I don't know the appropriate place to put this post, but I figure this community needs to hear it as much as anyone else.

One of the "Great Lies" that Satan has spread among the world's elite and to much of the population is that humanity is growing at an unsustainable rate.

But if you look in the Bible, God commands Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply". Indeed, throughout the Bible, it's clear that having children is a big deal, and having lots of kids an even bigger deal. How many times do we read about barren women begging the Lord to open their wombs, and then the Lord blessing them with children?

Malthusianism is an idea, an ancient and incorrect idea, that there are limited resources on God's earth, and that as populations grow, we need to ration these resources, or even, take measures to limit the growth or even reduce the population. It is the idea that land is a scarce commodity and we should be fighting each other over it for our very survival. It is the idea that we are in a rat race and only the winners get to eat while the rest must starve.

This is an evil idea, an idea coming straight from the mind of the Great Deceiver himself.

This is the reality. And I'll tell it by talking about a conversation I had with my brother. He is a civil engineer near Pheonix, AZ. If you've seen Pheonix, you know that it is just about as much of a desert as you can imagine. Maybe the Sahara is even more a desert, but Pheonix is right up there.

And we were looking at a satellite map of Pheonix, which if you zoom out, is basically a green circle with a gray center. Outside is pure desert.

We were talking about the Colorado River and California trying to take Arizona's rights to the water in the Colorado away from them. And I asked him how it is that Pheonix keeps growing, isn't he worried about the diminishing farmland?

He laughed at that. The farmers on the edge of Pheonix are selling their land for a huge profit. With that money, they can move to the desert areas and build a new farm, this time even better, with 10x or 100x as much land. And since they know what they are doing, they create a few more pixels of green on the edge each time they do this.

Well, what about water? He pointed out that when people first came to Pheonix, they dug wells, and then those wells would run dry, and so they would move on to another well. It wasn't long before they learned about aquifers, and then there was a law put in place that if you take a gallon of water out of a well, you have to put a gallon of water back. And he explained that the colorado is still flowing, even though the water is basically pumped into the ground so that they can dig a well somewhere else and drink that water. The ground itself is a water filtration system, and it's a big deal in Pheonix for obvious reasons.

On the point of using water, farmers are much more aggressive in using their water resources effectively. A lot of them are no longer spraying the water in the air -- too much of it just evaporates. They are exploring different ways of getting water to the plants, and they are finding that if you can put that water underground, the plants can get to it.

Back to the groundwater problem: the curious thing, though, is he pointed out that even though no one is putting extra water into the aquifer, over time, it is filling up. In fact, in some places, the ground water is getting close to the surface, and he said that if they keep going, eventually the ground water will be high enough that you might see the lakes, rivers and jungles return.

Jungles? Yes, in that part of the world, the deserts of Arizona and surrounding areas, you will find petrified trees, fossils of plants and animals that can only survive in jungles. It's not an exact science, but it's clear that up until some time fairly recently in geological scale, Arizona was a jungle, as much as the Amazon. And given that they are being very careful about the aquifer, and managing the water resources very carefully (you don't just let rainwater wash away all of your hard work anymore -- but you capture it and use it to recharge the groundwater), there may be a day in the distant future when "Phoenix" is synonymous with "jungle."

The point is this: The earth is a very special kind of resource, and we are just now learning some things about it that as mankind we have never understood. Some of the stuff we are doing isn't even noticed by the vast majority of the world's population, and those who know about it, are extremely hopeful.

As we get MORE people, and those people are able to think about things other than "what animal should I hunt today?" we are able to understand more about our environment. And as we allow people the freedom to experiment and to own the results of their experiments with property rights, we'll see the world blossom and grow and turn back into a Garden of Eden-like state.

Yes, we only have so much farmland -- right now. No, there is no limit to how much farmland we can create or how efficient that farmland can be. In Japan, for instance, they are growing lettuce in skyscrapers. A couple of acres and they are making mountains and mountains of lettuce every day. But more importantly, we're learning how to take marginal land, land that would be left alone because it is virtually useless, and turn it into pasture land for grazing animals -- free meat from sunshine and rainfall. And it's not just happening in one part, it's happening everywhere.

I wish I could write more about all of the exciting developments in agriculture. The more I learned, the more excited I got, so much so that I decided to move into rural USA and buy some land and try my own hand at it. The earth is a fantastic creation and we need not fear the future, in terms of resources and population. Get married young, have 8+ kids, and put your faith in yourself and your family and most especially in God.

Be fruitful, and multiply!