* Exclusive Earth Day shirt from Sarcasm Central

I have big concerns for the stability of the planetary crust. Not only are we blasting past 7 BILLION people on the planet (remember when it was a big deal ten+ years ago when child # 6 Billion was born?), but a lot of those 7 billion people are also obese.

This is old news now: The world’s population is forecast to hit 7 billion next year, the vast majority of its growth coming in developing and, in many cases, the poorest nations, a report released Wednesday said. A staggering 97 percent of global growth over the next 40 years will happen in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet.

“The great bulk of today’s 1.2 billion youth — nearly 90 percent — are in developing countries,” said Carl Haub, a co-author of the report. Eight in 10 of those youth live in Africa and Asia.

Too many people. Way too many. The article even mentions a prediction that in 2050 the US will be the third most populous country on the planet – with only 439 million. I say only because the next highest are China at 1.4B and India at 1.7B. That’s right folks – more than 3x the population of the US.

This spells disaster for the planet if Hollywood doomsday movies are to be believed.

What if we had to evacuate the Earth due to a massive celestial impact headed our way? There’s no way that we would 1: have enough spacecraft to get everyone off the planet, 2: have anywhere to actually go with all those people, 3: have spacecraft that could lift all that fat.

EarthWhat if our weight is putting too much pressure on the planet and it is cracking apart? Islands are delicate things – and we’re all living on one. Put too much weight on a patch of beach sand and you sink into it. Just imagine that on a global scale.

What about all these hundreds of thousands of people who are right in the way of tsunami’s and hurricanes? With wars and mother nature in full force we’re losing people nearly as fast as we’re creating them! (Except for China, which has over 13 million abortions per year)

Another problem (even though I’ve been mentioning this a lot in this post so it’s not really “another” problem it’s the same problem I’ve been talking about, but since there was a sentence or two in between I wanted to make sure we come full circle – and really does it require this much explanation? If you read my writing on a regular basis you know what it’s all about – so this explanation really is only for the new people. Welcome.) is that we’re a heavy people (there’s a reason the quote refers to the “bulk of today’s 1.2 billion youth” – let’s face it there is just too much good food to eat and we love to eat it and we have lots of parents who use fast-food as a babysitter)!

Childhood obesity rates are skyrocketing, morbid obesity in adults continues to be a major health-care battle, and although there’s that silly little law about matter neither being created nor destroyed, the human population sure seems to be creating a whole lot of junk that never goes away (whether that’s in fat form in our bodies that refuses to drop off despite our desperate pill popping in front of the TV, or material possessions that wind up in landfills – weighing down the planet even more).

Those poor tectonic plates on our dear planet Earth…I think we all need to take a moment to send them a message of hope.

I think I’m going to start a non-profit called Flowers for the Earth. Everyone will be required to get out of their house and plant flowers all over the planet – not just because it will make the planet pretty for the aliens that will soon be here to destroy us (unless we can evacuate the planet first), but so people can get off their butts and go burn some of that weight off by working in the yard.

Are you with me?