Collected letters

Some letters saved from the last two months.

A future timebomb

“Sir Bob Geldof calls for women to have fewer children”, The National (UAE), 16/3. The musician and activist made these remarks during a visit to the United Arab Emirates, but the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, rejected this suggestion:

“It’s not entirely clear to me that the way to succeed is to stop having children,” said Sheikh Nahyan, also at the forum. “They are the future.”

He said it would be better to focus on food production and consumption, as well as energy, water, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity, urbanisation and disease.

Sheikh Nahyan also quoted the UN as saying “we should not ask whether we are too many, but what can we do to make the world better”.

A foolish and short-sighted response. The Middle East generally has a large and growing population of young people, many of whom are impoverished, and even some of those educated have little in the way of job opportunities. This has been one unpublicized motivation behind the “Arab Spring” – venting anger and frustration at their situation.

Like China, Middle Eastern countries are facing a “perfect storm” of rising populations and dwindling resources, and are scouring the world to alleviate this, mainly by buying up farmland in countries such as Australia and Africa, something which understandably meets with resentment from many citizens there. Something has to give.

But Geldof called on the UAE to accept the harsh reality now and avoid disastrous consequences later.

“They either find a cultural way to make this acceptable or they’re going to have an anthropogenic critical event,” he said.

Global consumption is also expected to increase by 1,600 per cent in the next 90 years.

“I think the tipping point has been reached,” Geldof said. “There can’t be more people on the Earth than we can feed.”

They can’t say that they haven’t been warned.

Speaking of celebrities, “Cherryl Barassi on hoons, suicide pills and ratbags in sport”, H-S, 3/3. The wife of a well-known former Australian footballer had a few incisive things to say, including opinions on population growth. In the print article this was also included in a sidebar:

“Overpopulation and rabid consumerism are destroying our one and only beautiful little planet. Even the one-percenters who run the show can’t be happy in this climate of greed and denial. We are the ka-ching dynasty.

“How about we cancel public funding of the IVF program, and any other breeding incentives, and make it easier to adopt around the world?

“I’m tired of hearing about rights, the right to have 12 children, 12 cars and 12 televisions in one household. I’d like to hear more about responsibility.”

Too many of us, says Apollo astronaut

The Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary is currently underway. An entry at Cosmic Log, “Apollo 11: Where are they now?”, has this interview excerpt with Michael Collins (who remained in lunar orbit):

As seen from the moon, Earth looked fragile 40 years ago and probably would look even more fragile today, Collins said:

…When we flew to the moon, our population was 3 billion; today it has more than doubled and is headed for 8 billion, the experts say. I do not think this growth is sustainable or healthy. The loss of habitat, the trashing of oceans, the accumulation of waste products – this is no way to treat a planet.

Nice to see at least one astronaut has environmental sensibility!

A letter from The Age, 18/7, argues that high-density living decreases the risk of street violence because there are more people around:

The very high price of urban sprawl

Yesterday’s Age had two articles on the front page. One showed a perplexed Premier struggling to comprehend the spiralling street violence. The other told us what we have known forever: urban sprawl is costly and fraught with social problems.

The answer to the first article lies in the second. Higher-density cities are more able to manage day-to-day street violence than cities with satellite suburbs sprawling across the urban edges.

When density rises there is a blending of economic, social and cultural traits. Conversely, these traits are prised apart when new, isolated suburbs are constructed far away from the central activity areas where cultures and belief systems become secondary to personality.

There is often a cultural bias in these new suburbs and, in isolation, there is a far greater likelihood that violence will be used as a means of expression. For some, it replaces social, academic and economic deficiencies. Tolerance is more likely when cultural interaction is part of everyday life. Higher densities aid that interaction.

High-density cities are easier to police; to transport the population and to manage economically. Hong Kong has a density of 6400 persons per square kilometre, Paris 21,000, and Tokyo 33,650 – cities that people love visiting and living in.

Melbourne, by contrast, has a population density of about 1600 people per square kilometre and dropping. The contrast is significant.When Melburnians venture out, they are generally alone, especially at night. If our perplexed Premier wants to solve our urban crime problem, he will first need to resolve the issue of urban sprawl and low-density living.

– Graham Wines, Glen Iris

In my observation, crowding thousands of people together leads to more stress and thus violence, as humans are not evolutionarily adapted to live this way. This was the opinion given in the article “London’s a rat hole” (21/1/2009 entry). High-density cities also drain the landscape around them of resources.

Trees = rain

From New Scientist, 16/5:

Land clearances turned up the heat on Australian climate

Deforestation by European settlers may be to blame for making Australia’s drought longer, hotter and dryer than it would be otherwise.

The “big dry”, Australia’s 11-year drought, has been blamed on greenhouse gases and natural variability. To see if deforestation played a part, Clive McAlpine of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and colleagues used a climate model to simulate Australian conditions from the 1950s to 2003. They then compared the impact of today’s fragmented vegetation, obtained from satellite images, with that of 1788, prior to European settlement.

Over much of south-east Australia, where the drought has hit hardest, less that 10 per cent of the original vegetation remains. The team’s model showed that this land clearance has increased the length of droughts in the area by one to two weeks per year. In years of extreme drought, the loss of vegetation caused the number of days above 35°C to increase by six to 18 days, and the number of dry days to increase by five to 15 days (Geophysical Research Letters, in press).

“Land clearing may be having a similar impact on the drought as greenhouse gases,” says McAlpine. Reforestation could minimise future droughts, he adds.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, but he adds that the modelling needs to be confirmed.

Trees and vegetation attract and retain moisture, so it is not surprising to attribute one cause of the ongoing drought in south-eastern Australia to continued land clearance. Population expansion is accelerating this, with former open grasslands being smothered under the continued assault of housing developments (“More loss than gain in encroaching urban sprawl on threatened open plains”, The Age, 31/5/2008).

“David Attenborough: Our planet is overcrowded”, New Scientist, 15/5. An interview, where David Attenborough gives his views on the problem. He is somewhat restrained in his opinions, perhaps because he does not want to alienate.

The latest venture for this veteran of wildlife documentaries is as controversial as anything he has done in his long career. He has become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a think tank on population growth and environment with a scary website showing the global population as it grows. “For the past 20 years I’ve never had any doubt that the source of the Earth’s ills is overpopulation. I can’t go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet.”

There are nearly three times as many people on the planet as when Attenborough started making television programmes in the 1950s – a fact that has convinced him that if we don’t find a solution to our population problems, nature will. “Other horrible factors will come along and fix it, like mass starvation.”

Trying to pin him down about the specifics of what to do, however, proves tricky. He says it involves persuading people that their lives and the lives of their children would be better if they didn’t exceed a certain number of births per family. And that dramatic drop in birth rate rests on providing universal suffrage, education – particularly for women – and decent standards of living for all. It’s a daunting task, but the first step, he argues, is to acknowledge that population is a problem.

But isn’t the problem solving itself, as people have fewer children and population growth rates slow? Yes, he says, if you discount immigration, the UK’s population is more or less static, but it is not so elsewhere. This troubles Attenborough: sounding off about high population and fertility rates in other countries can sound patronising – or worse.

The world at the start of Attenborough’s career half a century ago was clearly a very different place. His passion about population seems to connect to a feeling that part of the joy of living rests in the natural world – a world without too many people, where seeking out wildlife means hard days canoeing rather than watching tourist boats arrive twice daily.

Two dumb letters (for obvious reasons) from the Herald-Sun this week:

Future needs population plan

The Budget speech and responses to it seem to have missed the most important issue. Australia is not producing enough children. If a society has a shrinking population, it will automatically have a shrinking economy. The most important issue for the Australian Government to grapple with is not the economy, but the shrinking population.

Where are the measures to ensure men at family-forming age (16-30) are able to earn an income that will support women at their prime age of fertility (16-30)? Women will not have babies if they cannot see reliable support into the future.

– Jeremy Hearn, Carnegie, 14/5

Jeremy Hearn (“Future needs population plan”, May 14): Babies are the solution to our problems. More babies, more workers, growing nation and more money.

– Brian Harris, Glenroy, 18/5.

Incidentally, Brian Harris has been writing anti-abortion letters to the H-S for years; he seems obsessed with the issue.

I sent in a letter, but it might be too late to get it published:

Jeremy Hearn (“Future needs population plan”, May 14) evidently hasn’t noticed that Australia’s population is already at an unsustainable level – with water supplies dwindling and infrastructure unable to cope with the increasing numbers – so the last thing we need are more babies.

Sir David Attenborough joins the cause

“Attenborough warns on population”, BBC News, 13/4. This article reports that Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of the UK-based Optimum Population Trust, as he is very concerned at the drastic increase in human population during his lifetime.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was “frightening”. Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

I have enjoyed his TV nature documentaries for many years, so it’s nice to know he is concerned about the issue. For future generations – perhaps as early as mid-century – the documentaries may be poignant records of environments and species which have vanished by then, no thanks to their destruction by humans.