A sterilizing virus

I recently came across a link to a short story by Gregory Benford, A Desparate Calculus, about a group of scientists who create a contagious virus that has an unusual side effect: it renders its female victims infertile by triggering their ovaries to release all their eggs at once. The virus is generally not fatal (though vulnerable groups such as the elderly might die, as they can in ordinary flu outbreaks every year). The ultimate effect of this is that it will stop most of the next generation being born – though a few women will likely be resistant to its effects.

Given my outlook you can safely guess I didn’t see this scheme as a bad thing :-). I wonder if it would be do-able in reality; obviously it would have ethicists and the general public in hysterics should they find out, so it would need to be implemented surreptitiously. I feel the situation with the world’s rapidly growing population and ongoing biodiversity loss to be urgent enough to justify such a drastic course of action. It would not involve killing vast numbers of people already here, but would prevent (most) future people from being born.

I suppose that measures such as IVF from stored embryos, cloning and artificial wombs could be used to get around the virus, but the last two technologies are not developed and the first can be difficult to achieve.

There would also be issues of body autonomy; the few fertile women might become valued for their wombs, and lose reproductive rights such as access to contraception.

While there are some worthy efforts to give women access to family planning and education in countries that don’t have or allow these, these are just too slow – they may take decades to achieve, if ever. And even in developed countries, women’s access to contraception and abortion are at times under thread from conservative governments – some states in the USA have currently been trying to overturn laws allowing access to these.

Terra Nova

There is a TV series of interest coming out late September called Terra Nova. Refugees from the year 2149, seeking to escape their ruined world, find a way to time travel back to prehistoric Earth and begin anew. The Earth in this future is overcrowded and overdeveloped, with most other species extinct – a scenario similar to the Avatar movie (and Stephen Lang, the actor who was “Colonel Quaritch”, is in Terra Nova also). The government of then is enforcing population control, which causes protests from silly irrational people, and one of the main families in the series who time travels has an illegal 3^rd child.

Unfortunately, this seems to be again presenting population control in a negative light – as dystopian future novels or movies tend to do (see my 16/7/2009 entry), presumably so as to give their characters something to rebel against. If they had practiced population control earlier, though, perhaps the situation would not have become so dire! Despite this annoyance, I’ll probably watch the series.

Myopic fools

“City to ‘grow’ 134,000 homes on farmland”, The Age, 30/7. I was infuriated enough to send a letter to the paper, but so far it hasn’t been published:

The Brumby Government and Opposition have demonstrated that they are nothing but environmental vandals in thrall to greedy developers by allowing expansion of Melbourne’s urban boundaries. Their short-sighted stupidity of allowing more open farmland to vanish under housing just beggars belief, as it threatens the city’s future food security and will increase pollution.

Letters in response:

31/7:

Victorians a rum lot

Well, it’s official. As we have suspected, state planning is not informed by sound policy and community interest but by big developers.

Liberal and Labor MPs have agreed to cover more than 4000 hectares of our highly productive horticultural land with tar and cement (“Green land cut back as Melbourne grows much, much bigger”, Online, 29/7)

So much for “allow[ing] time to assess the social conditions in new communities on the perimeter of the city” (“Gazing beyond the fringe”, The Age, 6/1).

So much for the advice of Australian agriculture, energy and environment specialist Julian Cribb, who believes we must stop building on arable land because future worldwide food shortages will make even climate change pale into insignificance by comparison.

Out with commonsense and democracy and in with political expediency. If it’s true we get the government we deserve, Victorians must be a rum lot.

– Rosalie Counsell, Harkaway

Housing on urban fringes is not cheap

The state government and the opposition are deluded in believing that housing on our urban fringes is cheap. Most of this proposed housing development is kilometres from train lines, and buses, where available, are slow and infrequent.

Casey and Manningham are examples of municipalities where families average more than two cars to get to work, schools, shopping, health and recreation services. The cost of running even two cars in the outer and fringe suburbs is $400,000 over 20 years; three cars is $600,000, according to our national motoring organisations. These costs will rise as oil prices increase and governments impose emission taxes.

Another cost the government and opposition have forgotten is the $100 billion required to service 134,000 new dwellings, mostly from the public purse. No wonder the land bankers and political donors are laughing.

– Brian Buckley, North Carlton

Some earlier collected letters:

11/7:

Big isn’t better

Regarding “Size does matter, Doyle tells PM” (4/7): Cr. Doyle stated “Sydney and New South Wales are losing people”. This is not the case. Sydney continues to grow at 50,000 people a year, according to the ABS. Perhaps the councillor means Sydney is not growing as fast as Melbourne. If the councillor sees the population rates of the cities as a competition, I am happy to have Melbourne win! Who wants higher density, less public space and fewer resources per person?

– Nicholas Car, Hornsby

Crowding not the answer

Melbourne’s lord mayor, Robert Doyle, argues for the inevitability of population growth.

Overseas immigration contributes nearly two-thirds of national population growth and can be changed almost instantly by federal ministerial decision. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about immigration-fuelled population growth.

Population growth benefits the few while the vast majority pay the costs in reduced housing affordability, congestion and pollution.

– Jenny Goldie, Michelago, NSW

14/7:

Population reform

Tim Colebatch’s article (The Age, 13/7) on Australia’s complementary problems of involuntary under-employment and our skills shortage is a valuable contribution to the public debate on population policy.

I endorse Labor MP Kelvin Thomson’s 14-point plan for population reform. Components include increased funding to tertiary and vocational education, while reducing skilled immigration, and funded by the nearly $3 billion that could be saved by ceasing the baby bonus and limiting child support payments to only the first two children of any couple.

– Kit James, Melbourne

28/7:

Why small is better

In the long term, freeways and buildings are not important. Our quality of life depends on good health, education, access to housing, open space and a healthy environment. The money spent on resource-sapping infrastructure for rampant population growth would be better invested in providing better quality services for a smaller number of people.

– Jennie Epstein, Little River

27/9:

Inequitable scheme

My wife is due to have our third child in January. She recently went back to work after taking unpaid maternity leave after the birth of our second child.

Under the government’s paid parental leave scheme, she will not be eligible for any payment. The rules state: “The primary carer must be in paid work and have been engaged in work continuously for at least 10 of the 13 months prior to the expected birth or adoption of the child, and undertaken at least 330 hours of paid work in the 10 month period”.

While I appreciate the need for such rules, they exclude families such as mine where our only error was to have our children too close together. Other than to take maternity leave, my wife has worked full-time and continuously since completing her education.

– Richard Morris, Viewbank

[If you are having financial trouble, why the hell are you having a third child? You are selfish in expecting government handouts to support this.]

Mr. Abbott, some single, childless people – even women – know what a struggle it is to raise a mortgage and pay grocery bills.

– Patricia Watkinson, Hawthorn East

H-S, 25/7:

City has become too clogged

Several years ago I bemoaned the loss of parkland as grand sporting blots on the landscape were developed to the southeast of the city.

Now it’s even worse. Once you could see the river from Flinders St. Once you could see the river and the city from the Bolte Bridge. Once I felt comfortable in the city.

No more.

You ask why there is an increase in crime in the city? I would suggest that the systematic enclosure of a once-proud and open city is partly to fault. Let there be space and let us cherish that space.

Australia is not Singapore or Hong Kong, but our decision-makers are trying to make us exactly that, and I resent and reject that.

– David Becroft, Mulwala

The io9 sci-fi site had an entry about a short story, Amaryllis, that I found a bit irritating as it is about the theme of rebelling against the system – in this case, one that has instigated population growth control. I previously mentioned a series of novels with a similar theme (16/7/2009 entry). I commented:

The main character struck me as selfish – putting her own wants ahead of others and the society she lives in, never mind how it might affect or inconvenience them. So I could only feel irritation, not sympathy – she would deserve whatever punishment they might mete out.

Annoying stories

I was browsing through the Young Adult section in Borders bookstore today, and came across a series by a Gemma Malley that aroused my ire. Beginning with The Declaration and continuing with The Resistance, they are set in a dystopian future, a drug to prolong life has been discovered, and naturally is used by a lot of people. With an increasing population, though, this puts a great burden on society, so the solution is to ban those who take the drug from having children, with harsh penalties for those who disobey this. Fair enough, but from my brief skimming through the novel, the plot takes the irritatingly predictable theme of Resisting Authority, a trope that infects a lot of YA and adult novels.

In the year 2140, it is illegal to be young. Children are all but extinct. The world is a better place. Longevity drugs are a fountain of youth. Sign the Declaration, agree not to have children and you too can live forever. Refuse, and you will live as an outcast. For the children born outside the law, it only gets worse – Surplus status. Not everyone thinks Longevity is a good thing, but you better be clear what side you’re on… Surplus Anna is about to find out what happens when you can’t decide if you should cheat the law or cheat death.

Anna does not have a last name. She has no right to one. She is Surplus – an unwanted burden on fragile Mother Nature; a child born after the Declaration which outlawed all children to control the rising human population. The most she can hope for in life is to Know Her Place and be a Valuable Asset to Legal humans, who stave off mortality with daily doses of Longevity drugs. At age fourteen, she has learned to accept her bleak fate – but then Surplus Peter arrives at Grange Hall, and turns her world upside down. Peter refuses to accept that he is Surplus. He insists that Anna has a family – and he plans to escape from Grange Hall to reunite her with them.

The first novel has a website [edit: now an Archive.org link]; from the “Inspiration” page:

I decided to put the questions to some friends. Would they, if given the chance to extend their lifespan considerably, give up the right to have children? The result was fascinating. Initially, all of them dismissed the idea out of hand; then, gradually, they started to consider it, to consider the temptation of a long, long life. After this consideration, about fifty percent still rejected the idea outright – some because the idea of living forever was abhorrent (“what would you do with yourself?”), some because the idea of not having children was too terrible. The others, to varying degrees, saw the temptation. Men were slightly more likely than women to agree; single men and women were more likely to agree than their married counterparts. Some older couples with grown up children thought long and hard and said that whilst they adored their children and wouldn’t be without them, they might perhaps have done things differently if given the chance again. Recently married couples were those most likely to be aghast at the idea; those who considered their chances of conceiving to be low (those who were resolutely single and those who had been (unsuccessfully) through the torturous route of infertility treatment) wanted details – how healthy would their extended life be; how would they feel physically and mentally a hundred years from now – but were generally open to the idea.

I realised I had the makings of a potentially terrifying new world, and one that many would recognise as only too credible. But I needed a protagonist, someone to lead us into this world, to expose its inner workings, its temptations, its horrific dark side. Everything comes with a cost; Longevity’s “cost” would be the end of new human life, the end of new thought, new energy; the end of youth with its naïve ambition, its determination, its belief in itself. And yet, I realised, as I mulled my new, inner world over in my head, there would, no doubt, be people who broke the rules, who ignored the Declaration. There would be mistakes; there would be rebels. In short, there would be children. Children that no one (except their parents) wanted; children who were considered a threat, a burden, a problem. Children who were Surplus.

There’s always an irrational few who spoil things for everyone else! There seems to be a vague preaching against population control, but I can’t verify this without reading the novels. I am certainly not buying them, but I may borrow them at my local library (if I can force myself to read them).

I can’t see much wrong with this; I don’t find such a world “terrifying”! I would certainly choose longevity over having children (I have done little in my life so far, and would like to have more time than the normal lifespan!). If society is to be sustainable into the future, some form of population growth control is a necessity, whether citizens like it or not.

“Mumbai faces acute water shortage”, BBC News 7/7. A city of 20 million with a water shortage – a nightmarish scenario, and a justification for population control. What happens if all water dries up?

“Sink immigrants’ boats – Griffin”, BBC News, 10/7. A member of the far-Right BNP made a statement that illegal immigrants’ boats should be sunk on sight, and to “Throw [the occupants] a life raft and they can go back to Libya”. I suspect this comes out of increasing exasperation at the never-ending flow of illegals, and many might agree with him (though not admit it). The U.K. is seriously overcrowded, and stress due to this will result in many adopting harsher attitudes towards immigrants, despite this not being politically-correct. Australia has the same problem of illegals coming in from the north (though not in the numbers that Europe gets). The brutal truth is that a country can’t take in everyone who wants to go there – it has limited space and resources, and should put its own citizens’ interests first. There should also be a U.N. taskforce to intervene in dysfunctional countries and take over their governments forcibly if need be, so the citizens of those countries won’t feel such a need to leave.

“Australia’s overseas education ‘a scam’ ”, AAP, 14/7. Not surprisingly, the growing international student market is also become an immigration racket. There are 500 000 students in Australia – using up resources. In my view the program should be ended – surely the education system in their home countries is not that bad?