Karachi

Kolkata, India

While the great minds of Mississippi try to figure out how to get blastocysts to sign petitions for their rights, The people of Karachi try to squeeze into a city already overpopulated. This NPR story sheds bright light on issues of overpopulation, poverty and capitalism. We are seven billion and growing. However, humans still focus on how to make a profit off the potential demise of the species as its supporting environment collapses under its weight.

Mind-numbing contrast in this morning's reports on NPR came with the piece on the dwindling moose population in Wyoming, a state whose largest city has  approximately 2500 people per square mile, as opposed to Karachi's 9500 people per square mile or Kolkata's 62,000 per square mile. The fragility of our ecology is secondary in the moose report. The focus of the piece was the hardship of big-game hunters, deprived of their prey by parasites, wolves and grisly bears.

The thread here is fairly clear. Imbalance. Human population is out of balance with its natural environment. The environment is seeking balance through its own natural mechanisms. Nature's balance will inevitably determine the future of the human species. Not the other way around.