aqvarivs

Please re-read the last sentance of my comments. This is all about informed choice. Patriarchal control, to which you apear to adhere, is where the real problem lies.

You are correct, we should be responsible for our actions, but we all know that good old hormones skew the balance somewhat in our society and where you have men subscribing to the ideal that "The more children I have the bigger man I am", the problem will exaserbate itself.

We also know that where we have educated people we do not have a population problem unless it is driven by a Government where a rampant "growth at any cost" economic model is held up as the ideal.

Australia is idealy placed to reduce it's population to take the strain off our overloaded environment while maintaining our quality of life and prosperity and to set an example for others. Why we constantly want more people is beyond understanding. We know the growth economic model works but we also know it only works with unlimited free natural resources which we no longer have.

aqvarivs

Instead of sourcing my info from books and faculty reports, I listened to real people; actively from 1971 onwards. And wherever possible, in their languages. These were not stupid people. They understood their positions perfectly and were extremely articulate. This is why mine, and the views of other community development people who learned how to listen and measure; are critically at variance with the theorists and ideologists. I reiterate, population problems are a product of poverty; and this is a poverty which is created deliberately by the IMF/World bank; by imperialist US and EU governments; and by megacorporations; all supported by the entirely unaccountable and undemocratic United Nations. Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd support this triangulation of global power. The pertinent question which you need to answer is: what are you doing about it; big mouth.

Once upon a time,

there were a group of very intelligent chicks, who started a democracy and invented plasma TVs and SUVs and thought they were the best barnyard in chookendom.
Then one day, while they were enjoying life, they became overpopulated with 10 billion of them (10^10) demanding 10^100 joules of Energy each to run their appliances. But they ran out of oil seed and the barnyard which could only supply 10^20 joules was now running down to 10^17 and falling.

Well, the water got dirty, the air became dusty and they choked on their own mess. Then a big hurricane came and an acorn fell and hit the head of one of them. With that event, and others like that, they soon became convinced that that their neighbour was to blame so they started killing each other.

Well the big CEO-Roosters(CRs) saw this and said "wait a minute if they're gonna die anyways, we can make a profit here. I say I say we can sell em to Chanticleer Farm for a nice fat Milton Friedman profit and the conveyor-buzz-saw is so quick they won't feel a thing".

So all the intelligent chickens were killed except a few breeders whose children were put in pre-school to learn ABC. The Roosters? Well they lived happily for a while till they too began to kill each other. But after waiting for the chooks to overpopulate again they cracked another windfall .... errrr .... acornfall ... and resumed their wickedness. Alas after some time the Roosters became sick at soul and took the cowards way out.

And the moral of the story?

Yes, Yes?

And the moral of the story?

Kaep your chickens close but keep your Roosters even closer & on a tight leash!

But alas, the story never ended there. The latest round of chickens took heed of that advice given them. So they got together, made democracy stronger, clipped the CEORoosters wings to keep them close. They could do this because they were a majority and they started to realise the CRs had to do as they were told. The chickens then forced the CRs to make profits in space with a mass transfer homologue of the Internet called SWW-MPAL (Space Wide Web- Maglev, Packet switched, scramjet Assist, incremental Launched unmanned space initiative). With this technology they spread out into inner solar system space where all the chickens bred to their hearts content for as long as the Sun shines bright and without any more than the usual minor conflicts that chickens must have.

But hark! In the middle of the Solar System the Sun's low entropy raised the IQ of chickens to such heights that they found how to mass produce atom-by-atom perfect fabrics by the card full. , They soon formed these into Meissner shields for cloaking their advanced space craft. They were able to warp space, travel to other solar systems and embark upon and infinite adventure whilst still breeding, co$k-a-doodle-do all the while.

Tony Ryan,

No doubt first world elites are contributing to the perpetuation of poverty in some places (and its alleviation in others), but you need to explain how people were able to stabilise populations before the industrial revolution, when almost everyone was poor and there were no first world elites. As can be gleaned from any text on differential equations, constant growth in population or anything else follows the exponential growth formula, P(t) = P(0)exp(rt) where t is the time from some arbitrary starting point when the population was P(0) and r is the fractional (percentage) growth rate. Assuming 1% population growth (less than global or Australian growth rates and a lot less than in many third world countries) for 10,000 years, starting with 2 people, then at the end of the 10,000 years you would have 5.4 x 10^43 people. Assuming an average of 60 kg each, they would all just fit into a sphere with a radius of 92 billion km, more than 10 times the distance from Pluto to the sun.

Clearly (most) people are smart enough not to breed themselves into disaster. Pensions (at least for people without sons) would probably help, and China is going to implement them, according to recent news reports. All the same, such things can be organised from the bottom up. Much social welfare was traditionally organised at the parish level in England, at least since the 16th century. Why do you assume that the world's poor are not smart enough to make the old people a community rather than an individual family responsibility?

"I reiterate, population problems are a product of poverty;"

You have it exactly arse about Tony Ryan!

In those countries with population explosions, often only
a small % have access to contraception, abortion is banned
etc. Yet many of these women express the desire to have
less children. So why not give them the choice?

You'll find that the WHO have done heaps to try and give
women these choices, only to be fought all the way
by the Vatican and boyo are they good at lobbying,
right the way into many Govts.

In wealthier countries, women have the choice of purchasing
their contraceptive needs, paying for abortions etc, even
if illegal. A large % of women in the third world don't have
that choice and that is where the problem lies. Catholic
hospitals will freely give their kids a vaccination, but
no snip, no condoms, no birth control pills either.

You try having sex with no family planning for 30 years and see how
many kids you land up with. Duh.