As we near 7 billion, we need to learn a new way of seeing our species.

As the population of our planet nears 7 billion, we need to take stock of how we got here, and assess the options for reversing a rather alarming trend.

Beyond the obvious – that more people are coming into the world than are leaving it – it seems we are proliferating out of control for two rather more fundamental reasons.

The first is that, contrary to popular belief, poverty doesn’t reduce a tendency towards overpopulation, but increases it. That there is a basic requirement of quality of life (not standard of living, that’s something quite different) that is required for us to stop having more and more children out of sheer desperation.

And as life in the world’s most populous countries (the ‘third world’) does not provide the sense of material and spiritual well-being and confidence in the future required for said contraceptive effect, they continue to breed at a prodigious rate.

It’s actually a little more complicated than this. As a clever chap called Barry Commoner pointed out a few years ago in books like ‘The Poverty of Power’ and articles like ‘How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation’, there’s a ‘double hump’ effect, in which we actually need to transition from a society with high birth rates and high death rates, to a ‘content’ society with low birth rates and low death rates as described above. But the principle still holds.

The second reason is an explanation for the first. Why are those ‘third world’ countries still unable to provide the quality of life required to slow the rate of overpopulation? Because of the political colonisation of the last century and the economic colonisation that continues today.

The kindly colonisers from the world’s wealthiest countries provided the medical advances that reduced the death rate, but took the wealth that provided the access to quality of life required to slow the birth rate, diverting it instead to their own countries where it resulted in a balance in their own population. The rich nations get richer, the poor get poorer and the carrying capacity of the planet reaches a tipping point that threatens us all.

So what’s the answer?

In ‘The Soul of the White Ant’, South African naturalist and poet Eugene Marais first documented a colony of ants as a single organism. When you see an ant, he says, don’t be fooled that it’s a single individual. It has no concept of ‘individuality’ outside of the whole, and whatever you see it doing, it’s doing for the good of the whole.

Which doesn’t mean it won’t stop and explore as it walks along, or stop to greet and (I believed as a child and still do) kiss other ants as they cross paths. In fact, most ants and bees have very specific roles that are often biologically determined. But everything they do is ultimately for the greater good, and they execute their roles without complaint.

As humans, we need to adopt more of the Soul of the White Ant. We need to embrace the ancient African concept of Ubuntu, in which we acknowledge the talents we were born with (izithopo) and understand that these talents don’t ‘belong’ to us alone, but ‘belong’ to everyone (izithakazelo) and must be used to selflessly serve the greater good.

With practice, we will learn to apply this mindset to others beyond our immediate community, and work for the greater good of our species as a whole. Hopefully, in time, we’ll be working for the lesser good too as our numbers start to decline!