From: "Ed Glaze III" <eglaze@vsta.com>
To: "PPN Listserv" <PPN@csf.colorado.edu>
Cc: "Christopher Christie" <refugee@thegrid.net>,
        "Les U. Knight" <les@VHEMT.ORG>
Subject: Re:  coercion, sterilization, culling
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 17:19:20 -0600
Message-ID: <01be1737$b2c13840$516039cc@eglaze.vsta.com>
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I was asked what I thought on specific issues and I spoke openly.
I was not asked how I think the government or NGOs ought to
approach the overpopulation problem. Needless to say I do not
think current approaches will be sufficient.

Like I said in my earlier message, my beliefs are based on there
already being too many humans and that there is a real need to
reduce that number greatly. Unless that premise is recognized the
conclusion that follows will certainly be rejected. I realize how
anti-social such population reduction discussions are, especially
reductions on a scale that would actually allow the environment to
heal and be sustainable over the long term.

Ted and Ravi sent a very reasonable replies which I will respond
to, though there will probably be other replies.

Mainly Ted pointed out that my taking such a pessimistic view and
saying such unacceptable things would not be welcomed and
would turn off most everyone listening to what I say, detract from
my effectiveness as a population activist, and possibly hurt the
cause of promoting overpopulation awareness. I agree but feel
that on a listserv dedicated to talking about population issues,
even controversial ones, I should be allowed to expand the
boundaries of thought on the issue, especially if asked to do so.
If the persons most concerned and knowledgeable, the pop
activists, do not discuss all the ramifications of the problem and
whatever solutions there may be then we are limiting ourselves.

I would like to make plain that these are my personal views and
I do not voice them when working as a population activist for any
of the eco-groups I am associated with -- ZPG, Sierra Club, or
Audubon. When I speak in the group's name I stick to the policy
they have, hand out the appropriate fact sheets, encourage people
to learn more about the population issue on their own, and answer
questions within the limits of the groups policy. I certainly support
their population awareness and education efforts.

Do I have a problem with the pop policy of these groups? You bet.
It is a shame that ZPG no longer advocates zero population growth.
Sierra Club has chosen to ignore the very real contributions of
immigration to regional population growth. Of the big groups I have
the most hope for Audubon, though they don't want to get too
involved with controversial issues on a national basis either.

The groups that I think are most realistic in their approach are
Negative Population Growth <http://www.npg.org/> and
Carrying Capacity Network <http://www.carryingcapacity.org/>.
They each have very informative publications and are willing to
take a stance that says we need to do more than we are now doing.

What Ted especially failed to do was explain how he expects to
get population down to the pop numbers he mentions: "I haven't
spent a great deal of time trying to come up with a really good set
of numbers backed up with lots of reasons.  I usually think somewhere
around 10-25 million for the U.S. and 200 million or so for the world."
I have given such desired pop levels more thought and am willing to
say what I feel might be necessary to reach them.

Yes, I too believe that "there is no way a 'planned reduction' will
come about unless there is SUCH a serious global disaster that
there is no other way."  What I fear is that by then it will be too late.

Ted said, "We don't know the true limits, we don't know the optimum
levels, and we don't know what the future will bring." I say we don't
have to know because we can see where the trends are taking us.
The probabilities are not good and I refuse to be optimistic because
that will make me easier to get along with. Pessimism has its place
also and by not sugarcoating the problems maybe more people will
recognize that overpopulation is a very real threat to our future and
the ecosystem. Change will come and overpopulation will be dealt
with, I just think humans need to take much more responsibility for
what we have done, lessen ecological impacts as soon as possible,
and work toward solutions that will actually solve the problem without
taking many decades or centuries.

Though Ted takes a more optimistic approach in his reply it doesn't
entirely jibe with what he has said recently, "Our situation is really
serious. We shouldn't just assume it will continue, we should do what
we can to ensure that it WILL continue, and will get down as fast as
humanely possible.  Even if we were to hit the low U.N. projection
on population, which is probably not real likely, we will grow to
something like 11 billion before starting a downward trend. I fear
we cannot sustain 11 billion people on earth even for one day."
Ted understands the problems as well as I do.

When the perceived goal is maximizing all human life, including each
individual, you will of course have very different priorities than if the
perceived goal is a much more general maximization for all life,
including plant and animal, for the long term. Too often we are not
looking beyond ourselves. We cannot continue to disrupt the other
life on this planet and expect things to continue on as they have in
the past.

As far as Quinacrine and cancer, I think most women would be much
more negatively impacted by unwanted births and the very real risks
incurred with additional births. Quinacrine has been used for many
years and has undergone testing, just not the FDA level which so
many people expect. In an earlier post I mentioned that such testing
has not been done because the two men who distribute it cannot
afford the $8 million dollars and the many years it would take. The
need for a cheap and effective sterilization method is here now.

Relative morality has its place but I do not think it applies well to the
case of Quinacrine which I think is very tainted by political, racial, and
gender issues. DDT should be banned everywhere, now and forever.
Freon and CFCs are another environmental issue needing control.
I personally feel that tobacco should also be banned.

Ted's rewording of my statement about restrictions and laws is good.
I have not tried to lay out a detailed future scenario in which certain
types of restrictions would come about under certain circumstances.
The concept of erosion of human dignity and rights is one I have
mentioned before.

I was asked specifically about culling and I responded. I did not take
the time to detail the circumstances and exceptions but make a
general effort to point out my views. PLEASE remember that all of this
is based on a widespread and agreed to realization that human
population must be reduced quickly. Granted, we would not cull certain
people no matter their condition, Steven Hawking's deterioration is
the best example I can think of.
<http://www3.us.com/awa/awa/articles/whiteholes0994.html>

It is true that I have strayed into considering the overall environment as
more important than human rights. In the big picture I feel that it is. The
ecological devastation we are causing will come back to haunt us and
debating human rights will not be a luxury we can afford. So few are
willing to speak for nature or even acknowledge that humans are not
living as we should upon this planet. Just because we can exploit
everything around us, including our fellow humans, does not mean we
must. Or that we must continue to do so.

I am not a child hater as such. I do feel that each pregnancy is another
step toward a very bad future for all life on this world. On an individual
basis children are wonderful, biology and evolution makes sure of that.
At what point will we all finally realize that there is no right way to do
the wrong thing? Too many people is not solved by adding more. I did
not say that I "truly believe that we should be killing infants now because
of OP." I listed some types of people that I would deem excess from an
"extreme stance from the view that we already have excess people and
perpetuating overpopulation just makes the situation much worse."

Yes, this is an important statement, "For this to work it would require
mutual coercion, mutually agreed on." And I do realize that this is
nowhere near being the case, nor is it likely to be until the walls of
our economy and environment come crashing down around us.

When I am asked why I do not believe in God, I usually respond that I
see no proof of the existence of any supernatural being and refuse to
accept man-made stories from thousands of years ago when the writers
did not understand the universe around them. Faith for me is not an issue.
A similar logic is involved when I am asked why I do not have a more
optimistic view of the future -- I see not proof that such is likely. The
trends
are negative, the chance for change is small, and the recognition of the
problem is questionable at best. I think there is enough truth in the doom
and gloom warnings of scientists and ecologists to warrant great concern.
Not everyone agrees but I feel that the likelihood that I am wrong is
decreasing as the years go by and our population continues to grow
and we further degrade the world around us.

I have said for over 20 years that my extremist solutions are idealistic.
There is almost no way they would be implemented. But then again,
I grew up reading science fiction and that possibly allows me to better
think of futures that might come to be and to not reject so quickly the
outrageous possibilities toward which the environmental trends are
leading us. If the worsening trends were less ominous then I might be
less certain that trouble lies ahead. The future may be fuzzy and the
worst might not come in my lifetime but I do not see that any turnaround
is going on to the extent that optimism is warranted.

Human rights issues, economics, religion, politics, and other social
issues are important and necessary if we are to solve environmental
problems. I do not dispute that because it is the reality of how our
culture works. I just fear that they will not be enough, I hope I am wrong.

Even so, I disagree that "the most effective way to argue the OP issue
is from a stance that fully respects human rights and dignity." The fully
part tends to set the importance of, and our dependence upon, nature
aside and imply that it is humans that are all-important. We aren't and
our self-centeredness may just lead us into finding that out the hard way.

I do agree with both Ted and Ravi that "policies that take human rights
into more consideration may work better than your suggested directions,
and will be infinitely more likely to be implemented." Ravi says methods,
"need to be humane, lawful, and in line with modern civilised norms" and
I agree that this will be the case until worsening circumstances dictate
otherwise. China has made its changes that most of the rest of the world
disagrees with but for them the circumstances required changing the norms.


We must understand the integration of humans and the rest of the world.
I like the approach Audubon takes by calling their population effort a
Population and Habitat Campaign.
<http://boulder.earthnet.net/~popnet/PopCover.html>
"National Audubon Society has launched a major new initiative to
build a public mandate for population and family planning and to
connect the issues of population growth with habitat"

Human rights will not be thrown out but will like erode away slowly.
The lives that most of us lead are filled with many day-to-day intrusions
into our freedoms that we accept in a mostly unquestioning manner
would likely be shocking to our grandparents. I wonder what
sacrifices the children of today will accept when they are adults and
whether they will still be worrying about the future prospects for their
children and grandchildren.

_____   Ed Glaze   <eglaze@vsta.com>


From: Christopher Christie <refugee@thegrid.net>
To: Ed Glaze III <eglaze@vsta.com>
Date: Monday, November 23, 1998 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: coercion, sterilization, culling

> Ed,
> Thanks for sending the post from PPN.
> Sounds like a more interesting discussion these days.
> Culling? Whew! This could get ugly.  :-)
>
> I used to subscribe but got disconnected when I moved.
> I think you mentioned it previously, but can you tell me
> how I can re-subscribe?
>
> Have you checked out Martha's page?
> http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Gimenez.Martha/

Ed responds (and this is not an attack on Martha):
I visited Martha's homepage and she has several of her writings online,
though the background makes them hard to read at times.
Here are a couple interesting quotes from a paper she wrote in 1971
which give me a better insight into understanding some PPN views:

<http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Gimenez.Martha/popissue.html>
     "Abstractly considered, the relationship between scarce resources
      and a continuously increasing population turns the arguments in favor
      of population control into "self-evident truths" which can only be
rejected
      by the unthinking and the dogmatic. From a Marxist viewpoint, such
      "self-evident truths" are but reifications of concrete historical,
social,
      political, and economic relations which should be taken into account
      if the population issue is to be at all understood."

     "Looking at the contemporary situation in underdeveloped countries,
      the Marxist critique of Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian analysis and
      policies does not deny the existence of the problems that stem from
      high dependency ratios and high rates of population growth. However,
      it shows that to deal with such phenomena as "population" problems
      overlooks the social, political, and economic structural factors that
make
      possible such a population structure and processes and that,
therefore,
      as long as population control remains the main or only concern of the
      various international and national organizations which in one way or
      another are trying to foster economic development in underdeveloped
      societies, their action will only consolidate the economic
backwardness
      they are avowedly aiming to solve."


I also received this message:

From: Mike Maher <tmm8088@usl.edu>
To: Ed Glaze <eglaze@vsta.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 17, 1998 9:06 AM
> Ed,
>         I've read your recent posts on PPN.  While I don't subscribe
> to that listserv, I am familiar with their mindset. These people live
> in a parallel universe, a kind of collective solipsism, where reality
> is "socially constructed," where gender is  a product of discourse,
> where science is merely stories scientists tell (misogynistic, racist,
> homophobic stories, at that!), and where population growth is just
> another dysfunction of capitalism.
>         I got an interesting dose of this while a doctoral student at the
> University of Texas, where I found myself in a couple of classes
> taught and peopled by Marxists.  It was actually a good experience,
> if one is mindful of Voltaire's dictum, he who is not familiar with his
> enemy's argument is not familiar with his own.  It forced me to do
> a lot of reading to find the holes in their arguments. There are plenty.
> But once someone buys into that way of framing reality, they're as
> inflexible and as unmoved by empirical evidence as any of the
> religious zealots.
>
> Dr. T. Michael Maher
> Assistant Professor of Communication
> University of Southwestern Louisiana