An unnecessary expense

“IVF cuts result in 1500 fewer babies”, The Age. In this week of 7 billion, I look at that as a positive outcome – 1500 humans not born and adding to an already overstressed environment. Government funding for IVF treatments should be stopped altogether in my view; it is an indulgence that society does not need. Some comments from the article that agree:

• We have a global population problem, local population stresses, future issues of food and security, and you want me to pay my hard earned taxes to create more babies for people who, sadly can’t have babies without assistance? I’m sorry, but no. Yes, it’s sad that you can’t achieve your God-given human right to experience pregnancy and birth, but really, IVF is a rich Western luxury. In the scheme of things, with a finite health budget, I’d much prefer money to be spent on other things. It would be much better to push for better adoption laws. People can still have babies, but you don’t need to actually carry them in your tummy to have the loving bond, the happy family, and the maternal instinct that goes with nurturing a child. (Sorry but | Melbourne – October 26, 2011, 7:59AM)
• Marvelous sense of entitlement some people have. I want a child so other people should pay for it to happen. (Quantum of Solace | Melbourne – October 26, 2011, 9:01AM)
• Tax dollars should only be used to fund medical treatment where there is a clear clinical need to improve the person’s health. IVF does not fall into this category. It is sad that some couples cannot conceive naturally, but this should not lead to an expectation that the government should fund peoples wish for a family lifestyle. (MA | Melbourne – October 26, 2011, 9:20AM)
• Fiona: I don’t have “a child of my own” and I’m not in unbearable pain and I don’t feel like I am in an inescapable hell. These are your own extreme responses to what is a relatively common natural phenomenon. The world is full of people who have successfully adjusted to the less than optimal hand nature has dealt them. You can too. Not getting what you want is hardly a reason to plunge yourself into pain and hell. People who are unable to see, hear, walk or talk have a much more legitimate claim to being miserable yet I don’t imagine many talk about their lives as painful or hellish. It is only Western women with a sense of entitlement to have their every desire met who agonise like this over infertility, at the same time as they turn their cold, selfish hearts away from the millions of children languishing in orphanages around the world due to a lack of parents. Maybe nature actually knows what it’s doing! (M T Pockets – October 26, 2011, 9:23AM)

“7 billion reasons to rethink how we use the planet”, 17/10.

This has meant - in contrast to the many dire predictions that over-population would result in disaster - that population growth has also coincided with far greater longevity, and a much more comfortable and materially richer life than pre-industrial man could ever have dreamt of. A key reason that massive population growth has not led to disaster has been the extraordinary growth in agricultural productivity. However, while continuing dynamism in agriculture is likely, there are some indications that these benefits are starting to slow.

It’s industrialized food production that has enabled the human population to increase so alarmingly. But it is a precarious situation – if some virus were to wipe out the world’s main cereal food crops (rice, wheat, maize) it would be disastrous. There are reserves held in many countries, but these would only last a few months.

“Africa Blossoms: A Continent On the Verge of an Agricultural Revolution”, Time magazine, 31/10. This article dismayed me as it promotes the expansion of agriculture in Africa as a positive trend – but agriculture is already putting great pressure on animal populations and the few peoples living as hunter-gatherers. Commercial farming is a disaster for these groups, as is the buy-up of land by foreign countries and corporations (a practice that should be banned – and in Australia also).

Collected letters, 24/10:

Look after our own

ASYLUM-seeker families are expected to be fast-tracked into residential housing. Also, many could be released from detention on bridging visas and sent to regional towns with labour shortages (“Off the boat and into the bush”, 16/10). However, Australia already has a chronic housing shortage, including a severe shortage of emergency and other housing for our vulnerable and most disadvantaged citizens (“$46m help for the homeless”, The Age, 6/10). Charity begins at home; our citizens must take precedence over those not yet in our society. “Asylum” under the UN Refugee Convention was never meant to be interpreted to give a right to permanent settlement and should be decoupled from other migrant streams. Once asylum seekers and their families are embedded in regional towns, the reality is that they are likely to be fast-tracked to permanent residency rather than remain on bridging visas. This policy will only add to the pull factors that are already a problem.

– ARTHUR BASSETT, Blackburn South

Deluded environmentalism

“Be Afraid. Experts Discuss Hallowe’en Population Doomsday” (PPF/Huffington Post, 1/10) contains various opinions on how the world will cope with continuing population growth. Of note is the opinion of an environmental reporter, Fred Pearce:

“The issue for me is about consumption, for which there are worrying statistics. We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense, we’ve got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven’t done is developed our technology.” When asked of the issue that needed most redress, he said: “We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another but climate change is global.”

That is the fallacy a lot of environmentalists believe: that population growth can be coped with if everyone learns to live sustainably and “magical” technological fixes are applied (what these are I am not sure). Well, in reality that is unlikely to happen; a lot of people, including those in developing countries, want high living standards, which is fair enough, and would resent having to downgrade their lifestyle. His opinion does not address the sheer amount of waste that 15 billion people would produce, and it’s unlikely all waste would be recycled. With a lower population, everyone could enjoy high living standards, though the wasteful consumerism that drives current society is behaviour that should be changed. I certainly consider myself an environmentalist, but do not share that optimistic faith in technological fixes.

Collected letters:

4/10:

City can’t cope

JASON Dowling’s article “ Storm of protest as sewage released into waterways” (The Age, 3/10) is a testament to the fact that Melbourne’s population has grown far too rapidly and has outstripped the capacity of our sewerage infrastructure to cope.

Compounding the problem is that open spaces that absorb rainfall into the ground are diminishing as they are built over or paved over to accommodate ever-high population.

The government should show concern but instead it encourages more and more development, which is incrementally to our detriment. Citizens and government need to wake up while we can still do something about ensuring a sustainable future.

– Jill Quirk, Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch), East Malvern

6/10:

Price of growth

THE cost of traffic congestion financially, socially (more time commuting means less family time, more tiredness, illness and injury), and environmentally (pollution, loss of open space, habitat and biodiversity) is actually a cost of population growth. We always hear how we must have population growth to stimulate the economy, but we almost never hear about the costs. Traffic congestion is just one of many detrimental effects of high growth rates that are inevitably unsustainable.

– Jennie Epstein, Little River

The month of 7 billion

Sometime this month the population reaches an estimated 7 billion, the most people the Earth has ever had – and it continues to increase, at great detriment to the environment we all depend upon. I cannot feel optimistic about the future – i.e. that humans will manage to radically change their attitude and society. Things will likely continue on the same self-destructive path until the environment is devastated, and the world will look like the nightmarish hellholes depicted in Avatar and Terra Nova. I would like to be proven wrong, but given intractable human nature, I think I will be disappointed. (A post at the Dark Mountain blog echoes what I am feeling: despair.)

National Geographic online has a special section on the topic.

In unwelcome news, Australia’s population has reached 22.5 million, just over half that due to excessive immigration, the rest to high birth rates.

There was a report on A Current Affair a family with 15 children; I didn’t watch it on TV but have been unable to view the video due to some technical issue (not viewable on any of my browsers), so I don’t know if they are all biological or if some are adopted. If they are all biological the family is irresponsible in the extreme. Unfortunately Government child support encourages such extravagance.

There is a large families section in a parenting forum on The Age. The concept that educating and empowering women will result in smaller families seems to have bypassed the women there. A few of the posts seem defensive – well, they bring it on themselves by their excessive breeding! The women have no excuse but selfishness. They obviously don’t care for the environment – no matter how frugally they might live, every extra child born negates that. [Looking at some of the posts in that forum, is pregnancy and giving birth addictive for some women, bizarre as that concept may seem?]

Collected letters

Another truckload of letters!

Future nightmare

A brief but alarming article hidden in the depths of the 19/8 Herald-Sun:

People tipped to top 10bn

The world population will reach seven billion later this year, with increases in the number of people in Africa offsetting a drop in the birth rate elsewhere, according to a new French study.

Looking much further ahead, the National Institute for Demographic Studies predicts a continuing rise in the overall population figures until the total stabilises somewhere between nine and 10 billion worldwide by the end of the century.

The growth in the global population has been soaring since the 19^th century.

“It has increased seven fold over the last 200 years, topping seven billion in 2011, and is expected to reach nine or 10 billion by the end of the 21^st century,” the report said.

Seven countries now account for half the world’s population. China tops the list with more than 1.33 billion people, with another 1.17 billion in India. The other five countries, in order, are the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Things are bad enough now with 7 billion!

Letters in response to a 16/8 H-S article, where some lobby group (Committee for Melbourne) had the gall to suggest anti-development protest groups were responsible for unaffordable housing:

Power to the protesters

The Committee for Melbourne, with its campaign to squash more and more people into our city (“Priced out of home”, August 15), should be renamed the Committee Against Melbourne.

The UK, approximately the same size as Victoria, has 10 times our population, but more than 85 per cent of them live outside London.

We have four million people (70 per cent of our population) in our capital city, and the de velopment industry wants to squeeze in another four million, when it should be developing provincial cities.

More power to the protesters who fight to preserve our suburban gardens.

– Chris Curtis, Hurstbridge

How to make suburbs worse

So the Committee for Melbourne is bothered about subdivisions being blocked in “nice areas”.

Does it not occur to committee chief executive Andrew MacLeod that if all current residents in a particular suburb cashed in their backyards to developers, the suburb would no longer be “nice?”

The “liveability” of Melbourne is being jeopardised by the same thing that threatens reliability and quality of our food, water and energy – over population.

– Chris Hooley, Viewbank

Ugly inappropriate developments continue unabated in my suburb, and it is despairing to see. An opinion piece at CanDoBetter.net expresses the same sentiments over developments devouring what open land around Melbourne remains like a horde of locusts.

Paving over Victoria

The continuing development and destruction of Victoria’s green spaces leaves me (and many others) in a frustrated rage. The current Government continues this policy, wanting to put up for development the Green Wedges around Melbourne – corridors established over 3 decades ago to provide some environmental breathing space. Unfortunately the deliberate encouraging of population growth (approximately 90 000 people a year) has these areas under threat. The Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, is proving as developer-friendly as his predecessor, Justin Madden, was. Some recent articles from The Age:

• “Review threatens to destroy ‘Melbourne’s lungs’ ”, 30/7
• “Open spaces to shrink as Melbourne grows”, 8/8 – public parks are also under threat.

Some letters:

A broken society

The madness of last week’s London riots appears to be mostly contained, but the many issues that provoked it are unlikely to be resolved soon (if ever). Some of the rioting was simple criminal opportunism, but a lot of it was a venting of frustration from people who have few prospects and no say in their society. Is overpopulation one of the contributing factors? I would argue, yes – in my 18/7/2009 entry I said that 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).

It is hardly surprising that many rioters seem to live in the ugly, inhuman, modernist housing projects that afflict London like the plague.

– David Thomson, St Kilda, 16/8

A counter-argument might be that countries such as Japan are even more overcrowded and their populations do not riot, but their pathologies merely are expressed in different ways. Their culture insists on extreme self-control, necessary for living so closely, but the suicide rate has long been one of the highest in the world, and the hikikomori phenomenon amongst mostly young people – extreme withdrawal for years on end – is well-known. Anger is turned inward rather than outward.

Many of the rioters are unemployed, and there are little in the way of jobs for them. It is simply impossible to provide meaningful jobs for everyone in a growing population, especially as many businesses and industries are “downsizing” to become more efficient, and outsourcing a lot of work to cheap (slave) labor in developing countries. Such frustrations were also a factor in the “Arab spring” uprisings earlier this year (which are still ongoing), and the Israeli housing protests over the rising cost of living (Israel is very overcrowded). Too many people competing for dwindling resources, living space and jobs.

An article in Business Week from earlier this year, “The Youth Unemployment Bomb”, looks at the social consequences of having a large, unemployed and educated youth population, and the inevitable disorder this creates. The article, though, somewhat unhelpfully suggests that the solution is to create entrepreneurs – start one’s own company. But not all people have the aptitude for that (I don’t), and there are only so many products and services that can be created; the market is arguably saturated with “stuff”. The article does not address the basic issue: that there is simply a massive overpopulation of young people (who will one day become old).

So that’s the situation in this year of 7 billion – how much worse will things get if and when the population reaches 8, then 9 billion?

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.

Food security

“Great Tully sugar sell-off proves bittersweet”, The Australian, 6/7. The topic of food security has been getting some media attention in Australia recently, due to people realizing that foreign companies are purchasing vast tracts of farmland here. This means that food grown here by them will be sent overseas. Add this to the foolish government policy of letting developers build over arable land and Australia may well have to import food for its citizens in the future.

His concern is that Australia is selling off its food-producing capacity, piece-by-piece, without thinking through the implications of what foreign ownership means. “We seem to be selling off the farm so we can go offshore ourselves,” he told The Australian. “We’ve got large superannuation funds and other funds available for investment in this country, but the people running them overlook the significant assets in this country because they think they can always get a better deal offshore. I see that as a real shame, that people overseas can see the value in our businesses and enterprises here, but we can’t seem to.”

Perhaps if the food supply situation became dire, the Government could seize the land back in the name of national security? Other countries should take responsibility for containing their own growth, not expect to keep grabbing resources from others.

“A Future of Price Spikes”, Time magazine, 14/7, looks at the concern of rising food prices and says that technology has enabled Thomas Malthus’s predictions (the planet’s population grows exponentially, while food production increases arithmetically) to be staved off – for now. But rising populations and decimation of the environment are pushing technology to its limits, and the world has only about 3 month’s wheat storage in reserve should some sort of blight wipe out the world’s wheat crops (illustrating the danger of reliance upon a limited variety of food products). The article asserts that “what we need is a new green revolution” – better technology such as genetically engineering foods, hardier seeds, fairer food distribution. But the world’s population will continue to rise and environmental destruction will hamper the attempts to increase food supplies.

Little media attention was given to recent reports about human activity in the oceans – mainly overfishing and dumping waste – threatening to wipe out marine species, but the sea is another major provider of food so this is an obvious area of concern.

Famine crisis

A famine has been declared in the Horn of Africa region, due to drought (possibly climate change-related). Around 12 million people are affected. Such a disaster shows what a liability high populations become when the food supply is threatened. Imagine this happening in a developed country – say, if the food supply was cut off for some reason – and the chaos that would ensue. As I have asserted before, the only way to avoid such emergencies is to keep population growth restricted even in times of plenty when the natural instinct is to reproduce profligately (as happens in the natural world – Nature’s “boom and bust” cycle). Then if a drought comes there will be enough food to go around. Therefore the long-term aid to the affected countries should include educating women, access to family planning and medical care so their children survive to adulthood. From one of the LA Times articles linked to below:

Women who have no schooling give birth to an average of 4.5 children; with just a year or more of schooling, the number drops to 3. As education increases, the number of births drops. Girls in Africa who receive some education will have fewer children and have them later in life. Their children will be healthier, and more educated as well.

There’s a series of articles about overpopulation in the 21/7 LA Times:

• Defusing the population bomb
• The world’s biggest problem? Too many people
• Overpopulation debate comes to one conclusion
• Decrease the birthrate, save the world?

Most commentators are in agreement that overpopulation is a real concern – a root cause of many of the other world’s problems – but gets little attention due to the topic being taboo. One though, Alex B. Berezow, disagrees and brings out the tired example of the problem being due to distribution not numbers. But a lot of land is unsuitable for habitation, or would require environmentally-destructive methods to make it suitable. Another has an opinion piece that bigger families are better. Maybe, if you want home-grown workers! Children in such families tend to get lost in the crowd as they recieve proportionally less attention with the more siblings they have (as some article commentators noted). I doubt there are any “good reasons” for women in developed countries to have large families; it’s just selfishness on their part.

I have read Dick Smith’s Population Crisis (reviewed at CanDoBetter) and found it an informative summary of the overpopulation issue. It is written from a layperson’s viewpoint, so is more accessible than an academic text. Possibly the only disagreement I have is his assertion that coercive methods of population control are not necessary as women “when given the choice, make sensible decisions about the size of their family”. From observation, quite a lot don’t – many Australian women seem to be having large families (three or more children).

In a book review or opinion piece (it’s not clear which) in the Australian, the reviewer dismissively remarks:

To the best of my knowledge this is the first time in history that an important scientific question is dominating national and international politics. It has occurred before but not in such a way as to permeate global awareness. For example, the fear of an all-out nuclear war, so strong in the 50s and 60s, possessed a strong scientific ingredient but the debate was generally viewed more as a military and political than a science matter. Likewise, periodic fears about overpopulation, and especially the Club of Rome’s warning in the early 70s that the world’s fast-multiplying population might soon be short of food and minerals, carried a scientific component, part of which was ultimately seen as slipshod. These fears engrossed only a small section of the population in Western nations, then they faded.

Er…no! Those fears concerning overpopulation are more acute and relevant than ever, and certainly haven’t faded.