Ok, it is true that we have too many people on the planet. But the number isn't the main facet of the ecological devastation problem, it isn't even the most important one. Remember, only a couple of million Europeans with the wrong attitude erased much of the wildlife and forests from the continental US in only a hundred years or so.

Our ecological problems stem from a philosophical one. That is the religious notion that it is our job to obey the ten commandments, go to church regularly, protest against such moral indignations as fornication, adultery, abortion and drug addiction, and it is God's job in return to provide all our earthly desires. We get that idea from the manna-from-heaven episode in the Bible apparently. Well folks, we're going to have to dig around in that Bible and come up with the firm belief that ruining the Earth is right up there with sex crimes in God's eyes. If we don't we're all going to end up in heaven or hell or Mars or someplace else, because we aren't going to be able to live here. One can obtain this thought easily from Revelations, "God's going to bring to ruin those ruining the earth", or from Ecclesiastes, "we are no better than the beasts of the field or the trees of the forest, from dust we all came and to dust we will all return, rejoice in the fruits of your own vineyard". Well, I don't know what all that says to all the highbrow religious, but to this uneducated layman, it sounds like the earth is our garden of Eden that God has given us, and we should feel an obligation to preserve all forms of life upon it. In fact, in Genesis, man was instructed to take care of the Earth and the plants and animals on it, not overpopulate and consume all of them.

This doesn't mean that I think we should all slaughter our children and go live in a tepee in the forest. I have tremendous faith in the power of the human mind. I believe we can have our cake and eat it too. I look forward to the development of transportation that will not contribute to Global warming, to farming techniques that do not threaten wild life, topsoil, and people alike, to modern homes and mining techniques that do not devastate the landscape. I look forward to farms on both land and sea that provide an abundance of food for people, all the while leaving large expanses of both land and sea in their natural state, to allow the great flywheel of Nature to preserve our ecosystem perpetually. And like every other Star Trek nut I look forward to deep space travel and expect it in my lifetime.

We can do this stuff people. We have the technology already to do most of it. All we lack is the will and the proper perspective. We must focus on the fact that nature is made up of resources that are cyclical at best and limited at worst, while "jobs" and "money" are human inventions of the mind and the most replaceable "resources" we have at our disposal. We have shed our natural tendency to be naked, to hunt and gather and live in caves. Now let us shed our natural tendency to war upon each other in the natural pursuit of the fittest race to deserve the planet, (modern amenities, clothing, and medicine, not to mention the devastating technology of war, have rendered that pursuit obsolete anyway), and let us join our forces and combine our attributes in a manner dictated by Jesus in the Bible and engage the really fun challenges of the future with the same Esprit de Corps we have demonstrated so readily at football games, in the war with Iraq, and during any time of collective hardship, such as blizzards, hurricanes, floods and such. Let us focus on our individual and national objectives rather than our immediate situation. Make a plan and follow it, and life will get better immediately. Because you will see progress, and everyday one follows it will bring pleasure and a sense of achievement. Everybody knows someone who was a manic-depressive who was up one day and down the next, and basically unhappy and going nowhere, until one day he or she finally formulated a plan, set a schedule and stuck to it, and became a happy and productive person immediately. I see it all the time as a teacher.