1) The Optimum Population Trust (optimumpopulation.org) says –
“Too many people: Earth’s population problem.
“The world’s population is expected to grow by another 2.3 billion, from 6.8 billion in 2009 to 9.1 billion in 2050.
“Human consumption of renewable resources is already overshooting Earth’s capacity to provide. Resources are becoming scarcer and the number of hungry people increasing year by year.
“Reversing population growth is one of the measures needed to ensure environmental survival.”
Fine so far. Unfortunately, OPT goes on to say “It can be done by voluntary and peaceful means,” and, on another OPT web page,
“The Optimum Population Trust is absolutely opposed to any form of coercion in family planning.”
Sorry, Charlie. Voluntary population reduction hasn’t worked. Won’t work. We have a real ‘tragedy of the commons’ here. Neither extreme poverty nor relative wealth nor earnest moral suasion have stopped people from uncontrolled breeding.
2) Lester Brown (Scientific American Magazine [on line], April 22, 2009):
“Many of [failing states’] problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. … Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. In fact, the key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating poverty — and vice versa. One way is to ensure at least a primary school education for all children, girls as well as boys. Another is to provide rudimentary, village-level health care, so that people can be confident that their children will survive to adulthood. Women everywhere need access to reproductive health care and family-planning services.”
Brown’s plan may slow population growth; it probably would. But not reverse it. And, health and education initiatives in many parts of the world are failing just because population is growing uncontrollably faster than health and education can keep up.
3) Ted Turner wants to reduce human population “humanely”, which he defines as voluntarily. (NPR interview, 7 May 2009). But we already have too many people for sustainability, and the number is still growing.
Coercion: Giving up one freedom, the freedom to breed without limit, is necessary if we want to preserve all our other freedoms, and if we want to avoid the eventual Great Die-Off.
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