Facing "facts" with fantasy

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Sep 3 14:00:17 PDT 1999


In message <07E012F391C6D2119AFD0050040E8AE022E4C7 at RLM-EXCH>, Carl Remick <cremick at rlmnet.com> writes
>
> Until societies can make fairer provision for all their citizens,
> and so long as population pressures pose serious threats to the
> global economy -- there seems no reason to regret low birth rates
> wherever they occur.
In message <07E012F391C6D2119AFD0050040E8AE022E4C9 at RLM-EXCH>, Carl Remick <cremick at rlmnet.com> writes
> Whoops!  What I meant to say was: "so long as population pressures
> pose serious
> threats to the global *environment*."

No, I think your slip revealed more than your correction. Of course people are not in excess. Food production is outstripping population, not vice versa. Oil markets are glutted. In general the environmentalists' nightmare of the 1970s has proved to be a phantom. Since 1981, increased grain yields have meant that the total land under cultivation has been falling.

Inequalities have nothing whatsoever to do with population, but with the form of social organisation. The countries with the lowest population rates are those with the greatest social inequalities, Europe, Japan and North America. Many westerners would like to suggest to third world nations that their own poverty was a consequence of excessive population, but that is a convenient excuse for western exploitation.

Increased population is on balance a good thing, not a bad thing. (Of course, if you don't like people, in which case you would take the opposite view.) People are the single most important economic resource there is. Evidence of that is that their has been more emigration to the United States in the last decade than there was in the period 1890-1910 (the previous highpoint, era of cities). Like West European nations, the US is politically hostile to immigrants, but economically it is recruiting furiously from the more fecund third world.

After all, what is the environment [etymology: that which surrounds 'vir' - man, same root as virtue] for, if it is not for people? -- Jim heartfield



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