Why should civilisation's primary goal be to see how many humans we can cram onto our planet? Runner implies that the proof that the world is not overpopulated is that there is excess food some place. Why not use the excess food and other excess resources to cure cancer and diabetes, improve our education and justice systems or hey, what-the-hell, all of the above?

Wing ah Ling just doesn't seem to want a sustainable world. I assume that means we just let the chips fall as they may and the free market will sort it out. China knew they needed a one child policy. It is working out a lot better for them than if they didn't have any policy. They reckon there would be 300 million more people in China now and all of them would be living in poverty. Maybe that is the chips falling as they may and the Chinese getting the benefits.

The problem with waiting for the free market to make the world sustainable is that the free market has no mechanism for saving anything for future generations. I assume Wing doesn't think that is important. I do. The only people represented in Free market exchanges are the buyer and the seller. Nobody who hasn't been born yet is considered. I think we need to consider future generations in order to have the best society we can have. I don't want my children to ask me why I didn't consider their futures when I was using up all the cheap easy resources. I hope I can say that we at least tried to do something and perhaps even tried to cure cancer and diabetes.

KEEPING PEOPLE IN THE THIRD WORLD IS BETTER. TAKE SOMEONE IN THE third world. They burn fire and collect firewood,etc. Bring that person to Australia and he drives around in a car and uses a plasma tv.

Also Australia increasing 1 million in population is more significant than taking 1 million people out of india.

This is an excellent article which probes a lot of issues which few others are prepared to although I might not agree with all of it.

The fact that governments including our own, deliberately encourage population growth when our own common sense and intuition and the hard evidence, tell us that it cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet, is a indication that the interests that they serve are inimical our own.

---

Whilst Christopher (correctly) takes issue with those who deny the evidence of the harm caused by population growth, he has elsewhere, shown himself to be a "rabid denialist". See, for example, his denial of the mountains of evidence which implicate senior members the (pro-population-growth pro-high-immigration(1)) administration of former President George W Bush in the 'false flag' terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 in the forum discussion "9/11 Truth" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=76

1. See "The legacy of Bush" at http://candobetter.org/node/222
"Bush slashes US family planning aid budget" at http://candobetter.org/node/400.

I extended my previous post into a brief article which may be of interest. It is:

"How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" at
http://candobetter.org/node/1002 http://candobetter.org/GrowthLobby

Comments there or here are welcome.

James, while it's pretty obvious that you have a pathological obsession with your 9/11 conspiracy theories, to assert that the vast majority of rational, informed observers who don't share your crackpot obsession are engaged in denialism is stretching the meaning of the term just a bit, don't you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

Wing Ah Ling,

If you doubt that human societies have collapsed in the past due to overpopulating and overexploiting their environments, then you need to do some reading. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is a good start. Another good read is Steven LeBlanc's book "Constant Battles". LeBlanc is a professor of archaeology at Harvard University and has done excavations at many sites around the world. Some of these sites were in the American Southwest, where he found, as elsewhere in the world, extensive evidence of nutritional stress and warfare over resources, and of warfare as a leading cause of death for men (more than 25% chance) over long periods. All of this, by the way, happened long before the evil white man ever arrived.

We did get lucky with more productive crops from the New World and later the Green Revolution, but there is no evidence that technological progress can always overcome any challenge. In Europe, real wages were much higher (sometimes twice as high) in 1400, and especially 1450, after the Black Death than they were in 1800, despite 400 years of technological progress. See the graphs in

http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/Faculty/Sevket%20Pamuk/publications/Pamuk_EREH_Black_Death.pdf

My problem with Libertarians debating Socialists is that I believe both of them. Government has given abundant evidence that it can't be trusted, but the Libertarian minimalist state would simply lead to a very nasty feudal system. The real worry for the would-be lords is that the peasants will go on a reproductive strike and start demanding to be paid in silver, as they did after the Black Death. That is why, with some honourable exceptions, Libertarians like high population growth and open borders.