Contraception good. Overpopulation bad.

Sorry. I think I made a mistake in that last post. The earths population is PREDICTED to reach 7 billion. JoHn - "Ex amore victoria". ("From love comes victory".)

It's interesting. I never realized there was such a big overpopulation skeptic movement. (They even have their own website “overpopulationisamyth.com” which just makes me all the more suspicious. Why go to all that trouble to debunk a 'myth' unless you have something to gain? I assume there must be some agenda behind it). Yoko Ono and the late John Lennon were also among the skeptics but looking at alot of the skeptic webs-sites the majority seem to be in the same sort of camp as the Global Warming Skeptics, which makes me wonder, if its only because the wealthy control most of the worlds resources then why do the right wing capitalists make up a large percentage of the overpopulation deniers. Surely it would benefit them more to perpetuate such a myth but they often seem to dismiss it as a lie spread by the green movement and socialists. From a neutral standpoint then, I’m putting down some cases, from different websites, for and against the belief in an overpopulation problem. I’m willing to be swayed against believing in overpopulation but, to be honest, there’s plenty of evidence on either side of the argument and again, I have to wonder, what do the Skeptics have to gain? Why put so much effort into trying to discredit ‘the overpopulation myth’? Furthermore, the link between overpopulation and pollution/ deforestation and thus global warming seems even more compelling to me than the argument based on scarcity of food and water. ================================================================================== FOR: Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich, Biologists (Los Angeles Times) – Think back on what you talked about with friends and family at your last gathering. The latest game of your favorite team? "American Idol"? An addictive hobby? The new movie blockbuster? In a serious moment, maybe job prospects, Afghanistan, the economic mess? We live in an information-drenched environment, one in which sports and favorite programs are just a click away. And the ease with which we can do this allows us to focus on mostly comforting subjects that divert our attention from increasingly real, long-term problems. Notice that we didn't mention climate change above, or the exploding population/consumption levels that are triggering it — the two major factors threatening humanity's future. Sure, if you're not too far from the Western wildfires or Midwestern floodplains, the conversation might have turned to the crazy weather that is finally forcing some media to actually talk about climate change in the context of daily events. But population? Get out. Way too inconvenient a truth. Take National Public Radio, for example. Of NPR's sparse record of population pieces, just one or two actually address unsustainable population growth. But as the political right whittles away at family planning clinics across the nation, the latest NPR series, "The Baby Project," devotes a plethora of articles to pregnancy, with the most serious subjects the problems some women have conceiving and birthing. If there is even a hint of too many babies, it is well hidden. This, even though a 2009 NPR story on U.S. pregnancies reported that half — yes, half — of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of unintended consumers adding to our future climate change. And that's what the right calls the "liberal" side of the mass media. The politically conservative U.S. mass media cover unsustainable population levels even less. That pretty much reflects the appalling state of U.S. public education today on population. The U.S. approach to population issues across all levels of government, in terms of such things as education, attacks on family planning and tax deductions for children, is an exercise in thoughtlessness. The ramifications, however, are far more insidious and brutal. Women are culturally conditioned daily to welcome the idea of having children — plural, not one or none. How to support those children economically is not discussed. Indeed, our abysmal lack of adolescent sex educational programs ensures there will be plenty of young women who secure their destinies, and those of their babies, to brutal poverty and shortened lives through unwanted pregnancies and lack of choice. The latest available statistics from the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan tell the story: 1 in 5 American children lived in poverty in 2008; 1 in 3 if they were black or Latino. Sure, there's much talk and concern that birthrates are down and will result in not enough workers to support the elderly. But this argument is overblown; after all, a 70-year-old can be more economically productive than a 7-year-old. And a large, pre-working population inflicts costs on a society. Furthermore, the birthrates in developing nations remain high, and the consequences affect us all. Globally, the effects of overpopulation play a part in practically every daily report of mass human calamity, but the word "population" is rarely mentioned. Wildfires threaten ever more people because expanding populations are moving nearer and into forests. Floods inundate more homes as populations expand into floodplains. Such extreme events are stoked by climate change, fueled by increasing carbon emissions from an expanding global population. ================================================================================== AGAINST: Fred Pearce Prospect News Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.” But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better. Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia. It also includes China, where the state decides how many children couples can have. This is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more: Chinese communities around the world have gone the same way without any compulsion—Taiwan, Singapore, and even Hong Kong. When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility rate in the world: below one child per woman. So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of Catholicism, women have two children on average—and this is falling. Nothing the priests say can stop it. Women are doing this because, for the first time in history, they can. Better healthcare and sanitation mean that most babies now live to grow up. It is no longer necessary to have five or six children to ensure the next generation—so they don’t. There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational. Women mostly run the farms, and they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields. Then there is the middle east, where traditional patriarchy still rules. In remote villages in Yemen, girls as young as 11 are forced into marriage. They still have six babies on average. But even the middle east is changing. Take Iran. In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight children to less than two—1.7 in fact—whatever the mullahs say. The big story here is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with or without tough government birth control policies in place, most countries tell the same tale of a reproductive revolution. That doesn’t mean population growth has ceased. The world’s population is still rising by 70m a year. This is because there is a time lag: the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom may only have had two children each. That is still a lot of children. But within a generation, the world’s population will almost certainly be stable, and is very likely to be falling by mid-century. In the US they are calling my new book “The Coming Population Crash.” Is this good news for the environment and for the planet’s resources? Clearly, other things being equal, fewer people will do less damage to the planet. But it won’t on its own do a lot to solve the world’s environmental problems, because the second myth about population growth is that it is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet. In fact, rising consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you choose, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions: the biggest current concern because of climate change. The world’s richest half billion people—that’s about 7 per cent of the global population—are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent of the population are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. Virtually all of the extra 2bn or so people expected on this planet in the coming 30 or 40 years will be in this poor half of the world. Stopping that, even if it were possible, would have only a minimal effect on global emissions, or other global threats. Ah, you say, but what about future generations? All those big families in Africa will have yet bigger families. Well, that’s an issue of course. But let’s be clear about the scale of the difference involved. The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians. A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and, in the unlikely event that those ten children all live to adulthood and have ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less carbon dioxide than you or me. It is over-consumption, not over-population that matters. Economists predict the world’s economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If this does indeed happen, less than a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human numbers. True, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they do—and I hope they do—their impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the height of arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we? Some green activists need to take a long hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthus’s Law. In Hard Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a caricature of Malthus. Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death toll in the Irish potato famine. We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame the world’s poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous. ================================================================================ FOR: (From National Geographics website) In 8000 B.C., only 5 million people were alive—roughly the population of today’s Papua New Guinea. Overuse of the world’s natural resources was hardly an issue. Now some 6 billion mouths must be fed and bodies clothed and housed. Misuse or depletion of the Earth’s treasures to meet those needs, for example unsustainable logging, poor farming practices, and overfishing, threatens human life and health around the world. Industrialized countries in the past have done their share of plundering and polluting. But today most such problems occur in developing countries commonly called the Third World, which also happen to be the areas of greatest population growth. According to the United Nations, population increases have slowed or even stopped in Europe, North America, and Japan. Nevertheless, global population continues to rise at a rate of roughly 78 million people per year. Most of the growth is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South and Western Asia—areas least able to afford more people. Not coincidentally, the same places are plagued by deforestation and other unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. Population Trouble Spots According to the United Nations, by 1960 70 percent of the world’s people lived in developing countries. Today the figure is 80 percent, and these countries account for 95 percent of population growth. Africa’s population has tripled since 1960 and continues to grow the fastest. Europe had twice as many people as Africa in 1960. By 2050 experts estimate there will be three times as many Africans as Europeans. Asia has more than doubled its population since 1960, as have Latin America and the Caribbean. North America’s population has grown by 50 percent, while Europe’s has risen by only 20 percent and now is roughly stable. The United States is the only industrial country whose population is expected to increase—due largely not to births, but to immigration. The United Nations estimates that as the 21st century begins, more than a billion people lack basic needs. Nearly three-fifths of the 4.8 billion people in developing countries have no basic sanitation. Almost a third lack access to clean water. A quarter have no adequate housing, and a fifth go without modern health services. The Science British economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 proposed the unsettling theory that population growth would outrun the ability to produce food. This, he said, would lead to war, famine, disease, and other calamities. Since Malthus’s time, technology has struggled to keep up with burgeoning populations. The introduction of machinery to farming vastly improved crop yields. Further leaps in production came from the development and use of fertilizers as well as new understandings of plant diseases, the use of genetics to develop new strains, and the use of pesticides to cut losses due to insects, fungi, and other parasites. At sea, large ships with heavy gear prowl in search of fish. The challenge remains to find ever more efficient and less environmentally harmful ways to feed the world. Better management of soil—for example, by rotating crops—can reduce the need to clear more woodland for agriculture. Contour plowing diminishes water-polluting runoff. Some governments have limited or banned the use of DDT as an insecticide because of its cumulative effects in the food chain. As the Earth’s population continues to mushroom, can ways be found to manage natural resources without causing ecological collapse? The most successful efforts are almost always the result of cooperation between government and industry. But as is true with all government regulation, laws tend to be effective only when they are understood and supported by the people who are affected: both producers and consumers. In places where these vital conditions do not exist the environment suffers, and ultimately, so do people around the world. © 1996- National Geographic Society. All rights reserved. ================================================================================= AGAINST- By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 29th September 2009 (Taken from Monbiot.com) People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”(1) But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational. A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions(2). Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce. Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together(3). Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm(4). The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development, points out that the old formula taught to all students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I=PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I=CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children. While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few superyachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they’re accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour(5) I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 l/hr(6). But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3400 l/hr when travelling at 60 knots(7). That’s nearly one litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre(8). Of course to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jet skis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby. Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone. In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”(9) The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise. James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich. The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons, except among wealthier populations. The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century(10), probably at around 10 billion(11). Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing. But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it? It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich. ================================================= I apologize if you disapprove of my choice of articles but you can always post your own articles/quotes. I would be interested to read them.

But why are the rich so eager to claim that overpopulation isn’t a problem? http://overpopulationisamyth.com/ is the website of the right wing Population Research Institute which is funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and this is what I found when I googled them: From WIKIPEDIA: The Foundation was established in 1942, shortly after the death of Lynde Bradley. However it was not until twenty years after the death of his brother Harry Lynde Bradley, in 1965, that the Foundation expanded in size and began to focus on public policy.[1] This followed the 1985 acquisition of Allen-Bradley by Rockwell International Corporation, with a significant portion of the proceeds going into the expansion of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which saw its assets rise from $14m to over $290m.[2] In 1986 the Foundation gave away $23m, more than it had in the previous four decades.[1] Whereas in 1980 only 2.5% of grants were related to public policy, by 1990, under the leadership of Mike Joyce (formerly at the John M. Olin Foundation) it was 60%.[1] The organization was founded in an attempt to preserve and extend the principles and philosophy used by the Bradley brothers. During their life they were committed to preserving and defending the tradition of free representative government and private enterprise. According to them, "the good society is a free society. The Bradley Foundation is likewise devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it." The foundation supports limited government, conceived of as a dynamic marketplace where economic, intellectual, and cultural activity can flourish. It states that it defends American ideas and institutions. Next to that it recognizes that responsible self government depends on informing citizens and creating a well informed public opinion. The foundation tries to accomplish that by financing scholarly studies and academic achievements, most especially by scholars coincidentally named Bradley. [3] The Bradley Foundation's former president, Michael S. Joyce, was instrumental in creating the Philanthropy Roundtable. The goal of the Roundtable's founders was to provide a forum where donors could discuss the principles and practices that inform the best of America's charitable tradition. Currently, there are more than 600 Roundtable Associates. In the early 1990s the foundation helped support The American Spectator, which at the time was researching damaging material on President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation has provided funding for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC brought together prominent members of the (George W) Bush Administration (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz) in the late 1990s to articulate their neoconservative foreign policy, including sending a letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq. --------------------------------------------------- The rich may screw the world up, some of them also don’t want people to believe in overpopulation. Why? JoHn - "Ex amore victoria". ("From love comes victory".)

I think that there is a belief among some economists that the rich may profit from the population rising. Perhaps thats why they're so against the overpopulation 'myth'. "The most common and popular form of overpopulation denialism these days, however, comes from the influence of free market economists, such as The Wall Street Journal, and the late Julian Simon (who is popular among libertarians).[2] This form of denialism teaches there are "no limits to growth", and is associated with the view that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely, and that continued economic growth depends on a perpetually growing human population. It is also closely tied to excessive optimism over globalization and technology, as well as economic deregulation. These views are collectively sometimes referred to as "cornucopian" - in that they believe there is an endless supply of matter to support an ever-growing population and economy. It denies the fact that at some point, the consumption demand will run up against natural limits in supply." -taken from rationalwiki http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Overpopulation JoHn - "Ex amore victoria". ("From love comes victory".)

I agree with you lavadis but its just one of the tricks up the sleeve of capitalism. The Cigarette companies fought for years to cover up the dangers of smoking; the Oil companies are still fighting to fool the public into believing that Global Warming doesn't exist. If the truth is bad for business they'll always try and cover it up. JoHn - "Ex amore victoria". ("From love comes victory".)

Indeed, there are some beautiful empty spaces left in the world Kadhai but lets keep them that way. Nature can only suffer if the human race expands too far; we have to think about all the other species that we share this planet with and their habitat. JoHn - "Ex amore victoria". ("From love comes victory".)