(If you don’t believe me, take a look at the history of human population growth as it correlates to the availability of ample food and water. You will quickly find that human populations explode with adequate supplies of both, even with disease, war and all other deleterious factors considered. Just take a look at the last 50-100 years of our history on the planet. If you want more specific proof please look up the amount of unused, arable land that remains available to grow crops in China. It approximates only 1 %.)
This course would only serve to prolong our population bubble until it has swelled to unimaginable levels. At that point our future offspring will exist on a subsistence diet of corn, soy, perhaps rice, and the occasional rat. There will be no wild animals anyways – they will all be extinct due to our over population. Their land will be long gone to make way for our crops, and even many of the plants we eat today would not be available because of their caloric inefficiencies. This philosophy assumes that humans and their ecology are mutually exclusive. This is not true; it’s actually quite the contrary – we are inextricably linked to the ecology we exist in. It is a part of us, and we of it. We are quickly discovering this to our own great dismay. This is a classic case of treating the symptoms vs. facing and solving the real problem.
I submit to you that a great definition for a basic “adequate quality of life” for any animal on this planet is “the ability to live in their natural habitat, complete with their natural diet and clean water”. Predation is a natural part of this cycle. On animal preserves in Africa we don’t punish the lions for hunting and eating other animals. We as humans certainly have a right to our natural place in the food chain, but unlike the lions, we must approach our predation with reason, respect, conservation, humaneness and compassion as our guides.
Whether involuntary or not we are stuck with (well, most of us) these feelings of conscience. We need to limit the human population of this planet to a level that allows for us and our ecological brethren to live in harmony and in our natural states – period. All other things being equal and efficient, this is the one main reason for the horrible symptoms befalling us; pollution, animal extinction, loss of their habitat and global warming, among many others.
As long as we don’t become grossly inefficient or short-sighted elsewhere, those symptoms magically disappear once this core problem is identified and solved. I do not have an answer for applying this solution of limiting the human population on the planet (especially being a Catholic) other than personally volunteering not to procreate or to adopt a child myself. But unless we find another planet to occupy, we must. As someone who believes in God though, I answer all religious zealots with one fact – he gave us a brain. As certainly as we are stuck with the aforementioned feelings of conscience and their philosophical consequences to us, we are also stuck with our gifts of thought, logic and reason. I am quite certain that our Creator knew we would study the simple phenomenon of rats or other animals living in an environment of limited resources while procreating endlessly. They all end up dying in one massive cataclysm. It does not take a genius to realize that we must come up with some fair system of limiting our population. That is the one true core problem at the root of all others.