Fear the reaper?

Stephen King's most popular novel- and certainly my personal favorite- is The Stand, a literally apocalyptic tale whose plot is taken roughly from the Book of Revelation and which begins with 98% of the human race being killed off by a genetically engineered superflu that escapes from a U.S. (of course) biological weapons facility.

It's a great read, if rather gruesome. One brief scene takes place at a U.S. 80 exit here in Des Moines. Another, in the expanded version of the book, happens, as I recall, at the U.S. 235 exit where one gets off for Grandview College, which is just up the road from me. It was creepy reading those sections of the book. I imagine that people who live in New York City, Las Vegas, Boulder, Colorado, and other locations where more substantial portions of the book are set get thoroughly creeped out while reading it. I personally remember what it was like reading about Larry Underwood's Zippo-lighted journey through the Lincoln Tunnel while traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel on the way to my CPE site in Connecticut.

Well, given the place environmental paranoia has on the college campus these days, it was bound to happen: a professor is saying that life is about to imitate art. Only 90% of the human race will die, though- and the agency will not be us silly homo sapiens, but the same one that puts nearly all of the greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere: nature itself.

Eric Pianka of the University of Texas says that the size of Earth's human population is way too big- and that nature is about to cull the herd, so to speak.

Many of his professional colleagues find his position rather extreme. So do some of his students.

Other students lap it up. One student at Texas Lutheran University (ELCA) in Seguin heard Pianka lecture, and blogged, "(Pianka is) a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death for (sic) all but 10 percent of the current population. And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right!"

Any volunteers?

The problem, Pianka says, is "anthropocentrism-" the silly idea that humanity occupies, by right, a privileged place on this planet. Can you imagine?

He insists that he is not advocating the near extinction of the human race, but merely describing what he sees as inevitable. "This is gonna happen in your lifetime," he says. "Do you wanna go there? We've already gone there. We waited too long.

Letters on the subject of Piaka to the Society of Amateur Scientists can be found here.

Pianka's lab page is here.

HT: Drudge

ADDENDUM: In fairness to Pianka, see this update.