Extinct

There's a scientist in her 80's who has spent a full year of her life under the sea if you add it all up. She said there wasn't much plastic in the oceans at the time. We tended to reuse it rather than dumping it. She is calling it the second oil spill in the ocean as our plastics are made using petroleum. When she started working there were 2 billion people on the planet now there are 7 billion.7 billion people who need to be fed and housed. She is warning us we may be responsible for our own extinction. I watched her video but of course, I can't find it now.
It's a scary thought. It brings back to what I have read about Stoneage populations staying fairly static as they didn't allow what they felt was overpopulation. Food was a major issue. They did start to farm towards the end of it and as this developed they allowed their population to grow as they could feed them. 10,000 years ago our population is supposed to have been 5 million. The Hunter Gatherer lifestyle is no longer viable to feed everyone.
But we need to change the way we do it. Farming on an industrial scale can feed us by volume and cheaply but the other side is that it may not be as nutritious and causes pollution. Animal welfare is coming more to the forefront. Domestication is supposed to have begun around 13,000 thousand and 10,000 thousand years in Turkey, Iraq and South West Iran. The farm animals went westward to Europe, possibly sold on as they don't think the farmers migrated. Our bodies weren't supposed to be able to process cows milk a mutation occurred making us lactose tolerant that increased through natural selection. They are surmising that many of us in Europe are descended from cow herders as the majority of us can process milk.
I think of conversations I had with two different people about Genghis Khan of all people. He and his army killed many people, destroying villages. This is supposed to have removed 700million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and allowed the decimated villages to go back to forest which produced more oxygen. This was horrific for the people involved but it did have a knock on affect which could be regarded as 'good' for the Planet. Its possible that the mild climate at the time helped him advance as it may have allowed grass to grow which fed the 5 horses each warrior supposedly had. Oddly enough he banned torture, the selling and buying of women and the enslavement of any Mongol(which I presume means anyone he forced to follow him or who joined him voluntarily). The theft of Livestock became punishable by death which seems a bit extreme and yet he was tolerant of other religions. He was an Animist believing that everything has a soul yet interested in other beliefs. He promoted trade, writing and taking a Census. And used unskilled workers as human shields.
He represents the duality of humans we can do both great and terrible things. We are a combination mostly we are not as extreme. And yet we are all products of our own belief system. Some would say he was a great man, to others a terrible dictator. It's like that with our Planet, some say that the cycle, we have a massive disaster which unfortunately kills people to 'resetting ' the Planet. That's difficult to contemplate. Maybe its easier to say this about events that have happened thousands of years ago but I think we would find it difficult to reconcile it with more recent wars and natural disasters.
That said we should probably start heeding what is being said. David Attenborough is echoing what this scientist is telling us. He is seeing a change from his lifetime of making nature documentaries. It might not happen in your or my lifetime but the thought of us being the cause of our own doom as species is frightening.