Received: from netlink.com.au (merlin.netlink.com.au [203.16.172.196]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1/ITS-5.0/csf) with ESMTP id GAA18473 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 06:17:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from netlink.com.au (h150.mel.netlink.com.au [203.62.225.150]) by netlink.com.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA08615 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:21:49 +1100 Message-ID: <36498E15.C2DA8D1A@netlink.com.au> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:16:05 +1100 From: rc&am Reply-To: rcollins@netlink.com.au MIME-Version: 1.0 To: PROGRESSIVE POPULATION NETWORK Subject: [Fwd: overpopulation] Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------3C373907889009079E841B47" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------3C373907889009079E841B47 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --------------3C373907889009079E841B47 Content-Type: message/rfc822; name="nsmailMH.TMP" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="nsmailMH.TMP" X-POP3-Rcpt: rcollins@merlin Return-Path: Received: from rivendell.vsta.com (rivendell.vsta.com [204.57.96.15]) by netlink.com.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id DAA29456 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 03:23:37 +1100 Received: from eglaze.vsta.com (eglazeADSL.vsta.com [204.57.96.81]) by rivendell.vsta.com (8.8.8/8.8.6) with SMTP id KAA12959; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:21:26 -0600 (CST) From: "Ed Glaze III" To: Cc: Subject: Re: overpopulation Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:24:48 -0600 Message-ID: <01be0bfd$788d2520$516039cc@eglaze.vsta.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3 Hello Angela, Didn't you notice in my message about the book that I said, "it seems he (?) is promoting a booklet?" When you did not put your name at the end of your post how was I to know you were a female. I think I did the right thing by saying I was not familiar with you and putting a question mark after he. Unfortunately it is a widely known fault of the English language that there is not a gender neutral personal pronoun. I also posted URLs and other information about Barricade Books to make it easier for others to find out more about the book you mentioned. Your initial post would have been better if you had included such information along with a review of the book. I will assume that you did read it since it was only 36 pages. You are right about my certainty that overpopulation is a fact and is threatening the world. I am not sure how it could be otherwise. We have 6 billion people growing to 9 billion within most of our lifetimes. We can witness or read about the vast environmental degradation that has already taken place and will continue. I do not doubt that some of the problems suffered by women, such as those you mention, are serious and examples of abuse. I do not deny that there are many problems with the increasing wealth and power of multinational corporations and the financial establishment such as the IMF. Pharmaceutical companies also need to test their procedures and in some cases they may be doing so in methods that take advance of the poor or others. However, I do not agree that these are reason that allow you an easy dismissal overpopulation as a factor in the problems faced around the world. Never is overpopulation cited on death certificates as the cause of death and yet it is obvious that almost all factors of a society are changed by conditions of overpopulation. Food, water, and resources become more scarce as the competition increases on the local, regional and international scales. When there is an ever increasing number of people the liberties and worth accorded to an individual decreases. Is it right, no, but it does happen. The problems of the poor are worsened by increasing growth, especially unneeded births, within their families and in their countries. Excess population places many demands on the infrastructure of a country which often cannot keep up. New schools, additional jobs, and increased food supply are just a few of examples of the difficulties that politicians everywhere must deal with when population grows. That should not be too difficult to understand but it is difficult to deal with. Many countries have cultures that are pro-natalist for religious or other reasons. Thus the people want to have multiple children and through these personal decisions contribute to overpopulation and make the conditions in their country that much tougher. Whether the people having the kids are rich or poor does not matter, except in the scale of lifetime consumption which will be much worse for the rich. I do not have an MBA and did not say that I did, though you might have thought my business management degree was an MBA. I did drop out of an MBA program when I decided that I did not want to live a life that required three-piece suits and keeping up with the Joneses. I have never sought out a high paying job and have been a very active civic volunteer for many years. The reason I feel I have "the low-down on the facts" about overpopulation is that I am very well read on the issue. For over 20 years I have been reading environmental books and specializing in population issues. My personal circumstances and lifestyle have allowed me the time to do some extensive reading and attend college to further my education. I also browse the internet for population items to share with others. Did you bother to follow up on any of the URLs I listed in my earlier posts? They are there to help people become better informed about population issues. The demographic trends we face are backed up by scientific reasoning which is rigorous enough o indicate that there really is a serious problem. Nothing I have read has been able to convince me that there is not an overpopulation problem. Just as nothing has convinced me there is a god. People, for whatever reason, may be optimistic and attribute the environmental crisis we are in the middle of to some other factors but I want more than faith. Denial of the problem does not seem realistic and that is why I seek substantiation of contrarian views, like those in the booklet you mention. There is ample credible writing available which convinces me that Malthus was not wrong. The conditions that he was concerned about still exist today and through our excess population we are likely to exhaust or diminish the non-renewable resources (oil, fresh water, arable land, rubber, biodiversity, etc) on which our economic societies depend. We have yet to fully pay the price for our foolishness for thinking we were exempt from the laws of nature. Our technology has delayed the Malthusian prediction but we have not invalidated it. For more info on Malthus and how relevant his predictions still are: Beyond Malthus: Sixteen Dimensions of the Population Problem Worldwatch Paper 143 The Social Contract Volume VIII, Number 3, Spring, 1998: Theme: Malthus Revisited ________ Ed Glaze Port Mansfield, TX "If they don't understand the severity of the problem, they won't understand the severity of the solution. Overpopulation must be dealt with." (snipped the previous messages -- we have copies of them already) ------------------------------ Below is a population article from Australia that you might have missed. Unfortunately the Canberra Times does not offer an online search. SLOWING THE POPULATION TITANIC by Tom Gosling Canberra (Australia) Times -- October 10, 1998 Copyright 1998 The Canberry Times In the movie Titanic the captain, E.J. Smith, receives radio warnings about icebergs but ignores them because he has been told by the ship's owner to increase speed. After ordering the last four boilers lit, Smith pockets the radio messages and retires to his cabin, a pathetic figure soon to go down with his ship. The theme is familiar -- supreme confidence in technology, a vainglorious conviction that size and power will conquer everything, deafness to the voices of caution and whammo! -- Mother Nature proves yet again that she has an ace up her sleeve. It was precisely to oppose this "bigger, faster and to hell with the consequences" mentality that a courageous band of souls assembled 10 years ago. The half-dozen founding members of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population first met in the Canberra suburb of Bruce on October 12, 1988. They resolved to try to convince the public that Australia's population growth should be halted as soon as possible, and that the Australian Government should increase foreign aid related to restricting global population growth. The message has been dismissed as "pessimistic" by many -- even by some in the environment movement -- but has found influential supporters. Opening AESP's national conference in Sydney last year. NSW Premier Bob Carr congratulated it for raising the issue. "We've got to dispose once and for all,' he said, "of the notion that Australia is an underpopulated continent, an empty continent waiting to be filled up." It's a view that has found support also from some of the icons of Australian public life: Nugget Coombs, Manning Clark, A.D. Hope, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Professor Frank Fenner, Sir Mark Oliphant (who opened the first national conference in Canberra in 1989) and Judith Wright (AESP's patron). Coombs, back in 1977, called for population growth to be "halted...and stabilized at an ecologically safe level" and in 1988 Wright complained that the need to control population growth had "not even been recognized by governments. "Australia is perhaps one of the last countries on Earth in a position to ensure that its population does not exceed its resources," she said. "With its enormous problems of land degradation, water and rising pollution levels, Australia is far from being limitless." Others who share this view have included Sydney University professors Charles Birch and Jonathon Stone. In 1994, the Australian Academy of Science recommended the Australian Academy of Science recommended that Australia encourage contraception and limit its net annual immigration too so that the population would stabilize at 23 million in the year 2040. More recently, author Tim Flannery, whose book and TV series The Future Eaters have been widely acclaimed, has argued that Australia's long-term sustainable population is probably well below its present size. Professor Ian Lowe, chairman of Australia's first State of the Environment report, commissioned by the Federal Government, has voiced serious concern about the environmental impact of population growth. John Coulter, former leader of the Australian Democrats, went further to become AESP's president in 1996. AESP's numbers have grown from the original six to 900, and it has added branches in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, south-east Queensland, Townsville and cairns, yet it has failed (perhaps because of its insistence on a non-racist immigration policy) to burst upon the national consciousness in the way one Nation has. A major obstacle, it believes, is that powerful commercial interests particularly in real estate, construction and the media are applying strong pressure on the leadership of both major political parties to ensure that Australia's population growth continues, even accelerates, regardless of the environmental consequences and regardless of the opinions of the passengers. AESP, funded entirely by donations and modest membership fees, has held conferences, sponsored public lectures and debates, lobbied politicians, issued press statements, prepared submissions for inquiries, written articles and letters to editors, distributed leaflets just about everything a group can do to get across its message, short of demonstrations and standing for Parliament. In terms of what has happened in population growth, however, it has had about as much success as the radio operators had in slowing down the Titanic. During most of the 10 years of AESP's existence, Australia has had the world's highest per-capita rate of immigration, and our population has grown by 2.3 million to 18.8 million. The rate of population growth slowed during the decade, but is showing signs of picking up again. The annual growth rate peaked at 1.7 per cent in 1989, and slowed gradually to 1.1 per cent last year. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, however, show it increasing again. Last month's Australian Demographic Statistics give our population rate as 1.2 per cent and our net overseas migration is more than having been down to less than in 1997. In combination with a relatively high fertility rate for OECD nations (1.77 children per woman) Australia's population is on track to continue rapid growth. At the current rate, our population will be about 27 million, and growing, by the middle of next century. It's a depressing prospect for the "father" of AESP., retired CSIRO soil scientist Dr. Chris Watson. Now 63, he was responsible for monitoring the soils of the Murray Irrigation Area in the 1970's: "I could see the land deteriorating before my very eyes, with increasing salinity, especially around Deniliquin and northern Victoria." A few years later he became a councilor of the Australian Conservation Foundation and, at its quarterly meetings in Melbourne, struck up a friendship with a like-minded Monash University sociology professor Bob Birrell. When Bob Birrell came to the ANU's Centre for Resource and Environment Studies for a year's sabbatical in 1987-88, they started a newsletter Population Stability for Australia, which spawned AESP. Watson says, "I found I couldn't get many people interested at CSIRO, or in science circles generally, but I did notice that there were people writing letters to the Canberra Times so I phoned them and asked them if they wanted to form a group. I didn't get a single knock-back." The first meeting of AESP. was held at the home of radar engineer Greg Dunstone and librarian wife Eileen. Those present included poet Mark O'Conner, retired Bureau of Mineral Resources geologist Hugh Oldham, Australian Democrats political adviser Jenny Goldie (formerly Jenny Macleod), a former assistant secretary in the Immigration Department, Duncan Waddell, and CSIRO staff member Peter Martin. O'Conner says, "We didn't realize the intense negativity of much of the media. At first, the letters to the editor page, especially of The Canberra Times, was one of the few places where these new ideas were permitted. "We've also held our membership against a long-entrenched ideology of growth from newspapers like The Australian, which has consistently run a propaganda campaign on the virtues of high immigration." As an example, he cited ALP leader Kim Beazley's announcement earlier this year that the ALP would introduce an environmentally responsible population policy when next in office. "It drew a fierce response from senior Murdoch journalists, with opinion headlines like ‘too many fogeys, not enough people' " he says. "Beazley subsequently changed his tune, announcing in August that he was in favor in increased immigration.." He says thee is also something "deeply wrong" in the culture of some parts of the ABC's news and current-affairs sections: "You could tune into a whole year of the ABC's TV News and 7.30 Report and discover only that our high immigration policy is good and inevitable, and that anyone who questions it is probably a secret member of the Hitler Youth League. "The vast majority of Australians who oppose high immigration are misrepresented as a small and suspect minority, while the tiny minority who endorse it are falsely misrepresented as responsible mainstream opinion." Another active early ESP. member was poet, broadcaster and 1997 Canberran of the Year Anne Edgewroth, who says it is "logical" that ESP., now a national organization, began in Canberra. "Canberra is unique. It's larger than a country town but smaller than any of the other capital cities, so it's still comparatively easy to get from one end to the other," she says. "It's always had a highly educated population because of the Public Service and the universities, and it's always had an attraction for writers; and it has a very pleasant physical environment there's this quality of the city, surrounded by the Brindabellas and the alps, which places it apart in a way." Concern about population only "crept up fairly gradually" on Duncan Waddell. He says he began to think seriously about it when he was senior immigration officer at the Australian consulate in New York from 1966 to 1969: "I became aware of America's huge conurbations and the pressures of population in those tremendous cities, and I began to wonder whether this was a direction we ought to be heading in. I gradually realized we were going to end up with wall-to-wall people, which seemed to me a pretty horrible prospect. We were destroying all the farmlands and the forests and the wild places and all the other species, and pretty soon there would be nothing but people." The greatest single step forward in ESP's development has been the establishment in 1996 of the Sustainable Population Fund under the triple trusteeship of former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairwoman Dr. Loitja O'Donoghue, Canberra lawyer Margaret Brewster, and University House Master Rafe de Crespigny. The fund, which for the first time has allowed tax deductibility to be claimed for donations to ESP, has attracted major donations from individuals, and the money has been used to set up a national office in Canberra and pay a full-time employee, national director Edwina Barton. Barton says that although ESP. has undoubtedly raised the level of public discussion of population growth, in one way its very success has worked against it because the "pro-growth lobby" has intensified its efforts, in the last two years in particular. "What we are seeing now is a massively resourced backlash by the pro-growth lobby to regain public and political support for endless population growth," she says. "The big problem for us is that we don't have the human or financial resources to match them." Founding member Hugh Oldham says, "ESP. has at least made a big dent in the smugness of the pro-growthers and that's as much as I thought we'd ever be able to do. Most politicians don't want to listen to what we are saying because they don't think it will produce anything useful for them in three years." ----------------------------------------------------------------- NPG Population-News Listserve http://www.npg.org To subscribe: send e-mail to MAJORDOMO@NPG.ORG with the message text: subscribe population-news ----------------------------------------------------------------- --------------3C373907889009079E841B47--