food supply. Other factors were involved as well, like the amount of waste produced (including not only pig excrement fouling our drinking water, but also green-house gases raising global temperature).
    It occurred to me this morning that moral indignation might be another factor. Growing numbers of riled-up people are butting up against one another, their butting-up facilitated by 24/7 news.
    Of course, I've been feeling some moral indignation myself, to judge by some recent posts here—on al Qaeda, for example, or on eating animals. Not to mention a few on religion.

But my immediate provocations might have been a couple of items in local papers this morning. The first was a letter to the editor from a man indignant that he didn't make an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list:

Why didn't I make that list?
    Have my many letters to the editor expressing my contempt for the Islamists gone unnoticed? Does it count for nothing that I led the applause on our United flight when the pilot announced the killing of bin Laden?

    And he even tells "aspiring Muslim martyrs" where to find him and what inscription to look for on the "crusader T-shirt" he often wears. "I'll be expecting some loser yelling 'alla-hu akbar' or whatever," he says.
    A hit list was mentioned only in the third of three reports I found:

1. The New York Times, "Al Qaeda Urges Attacks in West" (June 3);
2. Kitat Konenut's New York blog, "Al Qaeda Urges American Muslims to Buy Guns for Terror Attacks" (June 6); and
3. newsmax.com, "Al-Qaida Website's Hit List Targets US Leaders" (June 17).

A friend might have been alluding to such a hit list when he emailed me in response to an "amusing conjecture" of mine. He had written:

I'm afraid you'll be taken to a beating by persons who will misconstrue what you argue. You're walking on a mine field.

    I wondered, however, why I would need to be misconstrued.

The other provocation was the front-page photograph of three boyishly proud-looking male adults that illustrated the article, "Men snag possible world-record catfish." They're shown with a 143-pound blue catfish across their laps.
    The pride was front-page news, and the article revealed the important information that one of the men will "get to talk junk to my brother and dad all year long."
    But there was no mention that the bottom-feeding catfish will never get to feed again.
_______________
June 24. As a result of a comment on this article, I submitted a letter to The Chapel Hill News yesterday. It was published this morning; the third comment on this post provides the letter's text.
    July 3. Mr. Hurley's response was printed on July 1. And I submitted a follow-up question this morning; its text is provided in the first comment of yesterday's post, "'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'."

How long 'til we're barely surviving?

Noam Chomsky was in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago. I read in the October 6 Independent Weekly yesterday that Dr. Chomsky predicts, according to reporter David Fellerath, that "in 500 years, humans will be barely surviving." Fellerath writes that Chomsky cited nuclear war and global warming as the biggest threats.
    Chomsky doesn't define "barely surviving." Perhaps a precipitously declining human population? Or a much diminished quality of life for all but the remaining rich? The latter might lead to the former, in any case, as the have-nots rise up and rabble (some with those nuclear weapons Chomsky cites).
    In either case, I wouldn't have given us 500 years myself, but Chomsky is much better read than I am, so maybe he's right. Not that he or I (or you) will be around to find out.
    I suspect that "barely surviving" will come sooner, on the evidence of the sharp recent upward trending of one particular curve, the graph of human population growth (the thick red line in the chart below:

    The curve has been very steep for several decades and is accelerating; it's frankly a wonder that we're not just barely surviving already. Maybe we are but just haven't noticed it yet?

That's certainly true for other species on the planet. The effect on other species is and will continue to be catastrophic in terms of the size (or existence) of their populations. Another way of stating human population growth is in terms of humans' biomass relative to the total biomass on the planet. From the article, "Differential Reproduction - An Exponentialist View":

A sobering [Malthusian¹] thought is that as the global human population increases its percentage of the total biomass so many other species are going extinct [emphasis mine].

______________

1. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), who "observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine, disease, and widespread mortality."