This morning CBC featured Julia Whitty, author of Population: The Last Taboo, published in Mother Jones:
http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican Whitty was speaking from the Gulf, where the all-pervasive environmental disaster fails to inspire kind words for technological solutions to world hunger. Her article, however, focuses chiefly on India, and explores the clash between those who believe overpopulation creates the stress vs. those who see it more as an effect of over-consumption on the part of Western nations. She raises valid points on both sides, though she seems to be indicating that Western over-consumption plays the bigger role. With an anticipated extra 86 million Americans expected by 2050, each will be leaving a carbon footprint equal to only 4.7 Indian people. With each new Western child born, the footprint augments enormously compared to that child's mother's. This will also put a heavy burden upon the future Western child. Poor resource distribution, use and polluting of resources is discussed, as well as peak soil being far more scary than peak oil. Top soil takes 1000's of years to form geologically; river flow is the primary facilitator in top soil formation, but rivers keep getting dammed up in great part for the production of cheap hydro for Western consumption industry. Again, technology has led to the saturation of top soil with nitrogen the world over, and she cautions we must all learn how to grow food on half the amount of today's available topsoil over the next 50 years. There is also now 1/3 desertification in India, whose global land mass of about 2.3% accommodates over a billion people. Though she feels we focus too much on numbers rather than behaviour, and would sooner see a morning after pill for over-consumption, she discusses overpopulation with apposite concern. Education of women and free access to contraception obviously is key, and has proven to be far more successful than the one-child policy of China. Iran has had great success and even India's fertility rate dropped from 7 to less than that of the US rate. What I heard from the TED conference was that data on stats of wealth and growth rate are largely unknown. Apparently Viet Nam has the same family size and same life expectancy as that of the US from 2003. That N. Korea is ahead of Brazil, and Asia is more in the middle now with increasing wealth. In general, since '62, developing countries have longer life and fewer children mirroring developed nations. Increasing global health and wealth has changed the landscape considerably, and there is an averaging out of life expectancy and fertility rates. This data needs liberation from the UN files: http://www.gapminder.org/ Realizing that world wealth is increasing, wealth's demand for more consumer goods and resource-based services will further burden the diminishing remains. The taboos emerged out of a clash between environmentalists and human rights activists; abortion and immigration issues, racial anxiety historically over control, including tragedies like forced sterilization projects. Strong arguments for correction on both sides. Natalia Kuzmyn _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
