When I was in sixth grade, I decided to learn how to make a nuclear bomb.
Not that I was going to actually construct a nuclear bomb, out in the garage, as a weekend project. My parents discouraged nuclear bomb making, mostly by entirely filling the garage with boxes of useless junk and broken garden implements.
But I still wanted to know how those clever people had managed to make nuclear bombs. Out of youthful curiosity.
Naturally, the same books that described the construction process also described the ‘destruction process’, and its effects on biological lifeforms. I’m sorry, now, that I ever thought this would be useful research. Nightmares kicked in, prominently featuring mushroom clouds, and lasted for many years.
Turns out you can get PTSD from reading books you weren’t meant to read.
All of which makes me glad I didn’t read another book that was available from the same library.
The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich.
I had heard about Ehrlich’s book — for some unknown reason, it was a best seller when it came out — but I’d also heard that it was full of scary predictions that seemed almost certain to come true, due to the simple fact of too many people on the planet. Mass starvation. Environmental disasters. Wars. Pandemics. Homelessness. Political unrest.
Thankfully, none of his predictions came to pass. Except, of course, the environmental disasters, wars, pandemics, homelessness, and political unrest. But the mass starvation, we were pretty much able to avoid, thanks to much-improved agricultural technologies that are slowly destroying the soil. (But only slowly.)
But, regardless, we seem to be having our own little population bomb right here in Pagosa Springs.
So far, it hasn’t led to mass starvation or wars… but we did have a pandemic, homelessness, and political unrest. Not bad, for a small town in the middle of nowhere.
I first took serious notice of Pagosa’s population bomb during the recent pandemic. There were an awful lot of people in town during the summer of 2020, some of them speaking dialects I could barely understand.
Scientifically, a population bomb is normally caused by people having a lot of babies. The population bomb in Pagosa has involved people who looked a bit too old (in spite of Botox treatments) to be having babies. But old enough to own a King Ranch F-250, with a turquoise seat cover and a yappy dog.
You might say, we’re going through an ‘unscientific’ population bomb. Exploding very slowly.
I was thinking, the other day, someone really ought to write a book about the population explosion here in Pagosa. To warn people about the future.
But then, I thought, why give people nightmares?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.