You can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastards in this article, but with the understanding that these are entirely foreseeable consequences of policies (or lack of) in their respective countries. Whether you let people breed like rabbits or restrict them into gender selectivity, the consequences are strangely similar -- an overabundance of men in those countries.
But that's also a symptom of there simply being an ever-increasing overabundance of humans in those countries, and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. You can't swing a poached leopard without finding some do-gooder bullshit about how the planet has infinite carrying capacity if we all consume less.
This might be a decent idea if, you know, the handful of individuals who own most of the stuff did anything with their lives other than hoard and accumulate. But that's not going to happen, and for every person who is conscious of the problem and tries to live modestly, have just one or two kids, recycles, there's another (or five or ten or twenty others) who are solidly conditioned to self-actualize through jonesmanship and shopping for things they don't really want with money they don't really have.
Sure, Earth can probably hold twenty billion ravenous humans, if most of them are willing to tolerate a Slumdog Millionaire existence while a handful of inheritance swells live the good life. Maybe some of the peons can get on with them -- they will, after all, need someone to cook their food, watch their kids, scrub their toilets, service them sexually.
And as we are seeing with the rising middle classes in China and India, they are having fewer children anyway -- but, as one might expect, are consuming more, just like their western counterparts. So even reduced birth rates come at a larger per capita ecological price. But it's still the right direction to head toward. An ongoing, concerted international effort to reduce birth rates and improve health and education in the worst parts of the world is obviously (except for the religious idiots who look at shanty towns and think their celestial friend will magically provide, in which case I encourage them to spend a year in the slums of Sao Paulo or Abidjan) a necessity. We should be dumping money into such efforts, rather than letting anti-condom and anti-abortion fanatics muck it up.
But that's also a symptom of there simply being an ever-increasing overabundance of humans in those countries, and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. You can't swing a poached leopard without finding some do-gooder bullshit about how the planet has infinite carrying capacity if we all consume less.
This might be a decent idea if, you know, the handful of individuals who own most of the stuff did anything with their lives other than hoard and accumulate. But that's not going to happen, and for every person who is conscious of the problem and tries to live modestly, have just one or two kids, recycles, there's another (or five or ten or twenty others) who are solidly conditioned to self-actualize through jonesmanship and shopping for things they don't really want with money they don't really have.
Sure, Earth can probably hold twenty billion ravenous humans, if most of them are willing to tolerate a Slumdog Millionaire existence while a handful of inheritance swells live the good life. Maybe some of the peons can get on with them -- they will, after all, need someone to cook their food, watch their kids, scrub their toilets, service them sexually.
And as we are seeing with the rising middle classes in China and India, they are having fewer children anyway -- but, as one might expect, are consuming more, just like their western counterparts. So even reduced birth rates come at a larger per capita ecological price. But it's still the right direction to head toward. An ongoing, concerted international effort to reduce birth rates and improve health and education in the worst parts of the world is obviously (except for the religious idiots who look at shanty towns and think their celestial friend will magically provide, in which case I encourage them to spend a year in the slums of Sao Paulo or Abidjan) a necessity. We should be dumping money into such efforts, rather than letting anti-condom and anti-abortion fanatics muck it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment