As my buddy Doug told you earlier, CBS’ “60 Minutes” tapped notoriously incorrect environmentalist doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to be their expert in a segment about how we’re staring down the end of our once-great civilization unless we get our earth game together and listen to everything he says.
“The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Biologist Paul Erlich says that our current way of life is unsustainable. https://t.co/AwaKLZFGsj pic.twitter.com/MU1jHpuMwI
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 2, 2023
Our current way of life is unsustainable. There are just too damn many of us on this planet and we use too damn much stuff and humanity was really never meant to stick around for very long because we’re all just parasites if you think about it.
“People of Science” like Paul Ehrlich are, on the whole, pretty comfortable with the idea of saving the future by aborting it. But that still doesn’t really fix the current situation in which billions of people are currently alive. What do we do about the people out there who still want to be able to procreate but not be burdened with the environmental guilt that goes along with it?
Well, it turns out that the solution may be right under our noses — literally. That’s right, folks. Humanity needs to start being shorter.
“From where I stand — at five feet even — being tall is a widely held fantasy of superiority that long ago should have been retired,” writes @maraaltman. https://t.co/HfG2TQWMen
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 1, 2023
“There is an ongoing debate about the stature of a population and what it means for the prosperity and fairness of a nation, but I’m interested in shortness on an individual level,” writes @maraaltman. https://t.co/lxOFoGt7yb
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 2, 2023
Shorter New York Times: Tall people got no reason, tall people got no reason, tall people got no reason to liiiiiiiive.
OK, I couldn’t help myself. That’s not exactly what Mara Altman is saying … but it’s also not that far off:
The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion. Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).
…
Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked). Yuval Noah Harari, in his book “Sapiens,” wrote about a population of early humans who inhabited an island called Flores. Because of a rise in sea level, the island was cut off from other land masses.
“Big people, who need a lot of food, died first,” Mr. Harari wrote.
After generations, the people on the island evolved to reach only three and a half feet tall. They could do everything bigger humans could — make tools, hunt — but they could also stay alive when times got tough.
Gee. We must admit we’d never thought of it that way before. To think we’d gone our entire lives believing that topping out at three and a half feet tall could potentially pose some problems even just practically speaking, when all this time, we hadn’t considered the idea that short people eat less and will be able to be crammed aboard spaceships in greater numbers.
Someone short and single is writing op-eds for The New York Times. pic.twitter.com/ssM39Iy3dn
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) January 2, 2023
To be fair, Mara Altman is not single. She’s just short. Short, and married to a short man and they have short kids.
I myself am of average height. I was actually robbed of like an inch or so because my knees don’t straighten all the way (just trust me). Plus I never had a growth spurt. But I very much would like to be taller. Because i think it’d be fun and I’d like to be able to reach stuff that’s really high up (that right there is an evolutionary advantage, no?) and also when I inevitably start to shrink, I’ll still be a decent height when I’m done shrinking.
Being on the taller side has its advantages. It just does. That’s not meant to be a swipe at little people or at people who are of below-average height. It’s just the way it is. Short people don’t have much control over their height. And neither do tall people. And I think it’s effing weird that the New York Times would publish an opinion piece arguing that tall people are overrated because, among other things, they’re bad for the environment. I’d find it equally effing weird if the New York Times published an opinion piece suggesting that we’d be better off living in a world of tall people because short people are easier to trip over or something.
So will short be added to the L G B T Q R S T X Y Z thingie?
— JustJulia (@juliaguliamaga) January 2, 2023
Apparently it’s only a matter of time. A short trans woman will be untouchable in short order.
The STUPIDEST op-ed in the @nytopinion I have EVER READ. "Short is better, & it is the future"? "Some tall people are miserable?" How does this add to human discourse in ANY way? How did this drivel end up in the paper of record? I'm a short way from cancelling my subscription.
— Linda Patch #FBR (@LindaPatch) January 2, 2023
I’m shocked to see the NYT is ringing in the new year the same way it ended the last, by embarrassing themselves.
— Ryan Scanlan 👥 (@Xenius101) January 2, 2023
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