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"Environmentally Sustainable Populations" -- a conference for people who want you to die
Brendan O'Neill, Spiked...There is something unavoidably spooky about people who spend their waking hours fretting about overpopulation, and who hand out leaflets saying How many is too many? illustrated with a picture of an innocent-looking schoolgirl (white, of course) doing population sums on a blackboard (black, of course). In a Frequently Asked Questions section frequently asked by whom? Benito Mussolini? the leaflet informs us that there is a severe shortage of water and land on this beautiful planet of ours and then ponders: Whats the problem? The answer, in case you hadnt worked it out from looking at the programme of talks on everything from Scientific solutions in contraception to Population policies for the UK, is us: Sadly, we are. Humans. Every year around 75million of us a population nearly as big as Germanys are added to the Earths surface. Thats another Birmingham every five days. And God knows, one Birmingham is enough. Looking around the lecture hall of the Royal Statistical Society (a fitting venue for a conference that reduced everything to statistics), I was struck by the make-up of the audience: white-haired demographers; ladies-who-normally-lunch-but-who-today-were-discussing-the-coming-apocalypse; comparatively young but equally posh Soil Association supporters. There was, I think, one person of not entirely white extraction: he was operating the sound system. You can bet that when these well-to-do worriers about the human plague on the planet talk about burdensome people causing congestion, overcrowding and loss of green space, they arent talking about themselves, or their friends, or their neighbours, or their mistresses; theyre talking about them. You know them! The breeders, the not-sufficiently-educated, the dwellers of teeming cities, not only in Africa and Asia but in Europe and America too. The conference confirmed that, while groups like the OPT (founded in 1991) have tried very hard to spin population control in terms of choice and environmentalism, and to move away from that nasty eugenics of old, still some of the dark prejudices lurk beneath the surface. In her welcome address, Sara Parkin, a former leading Green Party activist and OPT patron, set the tone for the day by complaining: There are no Nobel Prizes for preventing births, only for preventing deaths. Yes, that is because, call us crazy, mankind has traditionally valued the creation of life over the destruction of it. Perhaps the OPT should set up its own annual Malthus Prize, to be awarded to the man or woman who does most to **shudder** prevent people from having as many children as they choose.... Robin Maynard of the Soil Association sounding like a trendy public-school teacher said too many people are scared to mention the P-word these days in case someone accuses them of being British National Party supporters or extreme ignorant racists. Then he said that if there were to be two more beers per person in China, [then producing that beer] would take the entire Norwegian grain harvest. I make no judgement. Suffice to say that judging the Friday-night drinking habits of the populous Chinese by the impact it will have on a responsible, sparsely populated Scandinavian country just about sums up the scientific vacuousness, scaremongering and fetishism about everything being finite that run through the veins of the modern Malthusian lobby.... There is one thing that the New and Old Malthusians unmistakably share in common: both make the schoolboy error of treating population growth as the only variant, and everything else food production, progress, human ingenuity as fixed entities. That is why every Malthusian, from Malthus himself to Paul Ehrlich to todays doom-mongering poshos, has been wrong in his dire predictions of collapse: because he didnt take into account humanitys creative streak. The OPT, utterly unable to see humans as the potential makers of a better, more fruitful society, says that on its currently existing resources Britain can only environmentally sustain between 17 million and 27 million people, way less than its population of 60 million. But what if we create more resources? Build more cities? Invest in nuclear? Build factories? I reckon if we did that, Blighty could take around half a billion people. No, that isnt a scientific fact; its an optimisitc guess.... Posted by: Mike 2009-04-01 |
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