On Sep 16, 2008, at 5:31 PM, Charlie Bell wrote: > On 17/09/2008, at 8:05 AM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: >> No, it's just what I ask _everybody_ who suggests that "approaching 7 >> billion" (or whatever the current world population happens to be) is >> "too many" people: where _specifically_ do you suggest that the >> needed reductions be made, and if you personally are not at the head >> of that list, how do you justify putting anyone else ahead of you? > > How about - let's try to lower the birth rate, rather than increase > the death rate? Hmmm? > > As education and life expectancy and SoL increase, birth rate > plummets. As has been pointed out, if we can raise living standards > world-wide without the gross overconsumption of Australia or the US > then we may be sustainable in the long run. Right now, we're not. > > C.
Deciding who does and does not get to have children (or deciding how many they're allowed to have) is in the same class of problems as deciding who lives or who dies. Neither one is a problem I'd want to be responsible for trying to solve in detail. (There is a third option, if viable enough habitats can be created elsewhere in the solar system -- ::eyes Mars enviously:: -- but the current overpopulation problem makes it difficult or even impossible to consider that, because too much of our resources are going into barely keeping up with the demand for feeding and housing and transporting the 6-7 billion who are already here.) And likewise, the fact that deciding who does and who doesn't live, or have kids, is a tough moral question, doesn't change the fact that the overpopulation and accelerating population growth are problems worth attempting to solve. I'd really like to live on an Earth whose population is limited to about 2-3 billion. :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
