COINS IN A JAR

Piggy banks are as old as money itself. The actual term came from Medieval Europe, when coins were stored in pots made of clay called pygg. The pronunciation easily became pig. By the eighteenth century, potters began creating pig-shaped money pots, which would be broken when they were full. The transition to a piggy bank was simple because pigs were seen as symbols of prosperity and good fortune. Before the piggy bank, people stored cash in money boxes and jars. For some nostalgic people today (I among them), the tradition of storing coins in a jar continues. At our house, we have an empty gallon-sized Carlo Rossi wine jug that we use to collect our spare change. Yes, I drink cheap wine—sometimes. With the advent of credit cards and a more cashless society, it now takes several years to accumulate spare change. Sometime back, we had one of those wine jugs almost full of coins. It sat in the corner of a room, and when either of us had extra coins, they went into the jug. One day, we came home to find the jug shattered and the coins scattered all around it on the floor. The weight of the coins had become so great that the glass jug could no longer contain it, and the pressure caused the jug to shatter from the inside. When we counted it all up, we had almost $500 in coins, enough to rent a hotel and have a weekend getaway, which is precisely what we did after we took it to the bank and exchanged the coins for paper money.

Everything has a breaking point. Our coin jug had reached that point before it was full to the very top. Fortunately, we were able to clean up the glass without getting cut and salvage the cash. However, not all breaking points have remaining good fortune attached to them. Additionally, when we ignore specific breaking points, disasters can occur, such as failing to intervene when a nuclear reactor core overheats and a meltdown is imminent. Just such a disaster occurred in Chernobyl, USSR, in 1986. As a result, the city of Chernobyl is still uninhabitable almost forty years later.  There have been other times in history when civilizations reached a breaking point that crushed them. In some cases, this was due to the overuse of resources to the point where the resources could no longer support the bulk of the civilization. This is why there are lost and abandoned ancient cities around the globe. Unfortunately, human beings tend to keep sucking on the teat of their prosperity while they ignore the inevitable consequences of sucking that teat dry. We are in just such a predicament right now, except this time, instead of being a single city or some lost civilization, the potential disaster is global.

It took from the dawn of time until 1804 for the global population to reach the first billion. It took from 1804 until 1927 for the world to reach two billion. In just 123 years, the world's population doubled, when it had taken thousands of years to reach the first billion. In 1960, the world's population reached three billion after just thirty-three years. In 1974, the world's population reached four billion after only fourteen years, having quadrupled in 170 years. By 1987, the world population was five billion. By 1999, after twelve years, the population had grown to six billion. In 2011, the world population reached 7 billion, and as of today, it is 8.2 billion. The world population went from seven billion to eight billion in ten years and continues to grow.  Some experts estimate the maximum sustainable population of the Earth to be 12 billion, and we are rapidly approaching that number. The population added an extra billion after reaching the first billion in 123 years. It added an extra billion the last time in only ten years. What does that tell you?

Without substantial intervention, there will be a breaking point. There will come a time, and probably soon, when the planet will be unable to sustain its population or reverse the effects of that population on the environment. That not only includes humans but also the animals we keep, such as our pets, as well as cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals we use for food. Those animals have also increased in population to supply either companionship or meat as our population has increased. To say that human beings have not affected climate change is ludicrous because the population can't increase that rapidly without affecting the environment. Add to that the advances in technology over the past 150 years, which coincided with population growth, particularly the widespread use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, generators, farm equipment, and lawn mowers, etc. Now, let’s consider the sheer volume of waste from 8.2 billion people (and growing), which is enough to harm the environment, not just plastics in the oceans, but also landfills and non-recyclable products. If we don’t even consider the effects of fossil fuels on the environment, and only take into account the methane gas (a greenhouse gas released every time anyone farts) from 8.2 billion people and all their animals, that alone would be enough to affect the environment. Still, we debate whether climate change is real, as we witness glaciers melting at an alarming rate, wildfires ravaging the landscape like never before, and increasingly powerful storms becoming more dangerous. These storms are so severe and frequent now that insurance companies are either raising home insurance prices in coastal areas beyond the homeowners' ability to pay or pulling out altogether. We can continue to ignore the reality and pretend that we are not headed for a breaking point, or we can begin to face the facts.

So, the world population is reaching a breaking point, and we have politicians banning abortions and oligarchs encouraging women to get pregnant and have children. My Godchild decided when she was very young that she did not intend to have children, and I don’t blame her. It’s not just a matter of what the world might morph into over the next fifty to a hundred years, but the fact that adding more children to the population contributes to the problem itself. It occurred to me when I was teaching about this in a sociology class several years ago that there would come a time when governments might be forced to cull the population deliberately, and if they reach that point, who do you think is likely to get culled? It will not be the wealthy or the elite. It will not be those who serve the government's agenda; it will be the common people. It might be concealed behind some operation that could be palmed off as an epidemic, and whoops, certain people just seem to be immune, or it might be concealed behind ethnic cleansing, or warfare to destroy certain portions of people in other countries or our own. We are hopefully not at that point yet, but COVID-19 certainly provided the world a wake-up call, if it was not a trial run. It all depends on the ethics and compassion of those in power, or the lack thereof.

In addition to everything else, we have AI. Cash registers were once prevalent, but we now have self-checkout or placing your fast-food order at a kiosk instead of with a human being. There was once a time when doctors dictated their notes onto cassette tapes, which transcriptionists listened to and typed for the doctor to sign before they were entered into the charts. Now, with voice recognition, all the doctor has to do is speak the notes directly into the computer and sign them digitally. Transcriptionists, therefore, no longer exist. Clerks are becoming increasingly scarce, and robots are replacing humans in factories. So, the question becomes, as the population increases and technology eliminates more and more jobs, how will those people who served in those jobs in the past be able to support themselves or feed their families? This is a setup for famine, which we have been seeing in third-world countries for the past thirty or forty years. That would be one way of culling the population. Again, withdrawing healthcare or food supplies might be one way for less ethical members of the government to address the problem.

When we consider that around 170,000 people die on Earth every day, but 362,000 are born, resulting in a rate of 252 births per minute, population growth and its overall impact must be taken into account. It has been assumed that young people are the ones who support and maintain the economy before they become too old to work and care for themselves. If a significant portion of the population is beyond the age of self-reliance, while fewer younger people are available to support the economy, this creates another problem, which is why certain politicians and oligarchs encourage childbirth. However, it is a double-edged sword.  Should we continue to build upon the population, knowing that we are rapidly approaching the point of unsustainability, or should we consider ways to curb population growth? Many sci-fi books and films have addressed this very issue, such as Soylent Green, in which the people were deceived into believing that Soylent Green was the solution to world hunger. They didn’t realize that “Soylent Green is people.”

It may be possible for technology to save us, but there are some tough questions to ponder. If we were to transition entirely to green energy today, it might be possible for new technologies to mitigate some of the effects of climate change and increase food production for populations. However, those who have made billions in the past through the oil industry are hesitant to relinquish their cash cow for the benefit of society. Even if technology can utilize machines to grow and harvest food, increasing food production for a growing population, what happens when a bored society emerges? If we have a population with nothing else to do but eat for free while they do little more than exist day in and day out, what kind of trouble might they find themselves in? What kind of trouble could they create for society? No one really knows where all this will lead, but it is clear that a breaking point is inevitable unless we remove some of the coins from the jar before it shatters from the internal weight.

There are know-it-all people who think they have the answers and believe they have the right to tell everyone else what to do, without even considering that there could be another way of looking at the problem or other potential solutions. Some are more interested in their own greed than in doing anything beneficial for the future of the planet or those who may be born after us. They have the attitude of get what you can get while you can get it and screw everyone else. What they don’t understand is that it is not possible to screw everyone else without screwing yourself. It’s not like we can eliminate sex, one of the most potent human urges, or the desire to have children based on some internal calling or the teachings of family and religion.  There was a time before the earth reached the first billion when having children and building a family was what you had to do to survive. It was what you did to create community and build support for yourself as you aged, or build support for your society. There was a time when having children was encouraged, but that was also a time when there were many women and children who died in childbirth or shortly after. The population was not overgrowing itself as it is today.  That was a time when survival was built on numbers. However, the opposite has become true, and if humanity continues to maintain a tribal mentality and operate under rules that were sensible thousands of years ago, but no longer apply to the modern world, there can be no backing away from the breaking point. For humanity to survive, we must rethink our approach to life. They say in the 12-Step program that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Humanity cannot afford to continue doing the same things we did in ancient times, because following those outdated rules is detrimental to modern society. Humanity cannot afford not to face the facts and rethink our approach to survival because if we don’t, we will reach the breaking point, and who knows if humanity will survive it?