Why We're Driving Ourselves and the Planet Towards Extinction

I really despise certain parts of this planet. Not the places themselves, but the people that unfortunately inhabit these places. A prime example is South East Asia. In case you missed the news this week, Malaysians are suffering through an awful bout with air pollution because of smoke from forest fires. This is nothing new. In fact, most of SE Asia - from India to Indonesia - is under a persistent giant brown cloud of smog because these countries are overpopulated and have no sense of cleanliness. They're backwards.

The cause of this choking smoke are the massive forest fires being set in Indonesia. Indonesia is on a path to completely destroy its entire environment with deforestation and incessant pollution. It's disgusting. But to show you an example of just how backwards and idiotic these people are, do you know what they are doing to try and fix this? Instead of doing the right thing and actually stopping these criminals who are cutting down and burning lush, tropical forests, they pray to a silly god. I can't point the whole finger at religion, as the fucked up Indonesian government is REFUSING offers from other nations to help put out the fires!

"We pray that Allah will bestow rain on this land so that the haze will disappear," said one preacher, according to the AP news story. Yes, let's pray to some bogeyman in the sky! That's going to stop the destruction! If there was a god looking over these people and this land, he'd send a few more tsunamis their way. Yeah, I know, I sound sick and cruel. But short of a major decline in population or cultural attitudes, nothing is going to stop this disaster in the making. Nothing. The Dec. 2004 tsunami wiped out more than 150,000 people, mostly in Indonsia. It's pretty clear more need to go.

It's sickening to see what's going on in SE Asia. China has built and continues to build these massive damns, flooding millions up on millions of people (mostly poor farmers) out of their lands, most of which have been there for centuries. Vietnam and other countries downstream are now also paying a price because of the water control in China. Rivers are dropping lower, the water quality is getting worse, silt is building up and fish are dying rapidly. Automobile usage in that part of the world continues to skyrocket, driving air quality levels to new lows, from Mumbai to Bangkok to Hong Kong. And no one is stopping it.

I wish there was some way to stop all this maddness going on in the world. We have religions that preach against family planning, yet that same philosophy leads to the destruction of what you could call God's creations mainly due to overpopulation. Ironic, isn't it?