On Jul 26, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote: >>> What's wicked about bringing children into the >> world that you have the >> resources to support and nurture? >> Doug > > it's wicked because it creates even more scaricities among other > children in undeveloped countries whose parents do not have the > resources to support and nurture. would you suggest that we forbid > anyone too poor from having children? > jon
I might. There, I said it. If our species were made up entirely of individuals who approached decisions, especially important ones like whether it's wise to reproduce, with as much thought toward collective benefit as individual gratification, I wouldn't suggest that. But this species has proven time and time again that the majority of its individuals do, in fact, act only on a motivation of immediate self-gratification and very often completely counter to collective benefit, even in the case of driving a population explosion that continuously paces or exceeds our best efforts at meeting demands for basic necessities such as food and shelter, and in the case of creating gross inequities in wealth that make virtual Olympic god-kings out of the wealthiest one percent or so, and exploit and starve large numbers of other people in the poorest parts of the world. And one big factor of this is a perceived "right to reproduce" that is common to most cultures, our own included, that makes it seem abhorrent to place any restrictions on how many children any family may have. China has its back farther up against the wall than many other countries, and even with its massive population and the strains on its natural resources, it has to fight the perception that its one- child-per-family policy is some sort of assault on its citizens' civil rights. Yes, if I were to become "dictator of the world", placing restrictions on who was and was not allowed to have children would be on the table. I'd likely be despised and hated for it, but I'd still at least consider it, if only to give us some fighting chance of a managed population decrease. Reduce the earth's population to 1-2 billion or so, with the knowledge we now have of agriculture and food production, and earth becomes close to a utopia. The only exceptions I would make would be for people willing to help terraform and colonize other habitable bodies in the solar system. I'm pretty sure Mars' surface could be terraformed to the point where people could live and produce food there without life support, with the right approach to releasing the CO2 locked up in the regolith and using a series of introduced plant species to convert the CO2 to breathable oxygen and jump-start biosphere growth. With a controlled population reduction, the economy could probably support a pretty massive spaceflight/colonization initiative .. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
