From global warming to fluoride: Why do people deny science? - Salon.com
Excerpted from "Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind"
The potent combination of our powerful intelligence with our massive reality denial has led to a dangerous world. Less obvious, but in the long term more dangerous, are threats resulting directly or indirectly from technological developments that have permitted us to increase our numbers well beyond the carrying capacity of the natural world. More efficient agriculture and the invention of artificial fertilizers permitted humans to produce food sufficient to support numbers that would be unthinkable for other animals of our physical size. Public health measures, vaccinations, antibiotics, and other medical advances also permitted population numbers to explode. The world is overpopulated already and is becoming more so at an alarming rate. And although we pay lip service to the resulting problems, we do relatively little to address their root causes. Indeed, some religions continue to promote the unrestrained propagation of their flocks. Planet Earth is sick, with a bad case of infection by humans....
... Why is it that ordinary citizens do not sit up and take notice of the danger? Unfortunately, the focus remains mostly on global warming instead of on the bigger concernthat we are disrupting the planets climate in completely unpredictable ways.
The intelligent and the educated are letting the stupid and the greedy kill our planet.
Excellent. I'll look for that book directly, in the hope that it does indeed concentrate on overpopulation, not the discredited "Ice Age Coming" in the '70s or "Global Warming" a la Fantasia with the dinosaurs dying of heat prostration. How "science" follows art.
Luddly, you may be the first poster after me who has started chucking out the global warming nonsense in favor of the actual danger: overpopulation. I have realized for YEARS that leftists dealt in global warming as a way to talk about overpopulation without actually mentioning it, because of course it's a racial issue: whites are declining in population, it's yellows and blacks and browns that are grossly overpopulating the world now. (Though whites had our hockey-stick time, too.) So leftists could not possibly talk about it, and went a wrong direction, and tried to somehow blame a falsified "global warming" on Bush and Republican Americans, which was all such incredible nonsense that it failed as a meme, finally.
I know it has by now conclusively failed because I just visited leftist relatives in Boston and not a single word was spoken on global warming, despite past enthusiasm and total faith expressed about that silly idea.
Here's a book for you: Spillover, by David Quammen. He is speaking of pandemics but makes an excellent case for humans being one of the few mammals that has had a true "outbreak" like disease outbreaks and pests, like gypsy moths and such do, increasing population by several factors very fast. Lemmings, of course, do have outbreaks, but other than that, mammals generally do not. Too large and reproductively slow. But humans certainly have!! Look at the hockey stick graphs. We are going to eat up the world and a whole lot of other species, and many are gone already.