The Overpopulation Lie

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Have you noticed how terribly crowded it’s getting everywhere you go?

In the city streets, in the rural areas?

When you go shopping, are you elbow to elbow with people?

And how about just travelling from one part of town to another? Aren’t you shoulder to shoulder with others while they fight for personal space while they go about their day?

Not really?… Huh.

Surely then, the farms must be overrun with people, disallowing the growth of food.

What…? No?

Well, it must just be places like India and China where the population is exploding, causing less room on the planet.

… Still no?

Let’s talk some common sense, shall we?

I don’t know when it was exactly that I’d first heard that the earth was becoming overpopulated. It may have been as far back as high school. For me that was in the 1990s. I do recall hearing it more and more, along with reports of increased pollution and then seeing Al Gore’s Documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

I bought into it back then, but I didn’t go into alarm mode because I saw it similar to death or being struck by lightening – there wasn’t much you could do about it.

However, over the years and into my 20s, the world around me was going more ‘green’. There was a push to be more environmentally friendly and clean. Nothing wrong with that; I like a clean environment. One person recycling was promoted as the one thing that you could do about it.

But I found it got to a point where I was noticing an anxiety in myself over the act of throwing a piece of paper or a bottle away into the garbage bin, instead of a recycling bin, if I couldn’t find a recycling bin. I had the accompanying guilt that so many people like me were doing a bad thing by this act of not getting the bottle into the right bin. Shame on us!

Then came the message you still see in some people’s emails, usually at the bottom: Please consider the environment before printing this email.

Oh, that one irks me now. You really want to make me feel guilty that I, little ‘ol me here, am destroying the forest, or even one tree, by printing an email? This is not about paper. It’s about digitization. (digression)

Combine garbage guilt with the supposed increase of number of people on Earth and you have a population who feels responsible for all the death and destruction that occurs on the earth. I suppose it’s a good precursor to Canada’s new MAID service, Medical Assistance in Dying, in which they seem to be adding more categories of people who qualify whenever they can. The most recent group are the mentally ill. When will the government help you die because you feel your life on Earth is a burden to nature? Sounds ridiculous, but a lot of what the Canadian government has done in the past four years is beyond ridiculous.

Enough is Enough

I agree that everyone, from the single individual to the large companies that produce large amounts of waste in production, should do everything they can to keep the environment clean. I think most people would agree that that’s reasonable, but what I’m talking about here is exaggerating and embellishing and also outright lying about what each of us is responsible for.

Backing up again to the early 2000s, while I was in university I felt the brunt of this guilt. I silently felt sad that my species was to blame for this destruction, and I wondered if it was better that we weren’t even here at all.

Still for me, it was too large a problem to fret about day and night, but I felt it anyway in the background.

Then one day, I’m not sure what triggered it – maybe it was my brain fog and chronic pain at the time, or that I recalled what some friends of mine told me about working in a recycling plant; that a huge portion of recycling ended up in the landfill (more than 50%, if I remember correctly) – So one day, as I approached the recycling and garbage bins at work with a number of items to separate, I got angry that I was feeling this anxiety – over recycling! How ridiculous.

I turned it around and spoke to the feeling, “Screw this! I’m not worrying about this anymore!” And I tossed all my stuff into one bin. How liberating!

Those Big Places Way Over There with All the People

Ok, so I’d gotten over garbage-guilt, but what about all those other people in the world filling up the planet? I was hearing that the planet was coming close to 8 billion people (back in 2013 – I think the number we are told now is 9 billion). It sounded like a lot.

One country we often hear about being overrun with people is China. Do you recall hearing how packed their cities were? Even today, it’s a narrative I catch wind of. Well, lucky me, I got to see China for myself.

In 2014, I took my first teaching job in China. It was only one semester at a university so I only had time to see a little bit of the country, mainly the cities of Jinan, Beijing, and a little bit more of the province they share, Shandong.

Sure, the cities were large and busy but my experience was like in most places I’d visited. There wasn’t much out of the ordinary in terms of large numbers of people.

However, it was in 2015 when returned to China that I began to notice something that changed my view on the overpopulation problem.

I travelled regularly to approximately 15 different cities all over northern China, each work trip consisting of a bus ride to an airport (usually about an hour), a flight, then another hour or so bus ride into a new city.

There were two key things I noticed.

One, there was a lot of space! I was seeing nature, forest, mostly. I didn’t see any wildlife other than birds, but I’m sure if I ventured on foot into the forest I would have encountered a critter or two. If China was so populated, where were all the people? What’s all this land doing here largely untouched?

Two, many new buildings were going up outside of cities already established, and I mean many buildings, like a whole new replacement city about a 45-minute drive from the main city that I was headed to.

And from what I saw at that time, back in 2015-2016, most buildings were empty and largely unfinished. They were shells of sky-scrapers at least 30 stories high and by the hundreds. I tried to count them one day while passing by them and I counted at least 10 buildings deep by 30 or 40 buildings across, maybe more.

That’s about 400 30-story buildings, empty ones, in the blink of an eye. And this wasn’t just one or two cities I travelled to. It was like this in most of them.

What else struck me about China was how similar it was to my home country of Canada and to most places I’d travelled to in the world. A larger number of people lived in the cities, yes, but they weren’t bumping into each other constantly (except maybe on a subway during rush hour, of course!), they weren’t crowding the land, and I didn’t feel that there was a shortage of physical space anywhere. There was wilderness for miles, and it took hours to get from some major centres to the villages… just like anywhere else.

I was no longer convinced that the earth was overpopulated, and I began to question this supposed rising number of 8 billion Earth population.

So Why the Continuous Building?

The constant construction of new buildings in many countries in the last 10 or 20 years, in my opinion, has multiple reasons, and only a fraction of it being due to the need for family housing.

I believe that a one reason for it is to create the illusion that the population is increasing and that we need more tall city buildings to put people in.

In fact, many of those skeleton cities in China were demolished before they were even finished. Search China’s Empty Cities on YouTube and you’ll find a number of stories on this.

The second reason is to get more people into the buildings with new technology such as Lifi (light fidelity used in many new SMART buildings), motion sensors, cameras, and computerized door locks. It is another way to integrate people into the digital prison that has been going up around us. This, I think, is more common in western countries, but is likely being implemented everywhere.

Believe What You See

Just like other psy-ops that we have been subjected to during the past four years, most people are in a state of cognitive dissonance about the overpopulation lie.

They see the vast wilderness, the farms, and the oceans, the distance it takes to travel from one populated area to another (heck, take a plane ride and look down – do you see swaths of people infesting the planet?), yet they believe there are too many people.

Why? Because TV and all the talking heads on it told them so.

The overpopulation lie is an element of the narrative that mankind is to blame for killing the earth. By you breathing the air, eating any food harvested, driving cars or throwing your garbage in the wrong bin, you – according to them – are a disease in need of eradication.

Wake up people! Grab some common sense!

No, don’t pollute. Yes, clean up after yourself, but it’s big business, big tech, the alphabet agencies, and government who cause most of the real problems of the world, and then blame you.

If you believe that people are the problem and you think there should be fewer of us, then you are free to take yourself off this planet if you choose. You go first, my friend, if that’s what you really want, but I’m grateful to be alive. I value my life and the lives of my loved ones.

I will not feel guilty for existing.