[Peace-discuss] Most amusing article I read this week

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

The answer Mort is Soilent Green.

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From: "Brussel Morton K." <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
Sent: Thursday, November 26, 2009 1:05 PM
To: "C.G.Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
Cc: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Most amusing article I read this week

> Most intelligent and educated people, not necessarily including "people of 
> faith", realize that the earth and its resources for life and humanity are 
> finite, and see evidence all around them that a limiting of population 
> will be ultimately necessary, willy-nilly. Wars and/or pestilence, climate 
> change, etc. may do the trick. The Chinese leaders and now even those in 
> India know this, and are trying to act on it. They do not need, or want, 
> more people. We are worrying about where our next kilowatt may be coming 
> from—and at what price, what is happening to living species—aquatic, 
> wildlife, how we are affecting the climate, you name it.
>
> Should we contemplate an earth of 50 billion people? How about a USA of 2 
> billion people? How will those people feed themselves, care for 
> themselves, from farms on Mars? From voyages to outer space? The problems 
> we have now, in almost all domains, will only worsen with increasing 
> population; from the evidence we have, that seems obvious, but 
> unfortunately not to some.
>
> We know a lot more now then we knew in Malthus' times, and Ehrlich may 
> have been wrong in his specifics, but not in his understanding.
>
> Obviously, the lower economic strata will suffer the most. Those in the 
> upper strata may survive, but will find their isolated and private 
> vacation spots increasingly hard to locate.
>
> In effect, this article is crap, and hardly amusing. It goes along with 
> the campaign to limit women's freedom, as for example in our current 
> debate about health care for all. Carl, of course, is an exponent of this 
> point of view.
>
> --mkb
>
>
> On Nov 23, 2009, at 11:47 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> "Since 200 AD, scaremongers have been describing human beings as 
>> ‘burdensome to the world’. They were wrong then, and they’re still wrong 
>> today."
>>
>> Thursday 19 November 2009
>> Too many people? No, too many Malthusians
>> Brendan O’Neill
>>
>> [Last week, on 12 November, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill debated Roger 
>> Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, at the Wellcome 
>> Collection in London. To kick off spiked’s campaign against 
>> neo-Malthusianism and all forms of population control, O’Neill’s speech 
>> is published below.]
>>
>> In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on 
>> the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called 
>> Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are 
>> scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’ In other 
>> words, there were too many people for the planet to cope with and we were 
>> bleeding Mother Nature dry. [WORTH NOTING THAT TERTULLIAN WAS A KNOWN 
>> CRANK AMONG THE CHURCH FATHERS --CGE]
>>
>> Well today, nearly 180million people live in the Eastern Half of the 
>> United States alone, in the 26 states that lie to the east of the 
>> Mississippi River. And far from facing hunger or destitution, many of 
>> these people – especially the 1.7million who live on the tiny island of 
>> Manhattan – have quite nice lives.
>>
>> In the early 1800s, there were approximately 980million human beings on 
>> the planet Earth. One of them was the population scaremonger Thomas 
>> Malthus, who argued that if too many more people were born then 
>> ‘premature death would visit mankind’ – there would be food shortages, 
>> ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’, which would ‘sweep off tens of 
>> thousands [of people]’.
>>
>> Well today, more than the entire world population of Malthus’s era now 
>> lives in China alone: there are 1.3billion human beings in China. And far 
>> from facing pestilence, plagues and starvation, the living standards of 
>> many Chinese have improved immensely over the past few decades. In 1949 
>> life expectancy in China was 36.5 years; today it is 73.4 years. In 1978 
>> China had 193 cities; today it has 655 cities. Over the past 30 years, 
>> China has raised a further 235million of its citizens out of absolute 
>> poverty – a remarkable historic leap forward for humanity.
>>
>> In 1971 there were approximately 3.6billion human beings on the planet 
>> Earth. And at that time Paul Ehrlich, a patron of the Optimum Population 
>> Trust and author of a book called The Population Bomb, wrote about his 
>> ‘shocking’ visit to New Delhi in India. He said: ‘The streets seemed 
>> alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People 
>> visiting, arguing, screaming. People thrusting their hands through the 
>> taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to 
>> buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we 
>> moved slowly through the mob, [we wondered] would we ever get to our 
>> hotel…?’
>>
>> You’ll be pleased to know that Paul Ehrlich did make it to his hotel, 
>> through the mob of strange brown people shitting in the streets, and he 
>> later wrote in his book that as a result of overpopulation ‘hundreds of 
>> millions of people will starve to death’. He said India couldn’t possibly 
>> feed all its people and would experience some kind of collapse around 
>> 1980.
>>
>> Well today, the world population is almost double what it was in 1971 – 
>> then it was 3.6billion, today it is 6.7billion – and while there are 
>> still social problems of poverty and malnutrition, hundreds of millions 
>> of people are not starving to death. As for India, she is doing quite 
>> well for herself. When Ehrlich was writing in 1971 there were 550million 
>> people in India; today there are 1.1billion. Yes there’s still poverty, 
>> but Indians are not starving; in fact India has made some important 
>> economic and social leaps forward and both life expectancy and living 
>> standards have improved in that vast nation.
>>
>> What this potted history of population scaremongering ought to 
>> demonstrate is this: Malthusians are always wrong about everything.
>>
>> The extent of their wrongness cannot be overstated. They have continually 
>> claimed that too many people will lead to increased hunger and 
>> destitution, yet the precise opposite has happened: world population has 
>> risen exponentially over the past 40 years and in the same period a great 
>> many people’s living standards and life expectancies have improved 
>> enormously. Even in the Third World there has been improvement – not 
>> nearly enough, of course, but improvement nonetheless. The lesson of 
>> history seems to be that more and more people are a good thing; more and 
>> more minds to think and hands to create have made new cities, more 
>> resources, more things, and seem to have given rise to healthier and 
>> wealthier societies.
>>
>> Yet despite this evidence, the population scaremongers always draw 
>> exactly the opposite conclusion. Never has there been a political 
>> movement that has got things so spectacularly wrong time and time again 
>> yet which keeps on rearing its ugly head and saying: ‘This time it’s 
>> definitely going to happen! This time overpopulation is definitely going 
>> to cause social and political breakdown!’
>>
>> There is a reason Malthusians are always wrong. It isn’t because they’re 
>> stupid… well, it might be a little bit because they’re stupid. But more 
>> fundamentally it is because, while they present their views as fact-based 
>> and scientific, in reality they are driven by a deeply held misanthropy 
>> that continually overlooks mankind’s ability to overcome problems and 
>> create new worlds.
>>
>> The language used to justify population scaremongering has changed 
>> dramatically over the centuries. In the time of Malthus in the eighteenth 
>> century the main concern was with the fecundity of poor people. In the 
>> early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to 
>> population-reduction arguments. Today they have adopted environmentalist 
>> language to justify their demands for population reduction.
>>
>> The fact that the presentational arguments can change so fundamentally 
>> over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, 
>> really shows that this is a prejudicial outlook in search of a social or 
>> scientific justification; it is prejudice looking around for the latest 
>> trendy ideas to clothe itself in. And that is why the population 
>> scaremongers have been wrong over and over again: because behind the new 
>> language they adopt every few decades, they are really driven by 
>> narrow-mindedness, by disdain for mankind’s breakthroughs, by wilful 
>> ignorance of humanity’s ability to shape its surroundings and its future.
>>
>> The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society 
>> can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy 
>> scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the 
>> only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including 
>> society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same. That is why 
>> Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of 
>> food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would 
>> massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce 
>> and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only 
>> variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle 
>> problems: they are variables, too.
>>
>> The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources 
>> are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t 
>> recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, 
>> depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian 
>> Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely 
>> adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were 
>> animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in 
>> the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The 
>> nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be a 
>> resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, 
>> more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. 
>> Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of 
>> scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to finite 
>> thinking, to a lack of future-oriented imagination.
>>
>> And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to 
>> underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs 
>> from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, 
>> simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind 
>> of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first 
>> and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the 
>> makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer 
>> to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world 
>> another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands 
>> that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to 
>> be met.
>>
>> We don’t merely use up finite resources; we create infinite ideas and 
>> possibilities. The 6.7billion people on Earth have not raped and 
>> destroyed this planet, we have humanised it. And given half a chance – 
>> given a serious commitment to overcoming poverty and to pursuing 
>> progress – we would humanise it even further. Just as you wouldn’t listen 
>> to that guy who wears a placard saying ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ if 
>> he walked up to you and said ‘this time it really is nigh’, so you 
>> shouldn’t listen to the always-wrong Malthusians. Instead, join spiked in 
>> opposing the population panickers.
>>
>> Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement - 
>> Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas - is published by 
>> Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) The above is an 
>> edited extract of a speech given at the Wellcome Collection in London on 
>> Thursday 12 November.
>>
>> reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7723/
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