Are we there yet Pa? Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned

Environmental Policy

by Joe Bageant | February 6, 2008 – 6:45am

John Raymond Castillo, age 81. Sunrise, January 14, 1917. Sunset, February 1, 2008. He leaves 21 children, 140 grandchildren and 302 great-grandchildren…
–Obituary announcement on Belize’s LOVE Radio station

”The population of Belize? Officially it’s about 300,000. But if you include all the kids, it’s probably three million.”
–Greg, longtime expatriate American in Belize

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE: The din of squealing, laughing children is the background white noise of the Third World. In Belize, as in most of the Third World, 45% of all people are under the age of 16. About a dozen of that 45% swarm around me as I cut my toenails under the mango tree. A few are picking on the mangy, quarreling dogs but the majority are drawn in close, giving advise about how to cut gnarly, old man type toenails: “Saw dem off wid a file” seems to be the consensus.

What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about grades … unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race. They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both ever in human history.
Most families here have five or six kids and their kids will have a similar number. I’ve yet to meet a native of the village who does not think half a dozen is not a nice round number of offspring. My adopted family has six kids and four adults living on a 100 x 300-foot lot. This does not include the Guatemalan family of five living in a rented cabana at one corner of the lot. Assuming all the children reach adulthood and procreate, the tally in ten years will be about 50 people of all ages trying to exist on this square of sewerage soaked sand.

But oh, were it that bright a future. As adults with families, these kids won’t even have this spot on which to live at all, much less live as well as they live now. The resorts and condo rackets out of Canada, South Africa and the U.S. are buying up these small plots. Unschooled in western financial concepts and janked by the developers’ offers of more money than they have ever seen in their lives, locals sell. Usually they are broke within a year. In any case their semi-literate children will join the next generation’s issuance of dispossessed poverty stricken young adults headed for elsewhere. Just what the world does not need, not here in Central America, not in the Middle East, not in Latin America or the U.S. But that’s what we’ve got and that’s what we are going to get a lot more of.

Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our approaching eco-disaster that that no one honestly talks about. On the left we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore’s advice, which somehow never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets feel-good electric car ads — buy your way out of the problem, or at least your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, “You can’t run a hundred head of cattle on half an acre.”

Most of the developed world remains clueless as to how all this will affect their own lives. But Americans in particular cannot get their head around the impact these billions will have on the lifestyles they are driven like rats in hell to sustain. About half of Americans…

THE SCREAMING MAN INSIDE MY HEAD: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. “LET’S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL FUCKING YES, LET’EM ALL IN!” YEA, RIGHT. LET EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A FUCKING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD AMERICA. HELL, IT’S ALREADY STARTED. THEY’RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS BECAUSE THEY CAN’T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY’RE KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY CAN’T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.

Meanwhile, both camps of a nation with no sense of history beyond its own state sponsored founding fathers mythology hasn’t the slightest notion of how population migrations from areas of scarcity to areas of plenty have shaped human history perhaps more than any other force, including war (war is just more dramatic when it happens and more entertaining to read about when it’s over.) The Vikings were a population shift from the limited arable land resources of the north around the British coast to Normandy (and then back to England by way of William the Conqueror, a Viking descendant.) The Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Irish in America, Chinese into Tibet …

SCREAMING MAN: WELL BUBBA, LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU IN CRAYONS. IT’S GETTING RIGHT BROWN OUT THERE IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. ALL THOSE SAWED-OFF LITTLE DARK HAIRED FUCKERS HAVEN’T COME UP HERE TO BE LAWN ORNAMENTS. AND SINCE THEY EAT AND SHIT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT AS YOU DO, THERE’S GONNA BE SOME REDISTRIBUTION OF THE GOODIES. YOU’RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF AMERICAN BLUBBER PARKED IN LINE ALONGSIDE SALVADORANS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS FULL OF WORTHLESS GREENBACKS WAITING TO BUY BLACK BEANS AND MASA HARINA IN BULK – THEN HITCHING A RIDE HOME ON A FLATBED TRUCK LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD SOUTH OF LOREDO DOES. OR MAYBE TAKING THE CHICKEN COOP FIREWOOD EXPRESS SURPLUS SCHOOL BUS BACK TO THE SAVAGE ARMED SUBURBS. A LITTLE TIP FROM THE OLE SCREAMING MAN: IF THERE IS A BILLY GOAT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, RIDE UP FRONT. IF THE DAMNED GOAT IS UP FRONT, RIDE ON THE ROOF. THERE IS USUALLY SOMEBODY OR SOMETHING UP THERE TO HANG ONTO.