Julatron, who is pointing the finger at developing nations or saying that population growth is the root cause of all our environmental degradation?

The essence of the concern about population growth is that it is the big factor that gets left out all the time.

Even now, with escalating resource issues in Australia and around the world, the focus is almost entirely on reducing per-capita consumption and developing more efficient and alternative technologies…. while just letting the rate of expansion continue unabated.

I=PAT

Overall impact on the environment and resource base = Population size x Affluence or per-capita consumption and waste production x Technological efficiency.

So please, don’t think of those who express population or continuous growth concerns as being one-eyed. We are trying to put the population factor into perspective. Clearly it is those who don’t consider population issues who are thinking in an unbalanced manner.

I have always considered the population argument to be completely racist. We are clever enough to address social imbalances (wether it be in terms of power and/or resources) without having to digress to arguments regarding reproduction (especially when the people who we are trying to regulate, also happen to be by and large not white). How is this any different from racial cleansing and genocidal rationales ? Furthermore, these simple statistical equations do not take into consideration cultural variations. The issue extends far beyond the quantity of resources available, different cultures USE resources differently. We attach a variety of symbolic and spiritual meanings to resources, so what may seem like trash to one man, may in fact be treasure to another (and offcourse vice versa). Economy of thought on this issue is really not appropriate.

The educated forthright women of Italy and Spain, and their sisters elsewhere who have achieved liberation from the tryanny of supression by religious and social fanatics, have taken action!
With their new-found freedom, they make their own determination as to the number of children they bear.
In the case of Italy and Spain, freed from the humbug of Papal sexual aberration, they choose less than two children. The average for both countries is about 1.2. For all of Europe the choice is less than two.
The fundamentalist Christian Southern Baptists of the USA, along with the Vatican, have been both dictatorial and effective in preventing disenfranchised women in most developing countries from having any choice as to how many children they bear.
Should they be bathed in the stink of the odious red herring, "racist"! Should they? Or, maybe they deserve some other, more appropriate rather than fashionable, epithet for their appalling cruelty?

Ho Hum “Meanwhile the capitalist world death machine with its drive to total power and control IS grinding everything to rubble!

How do you even begin to stop a machine that has such seemingly unstoppable momentum?”

Ha Ha what a laugh. “Capitalist World Death Machine”

A good test of how Capitalism rates as a “Death Machine” is to compare it to an alternative and test the history of treatment of its own citizenry and the environment.

When I look at the simple statistics of how many deaths can be laid at the feet of the incumbent governments in both models, I find the death count to suggest the “Capitalist World Death Machine” is a far less brutal a piece of equipment than the “Socialist Gulag Tank”.

The socialist death count runs into millions and millions and the environmental disasters would compare

Three Mile Island to Chernobyl and
The Great Lakes to The Sea of Aral.

All of which suggests we better keep the “Capitalist World Death Machine” well oiled and working, because the only constructed alternative (at world domination level) looks like a pretty scary proposition.

As has been said before by many, any environmental strategy which does not recognize and work toward solving the burgeoning world population explosion is either a fraud or the ramblings of the inane.

Fix population growth and you fix the problem of sustainability.
Fix the population growth and you fix the problem of environmental stress.
Oh you might cause a hiccup in economic terms with a contraction of demand, rather than an ever increasing demand for everything but such an economic outcome is better to the abyss of non-sustainable population and its impact on resource denigration.

Oh and Global warming, reduce the human population and you reduce the impact of human activity on climate change, which should please the sack-cloth and ashes brigade.

Vivy, if you have a careful look at previous postings on world population control, you will find that the majority have not singled out the poor nations as being the only ones to whom population controls should apply. If this is the impression that you have, then please let me corect that. It just so happens, that many of the richer nations are already in the population reduction mode, so that it generally only remains for the poorer ones to follow suit.

The challenge is for the economists in the rich nations to devise a suitable model to sustain negative growth, without causing too great a depression. Not an easy task as the Japanese have found out.

VK3AUU,
I take your point that population control issues are considered to apply to poor and wealthy nations. I am very concerned however that we have not asked the people of these poorer nations what they want to sacrifice in order to alleviate their poverty. This issue is about values and what is considered a priority. I for one am deeply saddened by the fact that so many people in the first world have chosen not to have children. We have designed social arrangements that are anti-children, with family unfriendly workplaces, and a social attitude associating notions of burden with child rearing. We have no right to impose our western ideas of economic priorities on others, especially given that they are so desperately in need of aid. The power imbalance between first world and third world must be addressed sensitively and diplomatically. Telling people to "stop breeding" or we will let you starve is offensive to say the least!