“Pressure grows as Melbourne rockets to 4 million”, The Age, 24/4. Another dismaying report from the Bureau of Statistics, showing that Melbourne is growing at an alarming rate (an average of 1500 people coming here a week).
The label of Australia’s fastest-growing city might once have been one for which Melbourne yearned but these days it could be more of a burden for Premier John Brumby and his Government, adding to overcrowded trains, congested roads, housing prices, housing shortages and delays in hospital treatment. In the past, the State Government used to seize on figures showing strong population growth as evidence that Victoria was leading the nation. Yesterday Mr. Brumby was silent on the data showing even faster growth.
Because it makes life increasingly unbearable for those already living here! Increased stress due to increasing competition for resources and living space, which means that crime will invariably rise. The suburbs continue to spread across the once-open land like a metastizing cancer – but residents oppose increasing suburban density:
Despite the pressures of a booming population – much of it driven by overseas students and new migrants wanting to settle close in – growth in the inner and middle suburbs declined significantly, as rising costs and council opposition blocked many residential redevelopments.
And rightly, too! The suburbs as originally designed were intended to give some space for the residents of the houses, and avoid the squalor of overcrowded slums like those in London. Unfortunately that vision is being eroded as high-density developments intrude.
“Influx putting the brakes on travel times”, The Age, 24/4. The overcrowding is also leading to increased road traffic as underfunded, privately-run public transport proves inadequate to cope.
Melbourne is not yet at the nightmarish level of megacities such as Tokyo, Moscow, Mexico City or London, but it is heading in that direction.
“Move over, it’s getting crowded”, The Australian, 22/4. Good opinion piece on the negatives of population growth.
“Jason Kenney fires up the melting pot”, Ottawa Citizen, 18/4. An article about the Canadian Minister for Immigration and Multiculturalism who is taking the (now-radical) view of encouraging immigrants to integrate, rather than wall themselves off in ethnic communities – “Integration, not separation” could be a slogan; such a policy encourages social cohesion and harmony.
In the past two months, Kenney has been speaking out at newspaper editorial boards, chambers of commerce and universities, raising concerns over the language abilities of immigrants, the danger of ethnic enclaves, even the “radicalization” and “extremism” among some tiny pockets of immigrants.
Multiculturalism? “Marvellous, established, irreversible.” Just don’t expect taxpayers to foot the bill for cultural festivals. “We don’t need government grants for cultural communities to celebrate their customs,” said Kenney in an interview Friday.
He makes no apologies for diverting the focus of the multiculturalism department from anti-racism programming to what he calls community “bridge building.”
“The best way to combat bigotry, racism or stereotypes is for people to get to know each other,” he said. “I’m a little skeptical that sending people to sterile sensitivity-training seminars is going to address those who harbour racist sentiments.”
To the topic of space travel. I was reading the comments at a NASA Watch entry, “NASA Faces Tough Choices & Needs an Administrator Now”, and some of the commenters display a dislike of “greenies” (environmentalists) apparently because they have the audacity to suggest that humanity should learn to live within its means rather than look to space as a source of more resources to fuel endless growth (and that they are also to blame for the decline of the U.S. space program in general!). A comment by Dennis Wingo that exemplifies this:
We must recapture what is important about space, which is that we live in a solar system rich with resources and that it can be the ultimate legacy in history of the United States of America to open that frontier for all mankind.
[…]
Today in Japan, a man named Meadows received Japan’s highest honor for a book that is complete bullshit, which is that we live on this single planet, this is all that we have, and that we must learn to live with less. Dr. David Webb once told me that he was a member of the board of directors of the group that funded the study that Limits to Growth was based upon. After the Club of Rome report was provided to them, he asked why space development was not included as an alternate future. He was informed that none of the people in the study believed in space as an option (this was circa 1968). Dr. Webb then started on the path to teach people about the value of space and there is an ad on this page today for the graduate space studies program that he set up.
Space is the Black Swan of civilization, the disruptive technology that will allow us to look back on Limits to Growth as a quaint example of limited thinking about the future.
[…]
We will have an RLV when there is a market to support it. Get over it. We will have the support of society for our dreams, when we quit dreaming small dreams. We create markets, and we fulfill dreams, by the development of the economic resources of the solar system, beginning at the Moon, asteroids, and then Mars.
Getting to space is currently expensive and difficult, so mining the resources of the solar system is a long way off yet (I don’t see it happening before the end of this century, if ever, barring some technological breakthrough such as making nuclear fusion energy viable). This attitude does nothing to solve the environmental problems besetting Earth, and perpetuates the mentality of greed. Humans should learn to live within their means as it is the prudent and moral thing to do. (I have some difficulty creating a coherent argument to counter such a viewpoint – any better suggestions? The article, “The Dream Palace Of The Space Cadets”, provides some counter-arguments to some of the nonsense espoused by “armchair experts” in the space community – I wrote about this attitude in my 4/2/2009 entry.)
“Meadows” is Dr. Dennis Meadows, author of Limits to Growth – the Japanese award is described here.
