Human numbers passed the seven and a half billion mark in about April of 2017, and their growth showed no signs of slowing to more manageable rates. According to the United Nations 2017 Population Prospects Revision humans will number in the vicinity of 11.2 billion by the end of the 21st century, and human numbers are expected to continue to grow in spite of dwindling fertility rates. While it may not be fashionable to talk about it yet, a growth crisis is on the horizon, and the sooner we start talking about it the better will be our chances of survival.
While celebrated naturalists and environmentalists such as David Attenborough and Al Gore recognise the seriousness of growing human numbers they wither when it comes to locating families in an ecological context perhaps because they are themselves husbands and fathers.
While it may be a bitter realisation for anyone who looks at this problem it nevertheless remans the case that in a growth crisis there are only two alternatives: either you lower the birth rate or you raise the death rate, and the logic of these alternatives is as simple as it is unavoidable.
There has been talk of establishing a human colony on another world but this is not really a viable alternative. It may be possible to send as many as several thousand emigrants to another world but this won't make any difference to the billions left behind here on Earth.
While this may sound like a very gloomy prospect the good news is that adapting to a culture of growth control won't require any change in our sexual behaviour. Sex is without doubt the most compelling motive we have for achieving social cohesion, and love is itself the foundation on which our definition of reality has been built. And if the Gulf of Mexico and the Antilles islands are anything to go by then it would appear that love is universal.
You may be thinking that time is short but it's not. We make time with our dreaming and with the love we share with another. If I've learned anything from my experience of dreaming then it is that reality is not inflexible, and that there is an abundance of time. I've not loved another for a long time but I know that time exists between a man and a woman. Just as the two ends of time are located within the body so too do they exist between a man and a woman, and between couples who identify with other combinations of gender. I doubt that men will be offended by the suggestion that they are relatively primitive compared with a woman, and that a woman is a more civilized being. Males and females hail from opposite ends of time and all of life endeavours to bring them together.
That a man and a woman join the two ends of time is a proposition about which there can be no doubt which may partially explain why love and sex are so persistently incomprehensible. Our bodies reach out to another so that they can achieve a temporal unity.
In terms of our problem with the growth crisis, love and sex may be unavoidable but contraception is a choice. If you plan on having a baby then this will be a very sensitive issue for you, and I dare mention it to you here because the ecological significance of the view that the body consists of a map of time is that it provides us with a belief about the body which doesn't ultimately lead to reproduction. We need to get people talking about growth control and for this endeavour to succeed we need to develop a dramatically different narrative about the nature and purpose of the body.
We don't need to be having so many children when we could be doing something else with our bodies. We could be explorers of a new dimension, and further our interest in the galaxy by exploring the universe within us.
