​​What is the single best thing you can do to help the environment? Is it to stop eating meat? Drive and fly less? Recycle and use less energy in your home?
 
It is none of these.
 
The best thing you can do to help the environment, by far, is to have a small family, or even better have no children at all. By not adding another person to the planet, you are saving an entire lifetime’s worth of pollution, waste, carbon dioxide emissions and consumption.
 
It is a truth universally ignored that a planet on the verge of collapse must address the root cause of ecological annihilation: overpopulation. World population has rocketed from one billion to nearly eight billion in only the last two centuries. Add to this our personal consumption, which has multiplied by many times in the developed world over the last century, and we are potentially heading to a cataclysm of epic proportions.

Allowing the world’s population to climb to its current level is the biggest act of criminal negligence ever committed, by ourselves upon ourselves. We know we’re heading in the wrong direction, but we blindly follow the path towards the cliff edge.
 
We have to ask, ‘How did we let this happen?’ Why is it the elephant in the room? Why is any talk about population off the agenda with virtually no one talking about it? As this book explains, it’s a very tricky subject.
 
We could easily change things for the better if we tried.
 
Everything you ever wanted to know about overpopulation, but were afraid to ask, is answered here.

I wrote this book after years of wondering why being ‘green’ didn’t seem to be helping in the way it was supposed to. Why did it seem to be little more than a token gesture to recycle and ride a bike when it clearly wasn’t going to make much of a difference? It niggled and festered in the back of my mind for years and eventually it dawned on me through some kind of enlightened osmosis that nothing would make much of a difference while there were millions of people everywhere, all consuming more and more, and increasing in numbers too. When you see it from an overpopulation perspective, it becomes obvious and you see the consequences of our billions everywhere you look.
 
Population size is a vital factor in the world today, yet awareness and action on it is tiny. We are so used to thinking that the planet is tailored purely for human purposes, we simply don’t realise what we’re doing. When you look from the outside on to the human world, from an animal’s perspective, you can see humans for what we really are. You can see the small fragments of the natural word that are left among a sprawl of human created crops and cities expanding on every continent. We carry on in the 21st century world as if this is the way things always have been and always will be, but the current norm of constant human change to the world cannot last much longer before the struggling ecosystem, on which we and the natural world depend, begins to fail. We are feeling the first effects now, and these will gradually and inevitably increase as our planetary changes continue.
 
Our ever growing numbers are potentially leading us to a cataclysm of a size never witnessed by humanity. It is happening right now and we are carrying on as if everything is normal. We have to ask ourselves why we are letting this happen.
 
It is so obvious that the more people there are, the more environmental damage will happen. So why have we just let it happen, when the consequences are so dire? We have very simple and effective ways to stop population growth through contraception, but we haven’t stopped that growth. Why not, when we can see the damage we’re doing? It’s such a simple solution isn’t it? But we’ve not succeeded, as we head towards 8 billion, with further billions in the pipeline.
 
This book contains everything you ever wanted to know about overpopulation but were afraid to ask.
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For anyone thinking of having a child, this book puts the case against giving birth as made by All Living Things Apart From Humans. The case for giving birth will be given by your natural instincts and desires. You are, of course, the final judge and it is your decision. Don't let this book scare you off having a family, but use it as one side of the argument and weigh up the pros and cons yourself. For anyone already with children or grand-children, talk to them about their own plans for having children.
 
It is a truth universally ignored that a planet on the verge of collapse must be in want of a stable ecosystem. Allowing the world’s population to rocket to its current level is the biggest act of criminal negligence ever committed, by ourselves and upon ourselves. We know we’re heading in the wrong direction, but we recklessly charge along the path towards the cliff edge. We are in the steepest part of the extinction collapse and extreme consumption phase of the Anthropocene right now.
 
We have faced world wars, famines and plagues and have lived to tell the tale. But the scale of the challenge today is on a different level: the climate is changing; icecaps are melting; the oceans are acidifying; forests, wildlife and ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes. We continue life in the modern world as if everything has always been like this and always will be – driving, flying and consuming. We are destroying our own life-support systems.
 
World population has grown more since 1950 than it has since humans first appeared on Earth. We are wrecking the planet and sitting back and watching it happen. The most urgent task faced by the world today is to stabilise and reduce the human population together with its rampant levels of consumption.