By José Argüelles/Valum Votan
1.23.7.18, Kin 34 (1-27-2011)
The January 2011 edition of National Geographic magazine bears the cover title, “Population 7 Billion, How your world will change.” It is predicted that before the end of this year the human population of planet Earth will top the 7 billion mark, only 12 years after it hit six billion. That is an increase of 1 billion since 1999, and an increase of 4 billion since 1960. Many of us were around in 1960 and can remember back to that time – black and white television, John F. Kennedy, Elvis and early rock and roll, the Cold War, Castro’s Cuba, the American freeway and interstate highway system was just developing, and along with it the sprawl of suburban subdivisions. Japan and much of Europe were just getting back on their feet after the havoc of World War II. The Civil Rights Movement was just beginning and Bob Dylan was still a budding folk singer.
That was just 51 years ago. There was no environmental movement, though soon thereafter, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring would sound the first wakeup call. The space age had scarcely begun. Computers were so big they filled a room. Timothy Leary back from his mushroom experiences in Cuernavaca had just begun his LSD experiments at Harvard. Existential philosophers in Paris and Beatnik poets in San Francisco evoked a new anti-establishment mood. Nonetheless, it was a simpler time.
It is hard to comprehend the rate and effects of the massive changes brought about by the exponential growth of the human organism both upon itself and upon the planet. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, the Population Bomb would be the first to alert the world to the potential disaster due to the unprecedented growth and expansion of the human species. Five years later would come the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. 14 years after 1960, in 1974 there were another billion humans – population 4 billion.
The human population explosion, which actually began in the eighteenth century, cannot be separated from the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution cannot be separated from the development of mechanical time which set the human species off from the rest of the natural order beginning in the seventeenth century. In other words, the human population explosion is paced by the machine; as the human expands new and better and faster machines are required, and slowly and inevitably the human encapsulates itself in its own time warp apart from nature called the technosphere. Within this artificial world the human is insulated from the effects on the natural world of his machine and the need for resources to feed his machine.
Because of the human population thriving on its philosophy of materialism and consumerism, consumption of natural resources outstrips Earth’s capacity for production of these resources. In 1961 the human consumed the equivalent of 60% of the Earth’s renewable resources; in 1975 it consumed 100% or the equivalent of one planet; in 1995 consumption was 125% and in 2007, 150% or 1.5 planets. Yet in the face of such devastating figures, the statisticians continue to project – at the present rate of consumption by 2030, the annual consumption rate will be 200% of the Earth’s renewable resources, or the equivalent of 2 planets. By 2045, the population is projected to be at 9 Billion. How much of the planet will be left? Clearly this is an untenable situation. Something has got to give, 
Attempting to clean up plastic garbage
washed in from the oceanand is indeed in the process of giving right now.
The root of this problem is actually the human addiction known as materialism and its money driven philosophy of consumerism. The human leadership would rather salvage its dollar or its euro than change its economic policies, or consider some concerted effort to deal with the effects of climate change. No consensus and no agreement, no collective will and no collective mind, plan or purpose. Yet the planet is a whole system, and only a whole system plan can come close to dealing adequately with the problem. Clearly the present human leadership is incapable of rising to such a challenge.
When we talk about these matters – population explosion and the mega crisis of consumption outstripping Earth’s capacity to produce renewable resources with all of the deleterious side effects, we must keep in mind that we are looking at and analyzing things from a purely material, physical or biological perspective. And then, without a consideration of the total nature of the Earth and all of her component parts, processes and functions as a whole system, we continue to project piecemeal statistics of possible future scenarios.
In looking at this situation from above, as it were, the most disturbing aspect is the human species’ unwillingness to really assume responsibility for its role in creating the mega crisis: The systematic destruction of the Biosphere.
Failure of Copenhagen and Cancun; as well as G-20 Seoul Summit meeting; Republican Senate muffle the EPA and exempt Greenhouse emissions from the clean air act. No hope in the system.
Who will draw up a whole system plan – even if we could draw up a whole system plan something like what Lester Brown formerly of the Worldwatch Institute and now head of the Earth Policy Institute, has done, calling for placing the whole world on a war-time footing to stabilize climate and repair the ecological environment … a campaign for the Earth … but in today’s global political climate, how could we ever get consensus?
Or must we issue an SOS, a call for higher-dimensional help? Either all of the great masters, teachers, seers, yogis, sages, shamans and saints were all deluded, or it is true, there is some factor we are overlooking that perhaps if properly grasped and understood could help us in our present predicament. Transitioning from the life undivine to the life divine is a matter of activating psi energy, psychic powers on behalf of the good of all mankind. Only a uniform collective higher consciousness will save the world.
Note: The article ends here unfinished. Though it was his belief that the teaching of the one reality may well come through the human encounter with extraterrestrials who, among other things, will manifest a supremely enlightened and mystical nature, convincing most people almost immediately that a higher way exists: the elite culture of self-cultivation that leads to mystic oneness with all that is, in addition to opening to paranormal powers and possibilities undreamed of in our materialistically benighted state of mind. (SS185).