partTimeParent wrote:

Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)

Dear partTimeParent.

It should be completely acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty. It is one component of a solution rather than the solution.

I agree that people who oppose population management are guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. I do not agree with calling them sadists. I feel they are not sadists and are aggrieved at the pain and death but may neither get pleasure from the pain and death nor see their attitudes as the cause of pain or death.

I know Catholic peace activists who are very concerned with the suffering and death caused by militarism. However, they are completely oblivious to the consequences of uncontrolled population growth. One of them said to me, "We can always use more people."

There is a tendency to demonise those who disagree with us by calling them names such as sadist. Such language cuts us off from having any chance to talk to them.

Dear David F,

Thanks for your agreement on the main point. Rampant population growth is a major cause of poverty and environmental destruction.

When I called those who oppost population management as 'sadists' I was being jocular. As I said "The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)"

Cheers.

Wing, your criticisms of flawed logic conflict so totally with the fundamentally flawed logic inherent in your assertion that we shouldn’t be striving for a sustainable future.

Your comparisons with religious beliefs don't help your argument, as most if not all religions are premised on good principles and beliefs.

I’m atheistic. But yes, I have often thought that I have a religious-like passion for environmental wellbeing and the achievement of a balance between all things human and the natural world.

“The common thread running through all the arguments from sustainability is utter economic illiteracy.”

Oh come on! You’d have to have the most contorted understanding of basic economics to say that!

What do you think economics is about? It is about providing a decent quality of life for communities, now and into the future. REAL economists take into account the ever-growing demand side of the equation as well as the diminishing supply side in many resource sectors. They realise that demand has to be stabilised, well within the limits of supply capability.

Pseudoeconomists think that the demand can continue increasing forever, despite the supply capability being precariously stressed in all sorts of ways. Unfortunately, pseudoeconomists reign supreme at the moment.

“For example millions of hectares of Australian land put out of production for ‘native vegetation’…”

Aha! This provides me with some insight. You seem to think that it is Australia’s primary role to feed the world, and that it is just wrong for us to ‘lock up’ land under native vegetation that could be made agriculturally productive. Am I on the right track Wing?

I extrapolate that you have no feeling for the natural environment at all, let alone for a balance between it and humanised landscapes.

You would like to see Australia developed as a food bowl to its fullest possible extent, in order to feed an ever-hungrier world. But you’d never even dream of addressing the main factor that is contributing to an ever-hungrier world – unbridled rapid population growth. Am I right?

continued

“You have not refuted the arguments that show that
1. sustainability is not necessarily a problem in practice because of the time-frame, and
2. if it is, government is not magically going to know how to fix the problem, of balancing the competing needs any better than the status quo ante.”

Not NECESSARILY a problem you say Wing! So you do concede that sustainability MIGHT be a problem, now or at some point in time? What timeframe are you talking about?

Of course governments are not going to be able to magically fix the problem. But they are going to be able to greatly improve on the status quo, if we act quickly and with the necessary united effort.

“The argument for political action for sustainability is a religious fantasy of totalitarian control that cannot be achieved and that is anti-human in practice. …”

You say this sort of thing about religious fantasy so often that it seems that you are desperately trying to convince yourself of it.

What’s with this totalitarian control and anti-human stuff? You equate efforts to strive for the sustainability paradigm with some extremely whacky stuff. Where do you get these ideas?

“The idea that Kevin Rudd controls the weather if we just give him enough money is deluded.”

What the ….??

“… declare myself the winner…”

Dear oh dear ohdear ohdearohdearohdear!

I’ll let other readers and posters decide what it is that you are a winner of in this discussion.

Do you want the human population to continue to grow endlessly? Do you want economic systems and agricultural enterprises to be geared directly towards facilitating this endless growth? Do you want the world’s rainforests to disappear under cropland and the world’s fishing stocks to become exhausted? Is it alright by you for this planet-wide boom in one species to reach the inevitable point where it crashes, with no real attempts made to stop it from happening?

Please, if you don’t address anything else in my current double post, can you just tell us what your vision is in regard to these points. Thanks.

The article I wrote just now "Courier Mail praises Bligh Government's 'solving' of population-growth-driven water crisis of its own making" at http://candobetter.org/node/1028 in response to the Courier Mail's editorial "Labor crisis skills seen in water bill" at http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25000513-13360,00.html may be of interest. It begins:

Andrew Bolt of Murdoch's Herald Sun newspaper Melbourne in his article "Melbourne is wrecked and full" of 30 January 2009 pointed out to his readers how population growth deliberately encouraged by the Victorian Government in recent years had placed too great a strain on Melbourne's infrastructure, causing it to fail during the recent heat wave.

Yet, in spite of this, the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, adamantly refuses to question past and future planned population growth in spite of an implicit acknowledgement in it's editorial "Labor crisis skills seen in water bill" of 3 February 2009, that the recent water crisis was a result of past population growth:

"This was a crisis that was inevitable given the booming population growth of southeast Queensland and the certainty that one day drought would strike."

So, if the Courier Mail acknowledges that the water crisis was 'inevitable', what then were its own reasons for stridently supporting population growth through all those years and why does it continue to do so?

Unsurprisingly this question is neither posed nor answered nor even is the Courier Mail's own past and continued support for population growth even acknowledged.

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Comments, either there or here, are welcome.

"Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death."

Yes, claiming the moral high ground in the population/sustainability debate is a bit uncouth. Like Wing Ah Ling's suggestion that people concerned with overpopulation should shoot themselves. I would be similarly uncouth to suggest that population growth advocates fantasised about owning a factory with battery human workers, like a Bangladeshi shipwrecking operation, or of renting out spots of dirt in their yards to fifty or sixty poor unfortunates at fifty bucks a week each. Heck, they might even fantasise about buying the sexual services of the young and pretty ones for a bit of change. None of this moral obscenity would be possible with a smaller population, so the perverted fantasies of these would be amoral vermin would have to remain fantasies, unless they wanted to move to a country with starving masses and indulge their wicked perversions their. And plenty of scum from the affluent west go and do that, dont they?

But enough of this. A position one way or the other in the population/sustainability debate says nothing about one's humanity. Surely we all can agree on this and leave the moral high ground crap in the gutter where it belongs?