A leading environmental problem: Overpopulation
Students do not understand that overpopulation is the cause of many other environmental problems. To help students understand this, one of my colleagues asks her students to list three important local and global environmental issues as part of a survey on the first day of class. During the following lecture, she presents overpopulation as the top environmental problem:
It may surprise many of you to find out that overpopulation is a leading global environmental problem. Remember on the first day of class, I asked you to list three important global environmental problems. Here are the results of those surveys:
1. Pollution (unspecified):14.7%
2. Global warming:14.5%
3. Air pollution:13.5%
4. Habitat destruction:13.1%
5. Resource depletion/degradation:11.8%
How many of these problems are the direct or indirect result of overpopulation? Would we have such a problem with the top three -- pollution, global warming and habitat -- if world population was not so large?
No living creature can survive prolonged contact with its own waste. No species can increase its population indefinitely. We do not inhabit the vastness of space. We live in a finite world, with finite resources that must sustain all life, not just our own. The food pyramid we sit at the top of is an unimaginably complex web of interdependent living beings. A single pond contains more relationships than we can possibly count, and don't think people haven't tried. The trees that make our atmosphere breathable thrive within narrow temperature bands. When the temperature changes too rapidly, they die. The insects we fear so much play indispensable roles in the maintenance of our ecosystems. When the environment is contaminated with toxic chemicals, they die, and beings that depend on them die. When we kill insects, trees, animals, plants, or any living beings indiscriminately, carelessly, without consideration, we kill ourselves. Let's not waste any more time talking about whether there's a problem, or how big it is, or whose fault it is. We have meddled with the primordial forces of nature. We must atone. Let's start talking about solutions.
"The One Commandment:
Thou shalt not procreate
The Four Pillars:
suicide · abortion
cannibalism · sodomy
SAVE THE PLANET
KILL YOURSELF "
If you grew up around the Boston area in the 1990's and early 2000's, then you would definitely remember the wonderful public performances of The Reverend Chris Korda , Pastor Kim and their Church Of Euthanasia.
IT'S A GRAY, WET SUNDAY in April in Boston's Public Garden, but the grounds are bustling with people happy to be outside after a long winter. Young families take advantage of the relatively warm weather to take their kids out in strollers and walk their Labrador retrievers around the pond. Well-to-do couples stroll lazily over the footbridge. And Rev. Chrissy Korda, the founder and leader of the Somerville-based Church of Euthanasia, is here, too--looking smashing as usual....
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What I can not do justice to here is the publics reaction to the performance. It was if some one threw a stink bomb at the spectacle of fashionable shoppers in the Newbury / Boylston street area or dropped a deformed elephant on The Boston Common. The reaction was anger, rage but most of all a delicious confusion, an absurdist slug at the dogma of political sloganeering.
"What do we want," began one of their chants
"Abortion."
"When do we want it?"
"Now."
"Why do we want it?"
"Because it tastes good."
Every week for 10 years a right-wing fundamentalist Christian group called Our Lady's Crusaders for Life had been picketing the Gynecare women's clinic in Brookline. Rev. Chrissy decided to take them on.
Outfitted in their most bizarre medieval regalia, the 30 or more church members showed up carrying a blown-up rubber sex doll crucified on a giant cross, and they mocked the fundamentalists by holding up placards declaring themselves the Pedophile Priests for Life.
Surrounded by the Church of Euthanasia members, the fundamentalists panicked. Immediately, they were on their cell phones to the police. "They can't do this!" they cried. "We've been here for 10 years!" When the Brookline motorcycle cops finally arrived on the scene, they found the two groups jostling each other, hopelessly intermingled. One church member, known as Vermin, who was wearing a black robe and veil, was spurting water at the fundamentalists with a penis-shaped squirt gun. In response, the fundamentalists prayed loudly. "Dear Lord," they shouted, "please deliver us from the demons surrounding us!" But the members of the church drowned them out, chanting "Sex Is Good! Sex Is Good!" over and over. It took about an hour but police finally restored order.
When asked to sell his land, the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh replied, "Sell a country? Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the great sea, as well as the earth?" How could he imagine that future generations would sell not only the land, the water, the air, and the electromagnetic spectrum, but even the genetic structure of life itself?
let's face it, we are at the center, the absolute epicenter of the consumer culture. We consume ten times more resources than any other nation on the planet. If it's going to start anywhere it has to start here! And the richer you are, the more money you have, the more assets you have, the more it matters that you kill yourself, right? I mean, it doesn't help us much if homeless people are killing themselves. Americans must die! Americans must die to save the planet!
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"Prevent AIDS--Aim for the Chin."
We should worship queers!
At least they don't reproduce!
Hello?
Senator Kennedy?
SAVE THE PLANET!
KILL YOURSELF!
Wear your media condom at all times!
Don't leave your house without it!
The church's website previously had instructions on "how to kill yourself" by asphyxiation using helium. These pages were removed in 2003 after a 52-year-old woman used them to commit suicide in St. Louis County, Missouri, resulting in legal threats against the church.
(From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
The instructions downloaded from the Internet were explicit, and, according to police, followed precisely by a 52-year-old St. Louis woman in taking her own life Monday.
Printouts from the Web site left nearby described how to use helium to cause asphyxiation, exactly as she did. This is the Web site's "recommended method."
It is worrisome advice to someone on the edge, say people who study suicide and its causes.
To authorities, the Web site is a killer.
The suicide victim "would not have killed herself but for that content," St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said last week. She wants to pursue voluntary manslaughter charges against the person responsible for providing that information.
The boyfriend of the St. Louis woman who committed suicide is hopeful the case against the Web site will be successful. His girlfriend had a history of clinical depression, he said, but she would not have known how to use helium to kill herself without the site's instruction.
"She followed it verbatim," said the boyfriend, who asked that his name not be used. "She got 100 percent of it from that site."
He found her Monday afternoon.
"It's destroyed my life," he said.
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The Church Of Euthanasia
