Richard – Population Matters-USA

“Alfie & Me” is a many-layered joy to read! Its main story is as delicious as they come. An orphaned baby screech owl is found and fostered by a human family who have the knowledge to sustain her. Even though there is much love in this story, there are also times of stress and doubt. Will Alfie (the owl) grow up to act like a wild animal? If she does, will she fly away and leave her human family? Will she survive living in the wild? Worse, will she not take to the wild life and have to remain a pet for the rest of her life?

The story of Alfie is the honey in this literary pastry. There are two other parts to this baklava book, however—chopped nuts, and thin, crisp layers of filo. The nuts are the real meat of the story. Compared to the sweet story of Alfie, these tidbits of philosophy, history and religion are more serious reading. The “Me” of this book, Carl Safina, trained as an ecologist, with work on sea birds. I am amazed that a biologist should have such deep knowledge of Eastern religions, Greek philosophy and other aspects of the origins of our modern society. He regrets the turns of events that have allowed modern humanity to have so little respect for the planet upon which we depend. He is especially troubled by Plato, who set the stage for the destruction of our planet which we are now experiencing.

Safina writes about the three forces that are destroying our world. They are: loss of biological diversity; human overpopulation; poisoning of our air and water—and of ourselves. It was refreshing for me to read someone who is so knowledgeable and who shares my concerns so strongly and eloquently. You will have to read the book to fill in the details of how Plato set us up for failure. You will also learn what these three horsemen of the apocalypse are doing to destroy us and the rest of the natural world.

Filo dough is the final component of this delicious book. It forms the structure of the baklava that holds it together and gives it shape. At first it was a bit disconcerting to me to go instantly from owl to Plato, but then I got used to it. After all, the book’s subtitle is “What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”.

The book documents a relatively short period of time, about a year during the early COVID pandemic. It also takes place in a small geographic area in New York state—mostly in Carl and Patricia Safina’s yard, plus a little surrounding territory with woods and neighbors’ yards. There is also the stop sign on the street in front of the Safina home, and several other landmarks that I’ve gotten to know well. It is a territory sized to a small species of owl, but also a friendly space that we get to know from Safina’s fine descriptions. This is the compact but complex space describing “what owls know”.

The scope of the philosophizing, however, is much broader than the owl territory. It covers millennia, its physical dimensions vary from subatomic particles to the universe, and it heads from the concrete to the spiritual. This vast breadth of subjects explains “what humans believe” in the subtitle. A recurring theme of the book is that our species has had the liberty to fabricate lots of ideas that explain the mysteries of our human experience, while animals cannot afford to indulge in this sort of nonsense.

“Alfie & Me—What Owls Know, What Humans Believe” puts Carl Safina in the same league with top nature writers/philosophers such as Rachel Carson, Ed Abbey and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

©Richard Grossman MD, 2025

Image: Global Footprint Network, www.footprintnetwork.org The top of the blue columns indicates the day overshoot started. The red indicates the duration of overshoot.

I was driving up Main Avenue, listening to a book and glancing to the left to find the eye doctor where I had an appointment. I looked at the clock and realized that I was almost late—then I realized that I had overshot my destination and made a “U” turn.

Not all types of overshoot are so easily corrected with a “U” turn. We are in ecological overshoot, which is much more complex than driving past that office. Ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made on a natural ecosystem exceed its regenerative capacity. Globally, we have exceeded our planet’s ability to regenerate what we take by about 80%. To put it simply, we are using more of the planet’s resources than are available.

Ecological overshoot is a little like overspending your credit card. You can get away with overspending for a while, and many people do. The average per capita debt in the USA is over $100,000, and more than $6,000 of that debt is owed to credit cards. You can be assured that the card company or the bank will eventually get their money, however. Unfortunately, it is our progeny who will need to pay for our ecological overshoot. We have overpopulated the planet, and are consuming too much “stuff”.

How can global overshoot be measured? You must know the resources of the planet, and how much of those resources we, humanity, are using. The Global Footprint Network, www.footprintnetwork.org, does those complicated measurements on a routine basis. It is relatively easy for them to calculate our excess use of resources. They have an interesting way of expressing overshoot.

One might think of measuring overshoot as megatons of carbon emissions or perhaps global debt; however, both of these concepts are difficult to understand intuitively. Instead, they use information from every country to determine nature’s “budget”, what our planet can supply. Then they estimate the day when we have used up all of that budget. Back in the early 1970s, we fit in the global budget. There were enough resources to supply all human needs, although they were distributed very inequitably. Since then, however, we have increasingly overspent that budget. Global population has more than doubled, and consumption has quadrupled, plus. We are too many people, consuming too much.

This year Earth Overshoot Day came the earliest ever—on July 24th. That marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. It was August 1st last year, and next year will probably be earlier in July. We are overshooting nature’s budget as fast as we’re racking up our national debt!

There are ways to decrease, and perhaps eventually reverse, overshoot. I’m sure you are aware of some; but let’s look at what the experts are saying. The Footprint Network people took advantage of the work done by Project Drawdown and came up with a list of solutions for overshoot. You can learn more at: www.overshootday.org/pop. If we took full advantage of all 76 items on the list, we could move Overshoot Day more than a month later. Two of the most effective solutions, “Educating Girls” and “Family Planning”, are similar in the way they have their effect—by reducing population growth. They are combined at the linked website.

Voluntary family planning is probably the most effective, least expensive and most humane way to slow population growth. Although World Contraception Day was on September 26th, let’s keep this year’s theme in mind: “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges—Contraceptive Access for All”!