Welcome to the world number 7,000,000,000!  Now wait a second… oh!  7,000,000,001!  Wait a few more seconds…There’s 7,000,002!  Congratulations new babies, families, and all!  This happy and joyous occasion!  We can ignore the suffering for a little while, anyway!

There are a few things that surprise me when they don’t hit people in the gut.  When they don’t get a rise or cause a little bit of panic: the kind in which you get a cold shiver or a little vomit in your mouth.  For me, these are usually matters of systemic injustice, such as poverty, racism, and sexism.  Another is environmental devastation.  Perhaps the most surprising is population growth.

Yesterday, the world passed 7 billion people.  My junior high text books referred to the 4 billion on the planet.  Now we are at 7 billion.  That’s 7 with nine zeros after it.  And yet, to many, this is just another number.  Another thing that “doesn’t concern them” or is simply “politics” or “I’m sure smart people will fix it”.  If only.

Perhaps population alarmists have claimed a falling sky enough times to get ignored by our population.  Maybe there is a corporate-funded movement of population deniers that think we are simply in some kind of “cycle” and that humanity could not possibly be at fault for our condition.  But there is no excuse for not paying attention to where population is growing: poor, rural, impoverished corners of the globe in which people have little to no education, access to birth control and the ability to properly use it, or women’s health organizations.  Places in which the existing population has trouble feeding itself.

There is some hope in action.  National Geographic has done a special series on population growth that is worth exploring.  The Green Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70’s was an important development.  Raising awareness is also important.  But none of this is enough and none of it deals with the central issue: distribution.

Every day, grocers all over the U.S. toss out food they couldn’t sell.  At the same time a billion people will go to bed hungry.  This is the problem.  The problem isn’t simply that there are rich countries and poor countries.  Rich countries have often been quite generous toward the impoverished.

The problem is that it comes at a cost: a price that further impoverishes the people.  We give away seeds and tools and strategies; they then feel obligated to take out a loan from a U.S. bank to buy the technology from a U.S. company to farm the way the U.S. taught them.  The crop we’ve given them is of lesser value on the marketplace, so they have to grow more of it, hiring even more people, buying even more technology, indebting whole communities, not to the U.S., but to private institutions within the U.S..  Debt that they never had to carry before.  Now the cost of breaking even is substantially higher.  This is our view of “helping”.  We’ve done the same with our role in the IMF and World Bank.

I wonder how we, as Christians, can ignore the rapid pace of population growth: that we can sit there and watch, saying nothing.  Doing nothing.  Not even talking about what it means.  Not talking about the increasing poverty.  Not talking about the conditions of the suffering.  Not talking about what a Christian response to suffering would be.  Perhaps there are too many of us who have decided that God simply wants us to have as many kids as possible.  Maybe we are a country of Duggars, or people that would be the Duggars if they could afford it.  Maybe we are so into our need for selfish independence that we couldn’t possibly do the smart thing–because apparently the only way to be independent is to be brain-dead.  I don’t know.

But we need to talk about it so that we can figure out what we can do about it.  Because we need to do something.

Something about food and income distribution.

Something about the conditions of the impoverished.

Something about economic inequality.

Something about the ability for food to be produced in every country that actually helps that country, without profiting others.

Something that deals with the human problem facing us.  The human one.  The one that faces each of these humans that aren’t as wealthy as you are and have no hope of ever being as wealthy as you.

Something about our selfish, greedy need to look after our own health at the expense of someone else.

That’s the ethics of population growth.

And that’s why I’m pissed that you aren’t.