If there is one blogger who seriously irritates me, it is author John C. Wright. He is a Catholic/conservative/libertarian (a former atheist who underwent a “conversion” after a heart attack), and, not surprisingly, he is anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and (the subject of this entry) does not believe Earth is overpopulated. On the contrary, the more humans the merrier! A recent Livejournal entry, “The Manifesto of the Cornucopians”, illustrates his viewpoint. He has a ponderously pompous style of writing that gives me a headache, so I can’t sum it up easily, but he denies that Earth is overpopulated, that there will ever be scarcity of resources, and that “human ingenuity” will find ways around any problems related to these.
He usually responds to any criticism with withering sarcasm, so there is little point in posting a counter-argument, but I did try anyway, in my usual incoherent fashion:
If ~7 billion people is not too many, how many is – 10 billion, 20 billion? Assuming humans never manage off-world space colonization, do we keep growing until the land is covered with continent-wide megacities, with no nature left? (Which was the nightmarish vision of Earth presented in Avatar, incidentally.)
It’s not only the sheer numbers of people that has a negative impact on the environment, it’s all the waste and pollution they produce – billions of tonnes of garbage in landfill, not to mention the oceans being used as a toxic waste dump. (See these photos of pollution in China for just one example.)
A Malthusian says that population growth (especially of Irish, Hindoos and Negroes) leads to disastrous scarcity of resources, resulting in mass famine, war, and apocalyptic megadeath.
That’s happening in parts of the world already. Not to mention the greatest mass extinction of species since the dinosaurs.
“Human genius” as touted here is dangerously close to hubris – technological “solutions” can have a nasty habit of backfiring.
I will copy any responses (which I confidently predict will all tell me how wrong and ignorant I am). If anyone else wishes to add to the discussion, feel free to –though there is little point in debating him, as he is utterly convinced he is right (as am I, admittedly).
As long as there are people with attitudes like his, there is little hope for Earth’s environment.
