The last taboo

A letter on overpopulation from today’s The Age – somewhat unusually it got highlighted!

Time to tackle a troubling taboo: population control

Now that the severity, urgency and gravity of the climate change situation has been revealed by Professor Garnaut, and the consequential extreme cuts required, it surely makes no sense in politicians encouraging Australian population growth to upwards of 50 million by 2050. More importantly, a world population of 9.5 billion by the same time is flirting with calamity.

Even if climate change were contained to a global temperature rise of two degrees by 2050, it isn’t going to restore rainfall patterns as they were. It isn’t going to address excessive land clearing. It isn’t going to address over-utilisation of replenishable resources. Climate change discussions have no scope to address or take into account sustainability, and while civilisation is predicated on more and more consumption based on an ever larger population, then the future is pretty bleak.

Climate change is the tip of the iceberg, as replenishable resources, food, housing and energy become less able to service an ever increasing global population. Our political leaders must wake up to themselves and stop treating population control and reduction as a taboo as time is running out. We have one earth and all innocent bystanders will pay the price of the greedy minority.

– Tony Smith, Burwood

Skewed priorities

From yesterday’s Herald-Sun: just what Australia doesn’t need – more people!

Skilled migration scheme expands

February 18, 2008 12:00 a.m.

The Federal Government is to expand the skilled migration program.

Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Chris Evans said the government aimed to increase the program by 6000 places in 2007-08, bringing the total number of visas to 108,500.

“Employer-sponsored visas are the highest priority because they put a migrant worker directly into a skilled job,” Senator Evans said.

The minister yesterday unveiled a package of measures designed to address the nation’s skills and labour shortages.

The government will also work to expand the working holiday visa program for young people.

Senator Evans said the package had the potential to provide thousands of additional workers in the short term and would help address inflationary pressures.

This while every month, it seems, some company closes down leaving hundreds of workers unemployed (recent examples being a steel mill and a car manufacturer).

Miscellany

Some collected letters and quotes. A letter from the local newspaper regarding overdevelopment:

Lethal mix

Regarding “Our green-wedge blues” (the Leader, January 30), I think that for an estate agent and an Opposition spokesperson who do not live in this area to criticise the decision of State Government who has some foresight to leave some breathing space for our city is a negative approach to our quality of living.

I enjoy our low-density living, I enjoy our open spaces – something that in the future we will be most thankful for. Remember the schools that Mr. Kennett sold? The developers worked every square centimetre with narrow roads, large houses on very small blocks, no open space and perhaps the slums of the future.

Put an estate agent with a developer and we have the lethal mix of medium and high density living in an instant. And will it make housing cheaper? How can it? All we will get is more of the expensive housing we have now, without our open space – our breathing space.

Thank you Mr. Estate Agent and Mr. Opposition Planning Spokesman. We can do without the unbroken suburb-to-suburb housing sprawl. Let some of us have a quality lifestyle please and not feel crowded out.

– John Spragg, Dingley Village

Overpopulation: some comments that infuriated me (bolded), from an article in the Good Weekend magazine, an interview with some woman radio personality, Shannon Lush:

We retire to an outdoor table where she can smoke, and the conversation turns to the low national birth rate – another subject on which she has strong opinions. “This business with people not having kids – I’m sorry, I don’t understand it,” she says. “People are supposed to have children. It’s a biological directive.”

I make the point that being childless is not always a calculated decision. Sometimes the circumstances just aren’t right.

“I think it’s laziness, really,” says Lush, who has a daughter from each of her two marriages. “Laziness and greed.” Too many individuals simply have the wrong priorities: “ ‘I want money before I have children. I want this and I want that before I have children.’ ” She laughs. “What a lot of codswallop.”

She seems to be an Australian equvalent to Martha Stewart, though it’s the first I’ve heard of her! I wouldn’t be buying any of her products out of sheer disgust at those remarks. (Posted to Childfree Hardcore.)

A letter in today’s The Age about a little-publicized problem in East Timor: the lack of women’s rights, including access to abortion and contraception, as it is a predominantly Roman Catholic country.

Aid, not grenades

Instead of sending soldiers to East Timor we should give money for social welfare. East Timor is the poorest country in the world, and many of its people can barely feed themselves. The country’s biggest problem is its high rate of population growth.

At eight births per woman, East Timor has the highest birth rate in the world, and 42% of the population is under 15 years of age. With such statistics, and when everyday life is a struggle, civil conflict is likely to continue. The best way the Australian Government can help the people of East Timor is to provide family planning aid.

– Anna Payne, Boronia

Suburban destruction

I was walking to the local library and stopped to take some photos of a group of 3 houses that will be demolished to make way for a group of 15 expensive 2-storey townhouses. An older woman walking past with her dog asked me what I was doing and I said I was taking photos before the houses disappeared. We then got into a conversation (well, she did most of the talking!) about the development which the local residents had strongly objected to as it would erode the amenity of the street and cause horrendous traffic problems. There is a tall oak tree that will inevitably be felled, and all the vegetation will be cleared too.

The local council made an amendment to put the properties “within the Bentleigh Urban Village area, namely within a new ‘Higher-Density Residential’ Precinct, east of Arthur Street which essentially encourages higher-density residential development”. The residents’ objections were overridden by the ogres at VCAT. So there is someone else who feels the same way I do about all the overdevelopment in my suburb. As she remarked, the suburb will become a slum in the future with all this overcrowding.

The root cause of all this is population growth, but State and Federal governments are obsessed with promoting this because it’s “good for the economy”, never mind the impact it has on living conditions.

World without us

There was a book released called The World Without Us, about how the Earth would adapt if humans were to vanish overnight. (A review in The Age.) A chapter excerpt shows the alarming impact that the huge amount of plastics humans manufacture have upon the environment. A bit of trivia I came across is that a plastic container might not decompose for as long as 50 000 years! Imagine the millions of tonnes of plastic items that end up in the world’s landfills and oceans, and the long-term implications are alarming, as the book extract points out.

What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its chemical constituents or additives – for instance, colorants such as metallic copper – concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution? Would it last long enough to enter the fossil record? Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts embedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? Or would they decompose first, expelling hydrocarbons that would seep out of a vast plastic Neptune’s graveyard for eons to come, leaving fossilized imprints of Barbie and Ken hardened in stone for eons beyond?

[…]

“Plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, he concluded, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it.

“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

That half-century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.

“The Fate of the Ocean”, Mother Jones, March 2006. This was linked from a Wikipedia page about the ocean; it’s an alarming read about how human activity is damaging the world’s oceans on which all life depends, and the damage might be irreversible. Reading all this makes me feverently wish that someone would genetically-engineer a virus to sterilize most of humanity.

Being a backwater

I have come to intensely dislike Victorian Premier John Brumby – he is as bad in his own way as the former Premier Jeff Kennett. He is obsessed with economic and population growth, no matter how unliveable this will make the state become in the future. It is already becoming unbearable. His latest gaffe is to say Melbourne will become a “backwater” like Adelaide (the South Australian capital has a smaller population) if the channel deepening project doesn’t go ahead (a project that many see as unneccessary and devastating to the marine environment here, myself included). Well, if it meant a smaller population I would be happy for Melbourne to be a backwater. Even moving to Adelaide looks appealing (Melbourne’s population boom is making life here increasingly stressful), though they were having water shortages last summer and the weather also gets over 40°C in summer.