Ray & all, Perhaps this is a clearer way of explaining the connections I've been discussing. "Scale", Ray, is the size of something or number of units of things. I was trying to connect numbers of under/un-employed & distressed individuals, migration pressure, and the *doubling* of the number of humans in your lifetime. Combined with the leverage of automation and the concentration of capital in fewer hands, dis-empowerment and distress become rampant.There are many reasons why people migrate, both temporarily and permantly. However, part of the reason wages are so low in developing nations is that there is a massive supply of labor there due to large family size and declining mortality/incr longevity during the past century.
The "scale" of urban centers can make community awareness and cooperation tough. How many of the thousands of people living in your square block do you know? How many meet to discuss neighborhood well-being & options going forward? Less than 1%? What % vote? Representation (political) has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness, making money that much more potent. This just arrived from Action Canada for Population and Development. http://www.acpd.ca/acpd.php/General/101/ I've actually had a fued with them for 2 years because they didn't want to deal with the notion of "overpopulation". They were stuck on womens rights, health, & fighting poverty. Just this January they sent a "Friday Facts" which focussed on overpop & envir as part of the wholesystem analysis. I sent a congratulatory email to the staff copying the 2 directors who have agreed with me all along. HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE BOTTOM LINE Jennifer Kitts, our senior advisor on sexual and reproductive rights has prepared an interesting report on human rights from an economic and social perspective. Here are some excerpts. The whole report is on our website. * * * * WHY INVEST IN SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS? (...) Achieving sexual and reproductive health and rights for all is an end in itself; it needs no further justification. But it also confers great benefits on the economic and social life of the community.(...) FIGHTING POVERTY Eliminating poverty is the single greatest challenge that the world faces. Empowering women and men to make key decisions about their lives - such as the decision about whether to have children, when and how often to do so - is essential to poverty eradication efforts. At the family level, high fertility can have a substantial impact on household income and can, in the extreme, makes the difference to a household being above the poverty line and being below it. If women have access to reproductive health information and services, they can take control of their fertility and break the cycle of repeated pregnancies, enabling them to seek employment or training and increase their family income. The burden of poor reproductive health affects women and men in their most productive years. Given the amount of disability and premature death caused by reproductive health problems in the poorest nations, it is difficult to imagine young adults - especially women - lifting themselves and their families from poverty without full access to basic reproductive health information and services. Reproductive illness and death help to perpetuate a vicious cycle of poverty among the poor. Poor and uneducated women are far more likely than other women to die or be disabled during pregnancy, or to bear the cost and consequences of clandestine abortions. Poverty is highly correlated with other variables, including early age at marriage and first birth, low contraceptive prevalence rates, short birth intervals, low birth weight, and relatively high risks of maternal and infant mortality. On a larger scale, there is new and more convincing evidence that high fertility at the economy-wide level makes poverty reduction more difficult and less likely. Rapid population growth exercises a negative impact on the pace of aggregate economic growth in developing countries. CRUCIAL TO NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Good reproductive health is crucial to national development. Half of the world's 6.1 billion people are under age 25; more than one billion are between the ages of 10 and 19. Within 15 years - less than one generation - all 3 billion will have reached reproductive age. Societies will need to make massive investments to prepare young people for economic and social participation, indeed, for all aspects of national development. Countries that fail to provide girls and boys with the means to remain healthy and in school will not benefit as fully from other investment they make in young people. What we do today will have far-reaching implications for the world in years to come. * * * * WEB SITES OF THE WEEK/SITES INTERNET DE LA SEMAINE : The official Web site for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: www.unhchr.ch Site Internet du Haut-Commissariat des Nations unies aux droits de l'homme: www.unhchr.ch/french/hchr_un_fr.htm Women's Human Rights Resources Web Site: www.law-lib.utoronto.ca/diana The purpose of the Web Site is to provide reliable and diverse information on international women's human rights via the Interne -- http://magma.ca/~gpco/ http://www.scientists4pr.org/ Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.--Kenneth Boulding
