Candide, are you going to voluntarily depopulate so others may thrive?

Italy has been reported as successfully depopulating or was it a media beat up?

Unemployed teachers, no children in some small towns,

Will the depopulate pundits staff the nursing homes full of childless oldies with no younger relatives to care for them throughout their final days?

When there are 25 retired for one worker, what then? Euthanasia -- a great solution for superannuation.

How many times has an unborn who would discover the cure for cancer been aborted?

More people, more CO2, ie more plant food and hence a greener planet, just kidding.

Ludwig, you seem to be becoming quite unhinged. I thought I'd made it clear in discussions here at OLO that I don't wish to engage with you in your obsessive misanthropic rants about this topic. Given that, I find your IRL stalking of me quite creepy. Please stop it.

Get help, old son.

One of the reasons the socio biologists love to write about public policy is that they have no more intellectual pull than the yo-yo craze of the 1960s.

They were hopelessly smashed in this forum a few months ago when King's double articles on population caught them out.

The anti-pops (the nutters at Sustainable Population Australia) are basically a small clique of early EO Wilson nutters who want to save the world through sterilisation programs. Throwbacks to the 1930s and further back.

They are the spotty faced, rubrics cube playing geeks of our teenage years who haven't grown up. That's rather endearing. I can't work out whether their mysoginist tendancies are born from awkwardness around women or whether they feel threatened by them.

One of the reasons why the anti-pop movement won't take off - and why this argument will be used to wedge the Greens at the next election - is due to the type of comments in posts such as this: immature, uninformed and antihumanist.

Banjo,

On Iran's success in bringing down fertility rates

http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2001/update4ss

Clownfish,

Fascism and the devaluing of humanity you decry is likely to appear when there is intense competition for resources. Hitler was considered a joke before the Great Depression. Population growth is only high in developed countries such as Australia or the US because it is being imposed by governments. High immigration and higher fertility rates do damage on both a local and a global scale because of the high average consumption in these countries. One additional Australian is equivalent to 10 to 20 additional people in a poor country. The solution is to vote out growthist politicians. If you consider this fascism, so be it. We have zero influence on what people do in other countries, but nor are we required to take them in and shield them from the consequences of their bad decisions.

Cowboy Joe,

Fertility rates in Italy are so low as to cause serious problems, but fertility rates above 1.5 would make the decline slow enough to be quite manageable. It is not an unreasonable ambition for Europeans to become self-sufficient in food. We cannot keep the population young by continually growing it, because those new babies and migrants will grow old too. How do you then provide them with the pensions and health care they will need? Still more population growth to standing room only? This is a pyramid scam.

Divergence,
Thanks for that link,I will save it for reference, and I hope many others on OLO will read it. I really am impressed as it shows what can be done with a concerted effort by Government with the support of religions. Wish Iran could export the policy to many other countries, especially those that suffer famine regularly and to the Vatican.

It does give me some hope for the future. If Iran can do it so can other countries. All that is required is the will power.

Thanks again. Ludwig, please read the link.

pelican, I agree with much of what you say - that humans are adaptable and damned clever at solving problems, and that simple, humane measures such as redistribution of resources would go a long way to sorting out our problems - which is why I am so opposed to the mischievous dog-whistling in this article.

My "take on things", pelican, and Candide, is that I take the perhaps rather unfashionable view that what people say is, more or less, precisely what they mean. When on January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke of “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”, he quite clearly meant it.

So, on reading this article, it is apparent that the author believes: we face an imminent threat to the future of (non-human) life on Earth; the survival of (non-human) life on earth must have absolute priority; we only have about 50 years to act; there are *at least* 5 billion humans too many; almost all humans are detrimental to the environment.

Logically, therefore, the conclusion is simple: we absolutely must prioritise the survival of life on Earth; in order to do so, 5 billion human beings must be removed from it within the next 50 years. Even if everyone, every single human being on the planet, was sterilised tomorrow, at current death rates, in 50 years there would still be just over 4 billion humans too many.

Therefore, *by John Reid’s own arguments*, for the sake of the survival of life on Earth, over 80 million humans must be liquidated, every year for the next 50 years. The lucky survivors, it would seem, will have to adapt to life as primitive hunter-gatherers.

Now, please tell me why I shouldn’t be concerned about people who clearly think like this?