Poirot, sorry but I don't do the Western guilt trip thinggy.
I've spent enough time in Africa to understand that there is
nothing there that they could not solve themselves.

The "dangling babies in front of Western TV cameras" actually
came from an Eritrean who was pointing out to at Ethiopian,
what a lucrative business food aid had become in that country.

Sending more boatloads of food to Africa will simply result
in even more people waiting for boatloads of food. Until family
planning is addressed in Africa, things can only get worse.

People like yourself and Squeers seem to view the world
through your perspective, which is quite different to the
African perspective of life.

But don't believe me. Catch a plane to Kinshasa one day and
go and find out for yourself.

The crunch in Africa will come when energy costs in the West
go through the roof and the oil starts to run out. Rationing
fuel, as Squeers suggests, is hardly going to change that,
as the size of the problem of ever more people, grows daily.

I remind you by the way, that Jakob Zuma, prez of South
Africa, has 19 children and a bunch of wives. I personally
refuse to send money as Squeers suggests, to finance child
no 20, in the name of equity, or in your case guilt.

Squeers,

From the environmental footprints, neither the poor countries nor the environment would be much better off if we didn't overconsume. While multinational corporations do cooperate with local elites to exploit poor, desperate people, and we have a responsibility to restrain them, the corporations didn't make them poor and desperate in the first place. That happened because people have been repeating a pattern that has been going on since before there were modern humans, as is clear from the archaeological record. See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" or "Constant Battles" by Prof. Steven LeBlanc (Archaeology, Harvard).

People outbreed their resources and overexploit their environment, so living conditions tend to get worse over time. There are occasionally countertrends towards peace and prosperity, when new crops or new technology expand the carrying capacity, or when some disaster has drastically cut back the population, but the good times never last. This is because they just result in more and more mouths to eat up any surplus and restore the accustomed level of misery. The physical anthropologist Lawrence Angel looked at a great many human bones in the Eastern Mediterranean from different periods and found dramatic reductions in average height and life expectancy from the Palaeolithic. There was some improvement during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but after that, it was downhill all the way until the Industrial Revolution.

When people become desperate enough, they try to drive off or kill their neighbours to take what they have. The conflict or persecutions are usually blamed on "ancient tribal hatreds" or religious bigotry. This is understandable: religion and ethnicity make good rallying points when people are joining up sides, although they can easily find other excuses. In Rwanda (where the population tripled between 1960 and 1990), Hutus killed other Hutus in districts where there weren't any Tutsis.

None of this is our fault. Development offers a way out of the Malthusian trap (so long as greedy elites don't stand in the way), but not everyone is willing to make the necessary trade-offs.

Ludwig:
<Why on Earth the Greens haven’t taken this up is just beyond me to understand.>
I've been banging away on this topic too forever on OLO.
Political contenders tailor their policies according to the hegemonic centre: the popular vote. Incumbent Parties cannot introduce tough policies, no matter how vital, without a mandate. As Divergence indicates, during WWII austerity measures had popular support, but that was because the need was indisputable, or popularly manifest. Comparable emergencies, like peak oil and AGW, are instead subject to constant equivocation, especially in the context of our communication age, such that they have not gained popular support. This is why nations have to unite to address global issues like these, become signatories to pacts; necessary actions have to transcend popular politics and ignorant-denialism, so that all domestic political parties are obliged to toe an international line. Of course such notions are immediately slagged as "communist plots"--what else?
As things stand, until issues like AGW and peak oil loom as irrefutable (that is when it's too late), as in the manifest reality of WWII and its aftermath, it's going to be too electorally damaging for any party to act decisively. Hence, the larger the portion of the vote captured by the greens, the greater their influence, the more they will soften their line.

Yabby,
your recent comments are despicable. And please don't presume to know my thoughts on Africa et al. I do not see sending "boatloads of food" as a solution, for instance. You're argument is beginning to look like a drowning man clutching a single straw to keep him afloat.

Divergence,
I'm not looking to apportion blame or distribute guilt. These are global issues (one goldfish bowl) whether we like or or not. Our economic, environmental, geo-political and resource problems are all global pathologies--world systems. We can't fix the problems here without fixing them elsewhere, though there are plenty of protectionists and scoundrel patriots who like to fantasise that national borders are more than abstractions. There are good pragmatic reasons for thinking locally and acting globally. For me this also goes for ethics; the "enlightened" west claims to believe in human rights, yet we turn a blind eye to both obscene wealth and its opposite. Partly, we're hamstrung by political correctness when it comes to foreign aid; we're not allowed to impose conditions on aid. Yet that is what we should be doing attaching international aid, requiring reciprocal commitments to reform and population control. That has to change. But we have to lead by example, in our case not so much cutting population as conspicuous consumption. If our vaunted human rights had any validity, high lifestyles would be cut according to what it takes to lift impoverished nations out of poverty, humiliation and ignorance, which keep them behaving in the primordial, traditional and self-destructive ways attested to by history. Foreign aid to poor countries should most certainly entail environmental responsibility. But we in the west should also be taking some responsibility for our own environmental recklessness.

I'll take the opportunity to thank everyone for the engagement, now, and bow out for a time now, lest I become a bore.
Cheers

popnperish' only post in this thread so far includes the following statement:

"The critical elements [of economic growth
being a zero-sum game] are that we cannot
use more natural resoures than are supplied
by nature nor produce more waste (particularly
carbon dioxide) than can be absorbed by nature."

These 'critical elements', IMO, would benefit the discussion by being amplified. But where to begin?

Why not begin with questioning the so far least questioned element of the two critical limits propounded by popnperish: "[that we cannot] produce more waste (particularly carbon dioxide) than can be absorbed by nature."? Just by way of situating the appreciation appropriately, I don't think it inappropriate to reiterate the rather trite summarization of the present situation constituted by the statement that 'peak oil has killed the climate change star'.

Can we rip the dreadful build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution back out of it?

Yes we can!

If there is one thing that my work in the area of carbon sequestration has done, it is to convince me that the vegetable kingdom, whose rotten, piled up corpses of all the yesteryears have been the direct cause of all this latter-day fossil fuel mayhem, can be enlisted as our ally in the establishment of Australian hegemony over the entire earth. All must be made to see that we know best.

We can use the vegetable subjects of that client kingdom as mindless and all-too-willing cannon fodder in the advancement of our glorious cause! With their going on before us, subject to the manifest destiny that has placed us in command of their photosynthetic forces, we shall put oxygen back into the mouths of a world breathless with anticipation at the prospect that at last there is something that can save them from an oilless future.

So what (and I know Squeers will like this) are we to do? With all the lonely people, that is. They have to be taught the Char Char!

Ain't nuthin' more phun than kickin' props out.

<< Political contenders tailor their policies according to the hegemonic centre: the popular vote. Parties cannot introduce tough policies, no matter how vital, without a mandate. …>>

That’s a very depressing post Squeers. Depressing because it is true!

But surely it is not really that bad. Surely we can escape the continuous growth trap before we are forced to by a crash event.

I find this so enormously frustrating – in theory we could SO EASILY change our absurd practices and embrace the vital sustainability paradigm, but in reality, it seems as though it is going to be very unlikely indeed, until it is too late.

Well, I was going to go to work. But now I’m going back to bed to bury my head under my pillow!
( :>(