Converting Involuntary Manslaughter to Murder

One way to save the human community from a terrible future is to help individuals covert their view of procreative acts from involuntary manslaughter to murder.

Most of the today's 6.4 billion people are alive because of the earth's bounty of resources and waste acceptance. This bounty is diminishing and the remaining bounty is rising in price.

The 2 billion people living today, who spend more than half of their income on food, will die from starvation as the cost of food doubles. A billion or two more will die in conflicts resulting from dividing the diminishing resources.

Tragic as this "die off" appears, we have an opportunity to choose behavior that determines whether the future contains a never ending dark age or is reborn in a state of ever improving wellbeing.

Our choice is selecting among two ways of managing the way our total human footprint overshoots global carrying capacity. A head long overshoot will probably create an unending dark age. An overshoot muted by a plan to keep total human footprint well below carrying capacity in the future may save the human experiment.

The muting plan is "low birth rate driven" rapid population decline (LBD-RPD) that achieves a total human footprint far enough below carrying capacity to allow ever improving human wellbeing.

Cut backs in personal consumption, recycling, and advances in technology, play a role in reducing the die off tragedies. However, choosing "low birth rate driven" rapid population decline determines our viability.

In our current circumstances, every person must understand that the birth of a child kills someone. Scarcity and conflict will determine who is killed. However, the fewer births the fewer people will be killed.

It may not seem fair to put this burden of responsibility on each future parent. But we, the existing parents, have already placed this burden on them, by putting the human experiment into overshoot, with our procreative acts.

Being in denial of what we have done does not change the deadly meaning of a birth. Our task is to state the reality of our condition. Loudly and clearly we have to describe our predicament and the deadly meaning of every child born into it. We can measure our communication success when a parent's act of having a child (in present condtions) is in his view converted from involuntary manslaughter to murder.

4/08/08

Jack Alpert (Bio)     mail to: Alpert@skil.org      (homepage) www.skil.org      position papers

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