letters
I don't think we'll ever know how
many complaints they received for the
police to issue a tweet, but we hope the
chuckles outnumbered the fainting
gasps (or do we?).
Ryan Eastman
Eugene
Editor’s note: Alas, the Eugene Police Log on
Twitter is not an official EPD account. But it is, not
unlike the snow penis, entertaining.
OREGON NEEDS
PATRICK STARNES
As a born and raised, multi-genera-
tion, native Oregonian, it is important to
choose someone to govern the state who
represents the interests of Oregonians.
This is a state with a very diverse set of
lifestyles, occupations and opinions.
In governing Oregon we need someone
who will listen to the varied and individ-
ualistic voices of its citizens, those who
live and work here. Not those who sim-
ply want to capitalize on its resources or
inhabitants, who have nothing emotion-
ally invested in being an Oregonian.
Campaign reform — prioritizing the
short and long-term interests of Or-
egon — is just one of the reasons I sup-
port Patrick Starnes. I have personally
known him for decades. He is all about
Oregon, a man of intelligence, integrity
and empathy towards the needs and
direction of the state and its varied citi-
zens. He is a hard working, community-
oriented kind of guy, having devoted
many years of volunteer service to help
make Oregon a great place to live.
Starnes is the right choice for this
state.
LuAnn Harmon
Westfir
IT’S THE MOMENT TO DECIDE
In the U.S. we have had the freedom
to abuse freedom, and we have. Even
though we have helped win two world
wars fighting for human liberty, after
winning the wars, we have nurtured the
gluttony of wealth instead — instead of
the awareness of human life, awareness
of all life on this small blue planet.
Is it too late to understand how pre-
carious this life on Earth really is? We
are still here, so it is not. But in our glob-
al crisis in a deadly pandemic, as well as
the life-taking storms of climate change,
we must act wisely and quickly. These
threats to our lives could unite us just
enough to respond with intelligent ac-
tion. It is up to us. Or we could continue
to be blinded by self-importance and
the god of money.
Which will it be? Survival of the natu-
ral world, or survival of the lies of ego? It
really is up to us.
Deb Huntley
Eugene
Local
Vocal
and
VIEWPOINT BY ROBERT EMMONS
The Failure of COP26
THE 2021 CLIMATE CONFERENCE IN GLASGOW
IGNORED OVERPOPULATION
A
s the November climate conference
in Glasgow sought agreement among
nations to reduce the amount of carbon
and methane in the atmosphere and
in the oceans, conspicuously missing
from their assortment of human
created catastrophes — drought,
fires, floods, ocean acidification, melting ice, thawing
permafrost, famine, etc.— was the root cause of all of
them: overpopulation.
Also missing from this charade of empty promises and
futile projections was China, a country with the world's
largest population and one of the top CO2 producers.
Any mention of the exponential number of us on the
planet consistently gets a pass from city councils and
county commissions, from state and federal legislators,
from politicians of every stripe. Even environmental law
conferences are gun-shy, largely because any talk of control
and reduction is predictably met by accusations of racism,
ethnocentrism, elitism, authoritarianism, sexism and
sacrilege. Lower birth rates have been a cause for alarm,
for economies predicated on endless and inequitable
growth depend on a reliable spawn of workers to fuel
their superchargers and falter with too many retirees
living too long and feeding at the public trough.
And so we continue to teem like maggots and feed off
carrion of our own making. Cities have nowhere to go but
up, hogging the sun from those in the shadows. Or they
expand beyond their boundaries where weak, corrupt or
non-existent land use regulation — little by little, lot by
lot — helps transform forests, farms, natural areas and
open space into lucrative real estate enterprises for ever
more customers, many of them refugees from some other
wasted and risky habitat suffering the same degradation.
Shy of falling into the ism trap, many liberal thinkers
object that it’s not overpopulation but overconsumption
that’s responsible for most of our ills. To be sure, developed
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J A N U A R Y
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nations (America chief among them) consume a majority
of the world’s resources, most of which are controlled
and enjoyed by a small percentage of their consumers.
Moreover, developing countries, which consume far less,
are suffering most from the catastrophic impacts of those
enjoying a grosser domestic product.
Clearly, the population-consumption argument isn’t
either/or but both/and. However, as the “tragedy of the
commons” demonstrates, land has a carrying capacity
whose quantity and quality erode according to the
numbers and scale of the creatures dependent on it. The
pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet has been an
ecological, economical and ethical disaster.
In 1968, when Garrett Hardin introduced the “tragedy
of the commons” paradigm, the world population was
3.5 billion. In 2021, only half a century later, there are
7.9 billion people on earth and counting. It took 2 million
years of human history and prehistory to reach 1 billion
people and only 200 years to reach 7.9 billion.
Even if we eliminate economic inequities and reduce
consumption, too many bodies remain needing and
breeding and too little land and clean air and water to
support them. The pollution problem ultimately is a
population problem, as Hardin has noted: “It didn’t much
matter how a lonely frontiersman disposed of his waste.
But as the population became denser, the natural chemical
and biological recycling processes became overloaded.”
Already, even as we continue and accelerate our
untenable numbers, lifestyles and practices, many places
are becoming uninhabitable and the world a melting
pot of refugees with fewer places to run to. Suffocating
on air fouled by coal burning, as it has perennially in
late fall, New Delhi is again facing an entire lockdown of
operations, closing schools and businesses. Urban areas
across the country are facing the same conditions from
ineffective control of industrial pollution, coal burning,
car exhausts and the relentless needs of a country with
the planet’s second largest population.
Yet at the 2021 Glasgow climate conference, India
demanded — and received — a last minute change in the
final climate agreement from a “phase out” to a “phase
down” of coal power.
As of this writing, massive amounts of consumer goods
are stacked in ports (and accumulating fees) with too few
to load them onto ships waiting offshore or onto trucks
and rail onshore. Blame for this distribution failure has
ranged from the pandemic, to accounting errors, to old-
fashioned greed, but what impresses is the monumental
amount of stuff that has required precious material and
energy resources to manufacture. And all of it wanting
dispersal to untold numbers of customers.
While our numbers have increased and economies have
grown beyond local to global scales to serve them, what
was economical and in sync with the local commons and
its natural ecology has morphed into Economy, whose
functions and effects have become alien and diffuse
and little understood, much less controlled, by those
it ostensibly purports to serve. Economy has become
king with a decidedly autonomous and autocratic bent,
and the natural environment and its inhabitants mere
vassals subject to its dictates and whims.
For many the way out of the trap set by the industrial
revolution and mass production is another revolution,
with renewables and “clean” energy leading the charge —
or the colonization of Mars or some other hapless planet
boosted by a Musk or a Bezos. Yet why believe that what
precipitated an exponential increase of our species will
somehow rescue us from its cataclysmic consequences?
Glasgow’s focus on carbon and methane merely
continued a chronic distraction from facing the real
enemy: ourselves, the inordinate and insupportable
number of us breeding and consuming too much for the
planet to bear. Such conferences will highlight the futility
of empty and unenforceable goals and commitments
until they ignore the isms, eschew business as usual and
recognize the primary importance and environmental
toll of human numbers and scale.
Until then it’s just more “Blah, blah, blah,” as Greta
Thunberg aptly declared — outside the convention doors. ■
Robert Emmons is president of LandWatch Lane County.
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M