Yeah, Arlene! Well put! A colleague of mine here--a radical
geographer--deals with population issues a lot in his classes. Bucknell
students (average family income $200,000+) always want to denounce those people
elsewhere "having babies they can't afford." He says he always responds with
the "modest proposal" that instead of controlling THEIR population, it would be
well to control "ours"--he contends that one of "them" equals something like 61
of "us." But like you, Arlene, he doesn't believe in any kind of coerced
population control.
Arlene Plevin wrote:
> Well, I don't think I meant population "control." My statistic about
> Americans using a disproportionate amount of resources per person was to
> complicate the discussion, introducing the idea that you can't look at the
> five children someone in India, for example, might have and compare it to
> the five children (and yes, folks here still do--witness the brood in Iowa
> and the outpouring) an American might have.
--
Glynis Carr
Associate Professor of English
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr
