We do have a few two-pot screamers on this thread (apart from Mr King) and they’re all growth merchants but how long must one endure their irrelevant jabberwonky which is totally bereft of any genuine argument?

Meanwhile, the creeping white death is engulfing this nation from land clearing. Since European settlement began, an estimated total of 15 billion trees have been cleared from the Murray-Darling basin alone.

Approximately 5.7 million hectares are within Australia’s regions mapped which are affected by dryland salinity. It is estimated that in 50 years' time the area of regions with a high risk may increase to 17 million hectares.

Some 20 000 km of major road and 1600 km of railways occur in regions mapped to have areas of high risk. Estimates suggest these could be 52 000 km and 3600 km respectively by the year 2050.

Up to 20 000 km of streams could be significantly salt affected by 2050.

Areas of remnant native vegetation (630 000 ha) and associated ecosystems are within regions with areas mapped to be at risk.

However, the growthists believe they’ve fixed the problems with “new-age” technology by incarcerating food animals in cages for their entire lives.

So consumers now drink milk from incarcerated cows with pus filled teats and a myriad of other diseases. Pigs we’ve recently discovered to be surviving just long enough to get to the dinner table, despite being eaten alive by maggots and the chooks…..well what can one say about a featherless battery chook’s house – the size of an A4 piece of paper?

Nevertheless, it frees the land up for development as the growthists tell us. Brilliant! Problem is some 60% of Australia’s antibiotic use is now administered to the caged animals we salivate over and 70% of all new and re-emerging pathogens afflicting (and killing) humans have zoonotic origins.

So this year Swine flu – a pig/bird/human hybrid………next year? Perhaps by then we’ll have produced our very own pandemic if the deluded growthists (driven by an unrestrained greed and an addiction to power) have their way.

Clownfish,

You think that Lester Brown is a fool, but clearly the German and Norwegian governments, who are funding his Worldwatch Institute along with some respected US foundations, don't agree with you. Nor do the editors of Scientific American, who published an article of his this May. Why should we believe that they are wasting space and money on nutters?

No one has claimed that population growth was more than a bit player in the latest 2008 spike in food prices. The more immediate issues include drought in some big food growing regions, a doubling of meat consumption in China from the 1980s, Bush's idiotic plan to turn corn into ethanol (motivated by concerns about energy security and buying votes in key electorates rather than by the environmentalists he has always despised and ignored), and speculation. The biofuels were responsible for about 40% of the price rise for corn and 20% for rice and wheat. The reason for the speculation is that grain production has been growing more slowly than global population for years. World grain stocks have thus been falling and are now at their lowest level in 50 years. Otherwise grain would have just been released from stockpiles, preventing those food riots and blocking the price rises the speculators were anticipating. See

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006_data.htm

Believe it or not, we do need a safety margin.

Thank you Protagoras, it's always valuable to know what are the extremes of an argument, to know where the craziest position may currently be. I worked a few years ago milking cows and they were beautifully healthy, relaxed, well-fed and properly exercised with plenty of room to graze. After all, no dairy-person in her right mind would incarcerate milk cows as you suggested (off the top of your head ?) - a stressed or unhealthy cow is an unproductive cow. And the dairy company would send the entire truckload back and fine any dairy farmer who allowed diseased milk into the load, and fine them heavily - if it happened more than once, the dairy farmer would be barred from the collection.

Pigs being eaten alive by maggots: really ?

Protagoras, most of us sceptics know where you are coming from and would sympathise, as long as you didn't egg the pudding so ridiculously - it's a sign that your belief in your own case is weak, covered up by over-statement. Please come back to earth. Confront the real data, like some of us are trying to do. We know the world's got troubles, I'm sure that most sceptics wouldn't deny that, but nor are we going to revel in some imminent cataclysm, or try to justify the most brutal and fascist 'solutions' (final solutions?) to the world's problems, or look for scapegoats. We are all in this world, this one and only world, most of us want to know what can be done to sustain it, but nobody should be exterminated or even dictated to, and few of us are stupid enough to believe the hysterical stuff that you throw around. Keep it real, Protagoras, and you might win us over, if that is what you really want. IF that is what you really want.

Joe

Loudmouth,

Where has anyone here called for exterminations, forced sterilisations, or other horrors, outside of the fertile imaginations of people like yourself? Point to such a comment. People in other countries will take action to solve their problems or not, without reference to us. We can give a hand to people who are trying to pull themselves out of the Malthusian trap, but we can't force them to take it.

Overpopulation in the developed countries, due to both high fertility in the past and mass migration now, is causing both local and global environmental damage. See, for example, this graph on total and per capita greenhouse gas emissions from the US and Europe

http://d.yimg.com/kq/groups/20338607/929044366/name/One%20slide%20from%20WRI%20Pop%20and%20GHG%20emissions%2Eppt

The Center for Immigration Studies (www.cis.org) has estimated that the average immigrant to the US increases his greenhouse gas emissions by 4 times.

There are obvious cultural and educational benefits to having a moderate level of immigration, and there are talented people who would be an asset anywhere (ignoring the morality of poaching them), but it is amusing how "progressives" put "diversity" (i.e. mass migration) above all other values: our environment, our social cohesion, the welfare of our disadvantaged fellow citizens, and civil liberties which 1950s progressives would have died in the ditch to defend.

So far the anti-pops can't work out whether its global population or just Australian population they want to cull. They equate every person, whether a five year old in New Delhi and a 35 year old TV executive in Manhattan 'exuding' the same greenhouse gases.

Whenever we get individuals such as Divergence talking about people in terms of energy units, we should be wary. Coloured people, Asians, Jews, women, etc, become units who need to be 'dealt with' because they are standing in the way of some fantastical green paradise or worse, be blamed for causing the end of the earth.

'Infantacide has been common since time began,' was one anti-pop comment.

So people who fight for the rights of immigrants, of refugees (and these are often green groups too) get lumped in with 'false consciousness' and become part of the problem.

All argument against the anti-pops - and there have been many here from green groups, social democrats, socialists, those on the left and right - have been dismissed either with 'the apocalyse is coming' or 'you're part of the problem'.

They are social engineers brandishing their ignorance in public.

Good one, Cheryl :)