Presidential campaigns are good events for candidates wanting to test new rhetoric on stale issues. It seems that for every crisis that is well past its peak, new candidates find news ways to try to turn back the clock on damage already done.
Global warming is one such issue. The global warming cause in America has made strange bedfellows out of some notorious enemies. During a recent tour of the West, I saw commercials sponsored by the Sierra Club on the issue, only to be followed by one with oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens touting wind power. My colleague Neil Pierce of the Washington Post Writers Group has devoted his syndicated column to spotlighting local programs created to head off future effects of global warming, and is sponsoring a website filled with great information on the subject. Of the many partisan bills in Congress, bipartisan support is often found on legislation aimed at countering the desultory future of our planet should current levels of pollutants not be curbed.
Yet with all of this organizational, legislative and creative energy, few are addressing the main reason why global warming will continue on its destructive path.
Sadly, the United States is well past the point of no return when it comes to ecological and economic damage wrought by the destruction of our environment and it seems the subcontinent of India and the giant Asian land mass known as China are competing voraciously to further ecological collapse. This is due mostly to the fact that these countries have done little to cut population growth in their areas.
From the time marine biologist Rachel Carson started writing her seminal book Silent Spring in 1960, the United States population has increased by 70%, from 180 million to 300 million today. China’s population has more than doubled since 1960, from 600 million to 1.3 billion, and India has practically tripled its population in the same period, growing from 443 million to 1.14 billion today.
Obviously, these increases in population have not only strained natural resources, it also increases the need for basic human necessities that are manufactured. Yet, few if any of the commentators, politicians, and organizations suggest that governments need to control populations in order to reduce the effects of global warming. Why?
In the United States, churches value a large populace. The more their adherents propagate, the more revenues churches hope to generate in the future. Conservative Christian churches, many of which are closely aligned with the major political candidates, still foist a ‘family values’ ethic upon the country, fighting vociferously against abortion and the rights of women to choose what is done to their bodies. With increases in birth rates through the years, plus a huge rise in life expectancy, the rise in population is crippling our ability to deal with resource and environmental decline.
India faces many of the same problems with the growing population. Infant morality rates in India have decreased dramatically in the last century, and life expectancy has risen substantially. The Indian government, aware of the constraints of rapid population growth has attempted on several occasions to distribute birth control to the people there. But such methods are culturally abhorrent for traditional and deeply faithful Indians.
For the most part, the Chinese have no religious or cultural imperative to reproduce. In fact, the Chinese government has prevented an extra 400 million births with a 1979 policy to limit families to one child. Even though the Chinese people recognize the importance of saving resources in their country, the one child policy remains extremely unpopular, and is viewed as a horrible legacy of the Mao years.
The sad moral to this tale is we are birthing ourselves to death. While there is nothing wrong in searching alternatives to fossil fuels, food production and distribution, and consumerism, the fact remains that as our life and lifestyle expectancies rise, so does the damage to the environment. And no one, from the Sierra Club to T. Boone Pickens, are willing to risk being called eugenicists for the sake of global warming.
As the ozone layer erodes further and our planet becomes more subject to prostrating heat and malevolent weather, we might finally come to the conclusion that we have indeed reaped what we have sown. We may finally understand that if we do not take some measure to control human population, nature will- and nature’s way will be a great deal crueler in the end.
www.mytown.ca/sakin
Larry Sakin is a former non-profit medical organization executive and music producer. His writing can be found on Mytown.ca, Blogcritics, OpEd News, The People's Voice, Craig's List and The Progressive magazine. He also advocates for literacy and directs The Progressive Principles Project, and is a National Coordinator for the DFA offshoot group WeDemocrats.
You are unconsciously sailing very close to a very dodgy wind, in my opinion. Too many people? Not if we loved each other, shared the earth and developed water as the fuel of the future (see www.waterpoweredcar.com ) and hemp (see www.hempforvictory.blogspot.com ) as the twin core of bio-regional self-sufficent communities where women determine/control their own fertility and where there are ways folk can enjoy kids other than have more themselves: i.e. with villages and urban neighbourhoods and co-housing communities where all the community take co-pleasure in and co-responsibility for children to some extent, so these communities would get to steady state where populations naturally settled down, didn't keep rising, I believe.
Remember Larry, the average Chinese of Indian person is still using only about one fifth of what the average American uses. The problem is social relations and political economy and not 'overpopulation' as such.
Easier to complain about too many people - especially with 'yellow peril/teeming subcontinent' racist rhetorics, which you yourself don't use, I admit - than to speak truth consistently and courageously to and about Power in the US and globally.
People like Kissinger and the Duke of Edinburgh are on record with some pretty horrific genocidal-sounding statements about global popuolation reduction. And with HAARP the US ruling elite have the means to control global wather, melt the icecaps, cause druoughts and floods and earthquakes, quite possibly even the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 if we follow Joe Vialls and other analysts. Add wars, stealth bio-weapons and sgtealth engineered famines aka 'market mechanisms' where supply only flows to meet gthe needs of people with mnoney and thtr rest can die in a ditch. The arsenal of pseudo-Environmentalist anti-Populationism is truly awesome and we should give it no credence, just flat out argue for social justice and freedom to use the resources of the earth to meet each others needs.
All of us one family, but NO one world government if by that is meant FRATriarchal control by the likes of Henry Kissinger who wants to bring the population down to 2-3 bn.
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Keith Mothersson (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 56 comments)
on Monday, August 11, 2008 at 4:46:18 PM
Ah, yes- cars that run on water. About fifteen years ago, there was a multi-billion dollar lawsuit filed against General Motors by the family of a young man who died in an accident. In the plaintiff's discovery, it turns out that a part that cost $1.25 wholesale could have prevented the accident, and thousands like it, had it been used to replace a faulty part. Why didn't GM use the better part?
Company bean counters calculated the cost of the replacement part against the cost to settle future lawsuits from accidents, and the settlements turned out to be cheaper. Now, take that scenario, and ask yourself: do you really think car manufacturers are going to re-engineer their cars to the tune of billions of dollars to run on water? Also consider the amount of time it would take for this technology to work on a mass basis- ten years, twenty years? What are we all supposed to do until then?
There is a terrible myth out there that China and India are still apart of the third world when in fact, both countries are enjoying great prosperity from global trade. This prosperity has led the majority of Chinese and Indians towards upgraded lifestyles. There is still poverty in both countries, as there is in the U.S. However, consumerism in both countries is up by nearly 10,000 percent in just twenty-five years.
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Larry Sakin (63 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 14 comments)
on Monday, August 11, 2008 at 7:33:50 PM
Cars can't run on water. And people can't eat dirt.
At the moment a very large proportion of the food we eat comes into existance because oil is cheap. This is not just because the fuel for tractors and transport is cheap but also because the cheap oil permits fertilizer to be cheap. If you don't realize that overpopulation is the world's greatest problem all your efforts will be misdirected, wasteful and in the end a failure.
Nature will take its course. Mass starvation will solve the problem. This seems a pity given that we are clever enough to see the problem and devise solutions.
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gravity32 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 174 comments)
on Monday, August 11, 2008 at 10:24:24 PM
3 comments
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