Pondering the Natural Way

I guess the title of this blog could be taken many different ways, but as always, there is one direction I have in mind for this post.  What I have been pondering over the last few days has to do with the nature of our world, human overpopulation, and diseases / medical conditions.  Sounds like a random bag of tricks when I look at it written out, but maybe I can put all the pieces together and make some sense out of it.  So here we go.  If we look at the human population in the world, it is growing at close to an exponential rate with no signs of seriously slowing down.  Through this increasing population, we are inherently taxing our resources; from electricity to food to water to land to pretty much everything.  All in all, there has been no serious check on our population increase.  Cities, especially in developing countries, are growing beyond their capacity to support the populations who live there.  Farms the world over are having a harder and harder time producing enough food to satiate the world's demand.  And lets not even get started on utilities which need serious updating and installation in developing countries.  Even in countries like the United States and Europe, there is a constant struggle to ensure that enough electricity is produced to keep the wheels turning.   At this point in history, it seems that humanity is on the brink of either figuring out how to move forward in a successful manner or crash and burn due to an excessive overload of people.  So what ever happened to the system of keeping humanity in check?  If we look at all the other species in the world, every single one has a predator or some outside force to in some way keep their population in check.  If you remove one predator in the food chain, some species then has the capability of growing their population beyond healthy limits.  Humans have no predators as we are at the top of the food chain.  There is nothing to keep the human population in check, or is there. 

Up until the 1800's, humanity did have a natural check to its population growth.  That check, as horrid as it may sound, was diseases and viruses.  Think back to the bubonic plague that wiped out a good chunk of the European population.  While the plague wiped out almost everyone it came in contact with, there were those that survived, namely the strong and healthy.  So what did the plague essentially do?  It placed the human population back within the boundaries by which it could sustain itself.  However, over the past few centuries, humans have been doing their best to prevent anyone from contracting a disease or virus in the hopes of allowing every human being to live out a full life.  While I feel that it is a lofty goal, was every human being meant to live out a full life or were some meant to succumb to a disease or virus because they were not strong or healthy enough?  I am not advocating at this point taking the weak out back and shooting them because that would simply be Satanic.  However, in preventing nature from taking its course in many cases, are we allowing our population to grow beyond our ability to sustain it?  Have we gone too far in preventing diseases and viruses from trimming off the excess if you will?  Perhaps we have.  In altering nature to our ideals by creating medications and vaccines to prevent death from ever touching our doorstep, our we inevitably setting ourselves up for disaster?   We already know that most areas in the world that can be farmed are being farmed and we can't simply create more earth on which to grow food.  How are we supposed to supply food to an ever growing population when there is no where else to grow food.  The same goes for water, heat, etc, etc. 

So what is the answer?  At this point in history, we can't exactly eliminate all medications and vaccines that ward of illness and death.  We must simply cope with our condition and move forward somehow.  I do feel, however, that diseases and viruses do have a place within this world to get rid of the weak and allow the strong to survive.  For thousands and thousand of years, this is how humanity got by and slowly grew.  The strong survived and the weak didn't.  Now we have almost everyone surviving with only the seriously weak dying.  Its not necessarily fun to think about as I am sure most of us have had to deal with sickness and death in some way, but if we look at the broader picture, it makes sense.  I think the problem with thinking about this issue lies in one's perspective.  If we look at this issue only through the lens of the present, then of course it looks inhumane, diabolical even, and not relevant.  However, if we take the time to step back and look at humanity over the course of its history, perhaps what I am saying will make more sense.  As I said before, its not like we can do anything about this issue now as we have come too far and "progressed" as a human people, however it does offer some interesting food for thought I think.  And before I finish up for today, I am not slamming the medical profession as I feel they do some great work.  All in all, when looking to the future, lets consider not just our situation, but that of everyone around us and how we all fit together in this big puzzle called life.