Oh Foxy! When are you finally going to finally realise that the biggest problem in the world today is governments listening to those fool, ivory tower academic experts you keep giving credibility. Most of them don't know which way is up, & those that do, too often have an axe to grind or a political motive in giving bad advice.

Belly aid is probably the dirtiest word in the language. When my son & his ship were in Indonesia after the tsunami, giving help to totally isolated areas, the government people they were liaising with said, "We no want you. You go home. Send money".

As for feeding the world, we could feed double no problem, if it was viable to grow food. Just in my district there are 10s of thousands of acres of very good river flats that could grow grain or small crops, if a farmer could make a living doing it. All those acres graze lots of horses & even more cows. You can't loose money on a few cows.

We had one Vietnamese family recently try small crops. They thought they were in heaven. Great land on the river, plenty of water & close to market. They worked their butts off, & produced great produce. All too often they did not get the cost of the boxes & freight for their stuff. They made more from a road side stall on weekends than for the bulk of their stuff.

Then the council demanded thousands of dollars worth of road work to allow a stall. They are still there, grazing a few cows, & running a couple of trucks for a living. In this country we have lots of bureaucrats who's only aim in life is to punish anyone who does something useful.

Canem Malum,
SocSci domination is not the problem - the real problem is accountants making the decisions that should be made by engineers. One result of this is we're not getting the infrastructure built that we would if the engineers were in charge - hence our growing population is causing big problems that could be easily solved!

But beware of any engineer who's motivated by greed!

"The critics of Malthusianism" would include Malthus himself, for he never regarded exponential population growth as inevitable (he merely warned it's possible). Were he alive today, he'd look at the situation and conclude that (contrary to the claims of self proclaimed Malthusians) the problem is being dealt with, mainly thanks to reliable contraception. The reason populations are still rising is because people are living longer.

What you don't seem to understand is that the carrying capacity isn't fixed. It's a function of technology, standard of living, and willingness to address the issues. That's true everywhere, but it's more apparent in Australia than most places because here there are still a lot of people who wrongly regard treating the environment with contempt as an economic necessity.

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Armchair,
I think I know where you mean. But are you sure that's what the two groups wanted?

Anyway, what happens next is that all their trees get cut down, but their society recovers and they intensively farm their island. Later, sailing ships break their isolation. After that their society is devastated by slave traders and smallpox. Others see the devastation and blame the lack of trees.

Hasbeen it would be wrong of me to not know and say clearly aid and charity's are not always, or near always, honest, cargo cult mentality exists, hence our government, your government, paying 50 million dollars, to re settle ONE refugee, in Cambodia!BUT aid, policed harshly, can reduce refugee flows, John Howard, hardly a lefty bleeding heart, used aid to Indonesia to educate and stop people becoming terrorists.if we are to ever say yes we need to stall population growth we will need to revisit and use aid as part of that.
See a lot of simplistic we can feed more stuff here but it remains my view we must confront this soon before it is too late

Hey Aiden,
The place I'm talking about has stone monuments, and as far as I recall from the documentary I watched, most of the people on the island died out, leaving just a handful.

Hey AC, recent research has totally disproved the theory that the people of Easter Island destroyed their trees to roll stone statues around, or to build canoes.

"If nobody figures it out I'll post the answer tomorrow."

I just hope you're not talking about Easter Island.

"We have bodies that house brilliant brains but superstition, greed, lust & lust for power outnumber these brilliant 6 Billion to one."

So there's only 1.26 brilliant brains on the planet? Methinks we've found one brain that has no comprehension of maths.

When I talk of the brain, it's a metaphor for human intelligence - the unlimited resource that took a naked ape and created things like the device you're currently reading. The intelligence that turned a stick into a tool, conquered famine, doubled lifespans etc etc. But it is true that a section of that collective intelligence struggles to understand the world around it and has no comprehension of how extraordinary that intelligence is.