Why is the worlds greatest problem... the one least talked about?
Global warming?? carbon footprints?? recycling?? terrorism?? religions??............all big subjects yes....... but surely the ONE subject everyone should be talking about is the constantly increasing population of this planet!!
Feed 100 starving Africans this year and next year there will be 200 starving Africans to feed. For everyone recycling some rubbish there is someone new producing more rubbish .... You can reduce car and factory emissions....but there will just be more and more cars and factories. More people require more food so more land must be used to produce it... but those people all have to live somewhere so more land is needed to house them. I could go on and on....all the efforts we make are pointless without controlling the worlds population. Why do the media, the politicians, the scientists steer clear of this subject??????
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So the world's REAL problem is over-population and your solution is what? Fewer people? No problem--you first!
All Peterjol is doing is regurgitating the vulgar, anti-humanist logical conclusion of contemporary environmentalist politics. It is a politics that views all human beings as nothing more than algae that needs to be removed from the pond called Earth.
I agree with Iron Mike, the only thing people like Peterjol need is a solid carbon bootprint up their eco-miserable, anti-humanist backsides.
Interesting ....... just to say that an ever increasing world population is a big problem that should be talked about ......is enough to make me some kind of anti-humanitarian or that I see people as algae that should be removed from the planet. I guess it's no wonder it isn't discussed. .....actually I am very humanitarian and wish 'every' human being on this planet could live a dream life, with full stomachs and all the luxuries possible.
I am getting old and so it won't be my problem anyway but having seen the population growth in england in just my one lifetime makes me wonder what kind of lifestyle people will have in a few more generations.
I think these gentlemen simply took offense to your use of the word "controlling" in regard to population. Very authoritarian in tone. I'm sure everyone is concerned about overpopulation and carrying capacity as you describe it but it seems education and wealth lead to population stability rather than any method of "control."
Now let me think, what country do I know of that has a population control policy? Oh yes, I remember, China. Now let me think again, what other country do I know of that has a population control policy? Emm... none that I can think of.
Ok, what government in living memory do I know of that had a population control policy - oh yes, I remember...
The truth is Peterjol, you are anti-humanist - you tell me then, we have 6 billion people on Earth today, how many people would you like to see on the planet? 5.5 billion? 5 billion? 4 billion? How many Peterjol?
Come now, if you think there are too many people on this Earth, how many people do you think their should be?
There is a very good reason why modern Western governments do not have population control policies, it is because only authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and ideologists think it is a good way to control any given population - the problem is, the likes of you do not appear to be able to appreciate that.
So Peterjol, tell us all how 'humanist' you are by giving us the amount of humans we should get rid of? Or would you not prefer to discuss such issues?
The problem with Peterjol is it is very easy to sanctimoniously claim the moral high ground and lament the "real" problem of "controlling the world's population"....as long as you don't couple that with "policy." No...its far easier to point out the problem and then turn the finger of blame elsewhere at "those people" who refuse to talk about it--politicians, scientists, activists, etc.
Pete...the reason you've caught so much flak is because your position is cowardly. You want to highlight a problem and avoid engagement by refusing to link it with policy. To do so is to quickly come to the conclusion that any policy that "controls" population growth is patently "anti-humanist" and only successful in authoritarian counties.
As they say in the south, "Sorry, that dog don't hunt."
[ Okay...I threw the last in to befuddle the Brits. :-) ]
Population growth is a serious development issue that deserves to be discussed - and Peterjol comes at it from the angle many people do.
It's great that it's been raised as an issue. Being accusatory about the views of someone wanting to start a debate is probably more likely to stifle that debate than encourage constructive arguments that might help people think more clearly about the population 'problem'.
There are many different strands to this dicussion that deserve mentioning - here are a few that I'm aware of:
- many studies show that better education, more equality, less vulnerability (to climate change, fluctuating trade prices/costs, ill-health etc) and better access to contraception enable families/women to choose to have less children.
- China's method of population control has had terrible consequences because of discrimination against girls and women - resulting in a huge number of 'missing women'.
- it is inequality that means the world's resources are unable to cope with growing populations. There are enough resources - they are just not fairly distributed.
- measures that tackle consumption ought to have an effect on the planet's ability to sustain its population.
It would be interesting to hear other people's views on these issues.
That is the difference between my outlook (humanist), and Peterjol's outlook (anti-humanist). Every single man, woman and child is a potential solution to any of societies problems - people themselves are not a 'problem' per se.
Peterjol's ill-judged foray into this debate betrays his outright hostility towards humanity - his words invoke the idea that there is too many humans living and eating on this planet. He provokes the idea that some people should not even be born, not for our sake, but for theirs.
He is nothing but the Twenty-first-century version of Thomas Malthus, with his cataclysmic vision of population growth - who predicted that unchecked population growth would enevitably lead to the complete collapse of society as he knew it. The only difference between Peterjol's outlook and the Malthusians is the later was not prostituting his politics under the guise of environmentalism.
Ok, I'll conceed that Peterjol is not a anti-humanist in the same way that we might perceive Nazis and Fascists to be - nevertheless, Peterjol's perceptions exhibit and betrays a profound sense of misanthrophy. He displays an obvious preference for non-existent humans than existent ones - does he not?
For Peterjol it appears that every new-born (African) child is nothing more than a consumer of food and aid - worst still, if the baby actually lived to adult age they would be responsible for the 'crime' of emitting 9.3 tonnes of carbon per year. For Peterjol, and his misanthropic apologists, population control policies appear more like a cost-effective strategy of carbon-offsetting. The logic of such a perverse outlook is if we rid the planet of humanity then global warming would ultimately solve itself, and the Earth would live happily ever after.
Such a misanthropic and environmentalist outlook is a precursor to taking away the rights of human being to procreate as we are currently seeing in the African nation of Rwanda. Indeed, a country where some 800,000 people were killed back in 1994 in the space of 4 weeks, Western environmentalists are offering surviving Rwandans a 'solution' to their 'problems' - no, not more Western financial investment - no, for environmentalists, the 'problem' with Rwanda is there are still too many Rwandans.
Well the hostile assumptions that are being made about me because of my question about world population......seems to answer my question of why people do not talk about it.
I did not start the topic because I had any solutions..it just seems to me that it is very important that people start talking about it.
I have no idea of how large a population the earth can carry or what would be an ideal size population or how it shold be controlled if it was.....I just know that at some point in the not really so distant future there will be too many people on this planet vying for all it's resourses and sticking our heads in the sand and leaving it to nature to sort it out doesn't seem the best way to go about it. There doesn't seem too much hope of emigrating to new worlds.
Peterjol argues that he hasn't got a clue as to 'how large a population the earth can carry', yet he was the one who proposed that there was a over-population 'problem' in the first place - which begs the question, where did he get the initial idea of over-population from?
The answer - the environmentalist movement.
The truth is, as soon as Peterjol realised his 'over-population' argument had become undefensible, he changed tack. When asked about what might be the correct carrying capacity of the earth Peterjol replys 'I have no idea', and resorts to crystal-ball gazing about what might happen 'at some point' in the future - when? Well, in the 'not really so distant future' - oh, really?
So instead of dealing with our arguments against population control, Peterjol decides to throw caution to the wind and quote Martin Luther King, in the hope that no one would dare to criticise the words of such an heroic figure. Rev King was right on many subjects, but when it comes to his ideas on population control, he was a backward as... well... most environmentalists on this issue.
One things for sure, you don't have to be a sophisticated follower of environmentalist politics to see cleanly through the simplistic and opportunistic arguments on population control put forward by Peterjol - the problem that real humanists have today is that Peterjol's loss of faith in the human potential, and his fatalistic vision of the future has been rejuvenated because of the strength of cultural pessimism which is all pervasive in the West these days.
Peterjol is in the grip of this powerful cultural pessimism which calls into question human life itself. Peterjol is a modern day neo-Malthusian, of the pessimistic kind. I find it ironic that unwitting followers of Thomas Malthus have so little belief in humanity than the man himself.
Ultimately, Peterjol seeks to corrode our ability to solve problems like poverty, starvation or war - but for those of us who are not obsessed with natural limits, we should continue to view human life as something that is special, and indeed, precious.
Too many human beings? There can never be too many.
Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not
understand, the modern plague of
overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources
we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution
but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education
of the billions who are its victim.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.,
1929-1968
For all the "humanists'" philosophical arguments against population control, they fail to give any scientific evidence against the claim that the world is becoming overpopulated. However philosophically repugnant an idea may be, that doesn't magically allow us to keep on at the alternative without creating disaster. The laws of physics don't go out of their way to ensure there's always a cause of action which suits everybody, and the laws of physics do place a limit on how many people can survive on the amount of food and oxygen the earth can produce. And if there isn't enough food to go round, it will inevitably lead to starvation and conflict, if there isn't enough oxygen to suffocation. And when I say inevitably I mean it in it's literal sense. To claim that there can never be too many people is to claim either that these are good things or that somehow an infinite number of people can survive on a finite supply of food and oxygen.
"For all the "humanists'" philosophical arguments against population control, they fail to give any scientific evidence against the claim that the world is becoming overpopulated."
The scientific 'evidence' against the overpopulation thesis has been with us for a while now - for nearly two centuries. It has been two hundred years of population growth and economic progress that has discredited the original 'overpopulation' thesis developed by Thomas Malthus. Malthus thesis predicted that population growth would lead to starvation, famine and death - it was a dark catastrophic vision that was ultimately proved wrong - over time.
The onus is not really on me to produce 'scientific evidence' to discredit contemporary ecological Malthusianism - on the contrary, the onus is on the misanthropes to prove that population control is the best solution to the problems faced by humanity. The belief that there are 'too many people' is exactly just that, an unfounded, discredited, anti-humanist, moral belief that castigates people for producing and consuming too much food and other nice commodities.
India also has a population control policy (the "two child mean").
"The only country with this policy is authoritarian, so it must be incompatible with not being authoritarian" is not logical when there are a lot of authoritarian countries, anyway. If there were many authoritarian countries but no other countries with a policy, or if there was a tendancy seen in multiple countries for countries with the policy to become authoritarian soon after introducing it, that would be a worse sign, but neither is the case with population control.
If it is immoral to use contraception because it prevents people from being born, presumably it is also immoral not to have sex whenever possible.
That is the difference between my outlook (humanist), and Peterjol's outlook (anti-humanist). Every single man, woman and child is a potential solution to any of societies problems - people themselves are not a 'problem' per se.
Don't forget the cute little fluffy bunnies! Aaaah!.
I don't see what people are getting so worked up about -- particularly the environmentalists who are so concerned with the health of the planet.
Clearly, they believe that a growing human population is bad for Mother Earth. They believe that increased famine, disease and lingering death will afflict people who will eventually be running out of food, water and shelter, as well as breathable air.
But they also believe in global warming, right? In fact, it's their contention that one of the primary causes of global warming is the increase in human population, which naturally leads to more consumption of fossil fuels, deforestaion, pollution, etc.
So where's the problem? If they're right about global warming, then the eventual increase in sea levels will drown many millions (most of the human population living as it does in large urban centers near the ocean), and then the problematic population issue is no more.
So, embrace global warming, you worried environmentalists. Drive bigger cars, use more aerosol products, stop recycling and then sit back and watch as your problem solves itself.
HH
So, embrace global warming, you worried environmentalists. Drive bigger cars, use more aerosol products, stop recycling and then sit back and watch as your problem solves itself.
This is precisely what those here smeared as anti-humanist are trying to avoid - to avoid letting nature restore balance, the cruel way, the obnoxious way - the natural way - by looking for more humane way of dealing with human overpopulation, than the way provided by nature if allowed to run its course.
Of course, some might find reasons to agree with Henry Hart: let humanity starve, brutalize and suffocate itself to death (as it is already doing in Africa), if all we get for trying to save it from itself, is insult, harassment and smear.
What I wrote was, of course, written tongue in cheek. (I've noticed that people of a serious environmental frame of mind often lack a sense of humor).
I, however, DO have a sense of humor. And while I don’t know whether poor, put-upon peterjol is an anti-humanist or just a lazy debater, I do know that I always get a kick out of environmentalists condescendingly telling the rest of us peons exactly what the problems are, and then having no earthly idea what to do about them.
First of all, as has been pointed out on this thread, it is not at all clear that “human overpopulation” is a fact that needs to be dealt with. The environmentalists’ position is that it’s so obvious, we can just skip over that pesky “proving it” part and get right to blaming people for it. And I love how a so-called nature-lover is now telling us that the LAST thing we want is nature taking a hand in our so-called problems.
Wow … this is really amazing. You (and, I guess, your friends and co-nature-lovers) are “trying to save [humanity] from itself”? Really? Please detail exactly how you are doing that. I mean, other than by posting your thoughts here. Because when and if you guys actually figure out a WAY to “save” humanity from itself, I think that will deserve a new thread, at the very least. And some grants. I KNOW Bill Gates will want to throw money at you. And Greenpeace will probably name one of its boats after you too.
HH
I take it that by "pointed out" you don't mean proven.
I interpret this to be Henry's unanswered challenge of Peterjol's accepted "underlying assumption." Peterjol expounds upon a problem that is not proven to be a problem...much like global climate change which the Earth has been undergoing since formation.
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