EcoFeminists Deep Green Ecology Indigenous Rights Application Filed in Norway v. Breivik Supreme Court

EcoFeminists Deep Green Ecology Indigenous Rights Application Filed in Norway v. Breivik Supreme Court

EcoFeminist is a Jus Sanguinis Indigenous European | EcoFeminists Jus Sanguinis Settler Progenitor/s traveled to South Africa as ‘settler’ farmers, soldiers, medical personnel, religious and political administrators, in response to, and as a result of, their Nations Geopolitical ‘Colonial Empire’ Decision-making policies, to find only the Bushman, as indigenous natives | ‘Colonial Empire’ actions were motivated by their decision thousands of years ago to give up their sustainable hunter gatherer / agrarian policies founded upon the Law of Limited Competition, and instead to adopt unsustainable Totalitarian Agriculture policies.

Andrea Muhrrteyn | 10 May 2012 | Norway v. Breivik

A Deep Green Ecology Indigenous Rights application has been filed in the Norway Supreme Court by an African EcoFeminist member of the Radical Honesty culture. The application includes the UN Special Rapporter on Indigenous Rights, James Anyana (http://unsr.jamesanaya.org/) as one of the respondents.

The Norway Supreme Court are asked to approve the African EcoFeminist Applicant to be admitted to the Norway v. Breivik matter as a Jus Sanguinis Radical Honoursty African EcoFeminist White Refugee Applicant.

If approved, the EcoFeminist Amicus Curiae written submissions would (a) address alternative legal arguments to those of both the Prosecution and Defense, i.e. from a Problem Solving Radical Transparency EcoFeminists perspective as opposed to the Prosecution & Defense’s Parasite Leeching Masculine (Reason and Logic) Insecurity Patriarchal perspectives; (b) ‘argue points deemed too far reaching for emphasis by parties intent on winning their particular Parasite Leeching Masculine Insecurity case’ ; (c) ‘apprise the court of Problem Solving Radical Transparency EcoFeminists legal, social, economic, ecological and cultural enquiry implications for its consideration’ to allow the court to base its decision on a larger, more comprehensive, and more accurate reality based natural law deep green ecology legal framework.

The EcoFeminist applicant states that she is a Jus Sanguinis (Right of Blood) descendant of Norwegian artillery officer and citizen: Johan Pieter FÜRSTENBERG, who was born about 1760 in Bergen, Norway and then emigrated to South Africa.

The EcoFeminist applicant states that she is an Indigenous European, because she is Jus Sanguinis (Right of Blood) directly descended from Norwegian, French, Dutch, British and German Settler Progenitor/s who traveled to South Africa as ‘settler’ farmers, soldiers, medical personnel, religious and political administrators, in response to, and as a result of, their Nations Geopolitical ‘Colonial Empire’ Decision-making policies, to find only the Bushman, as indigenous natives.

The EcoFeminist Application states that her predecessors ‘Colonial Empire’ actions were motivated by their decision thousands of years ago to give up their sustainable hunter gatherer / agrarian policies founded upon the Law of Limited Competition, and instead to adopt unsustainable Totalitarian Agriculture policies.

Pentti Linkola: Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

Pentti Linkola: Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

Diord Fionn | Ireland First

“If there were a button I could press [to radically reduce world population], I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.” - Pentti Linkola, Wall Street Journal Europe, May 1994

“A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but through the use of violence.”

“Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”

“Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents.”

“Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to the extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over.”

“By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for prosperity. We can now thank prosperity for bringing us – among other things – two million cars, millions of glaring, grey-black electronic entertainment boxes, and many unnecessary buildings to cover the green earth. Wealth and surplus money have led to financial gambling and rampant social injustice, whereby ‘the common people’ end up contributing to the construction of golf courses, classy hotels, and holiday resorts, while fattening Swiss bank accounts. Besides, the people of wealthy countries are the most frustrated, unemployed, unhappy, suicidal, sedentary, worthless and aimless people in history. What a miserable exchange.” – Pentti Linkola

Linkola is one of the few voices who advocates:

1. No immigration
2. Downsize population
3. Kill defectives
4. Stop rampant technology

In the eyes of the most credible sources, planet Earth can sustain a half-billion humans without any sizable destruction of our habitat, or any loss in species or stability of our ecosystem. Any numbers higher than that, no matter how much they recycle, will cause environmental chaos. The modern leftist-tinged environmental movement is terrified of telling anyone that they cannot breed and keep buying whatever strikes their fancy, but someone must do this in the future. The sooner we do it, the fewer people in the future will be left without a means of sustenance and thus require termination.

As Linkola himself has said, "We still have a chance to be cruel. But if we are not cruel today, all is lost."

The Real Inconvenient Truth: End of Economic Growth

The Population Elephant: The Problems with “The Problem”

Ten Best Population Quotes, from The Population Elephant

Climate change, energy depletion, food shortages,
resource wars, species extinction - these are not
the problem, they are only the symptoms. The
singular root problem that causes all these
horrifying threats to mankind is overpopulation.


So - logically - the solution that will eliminate
these threats is simply to reduce the population of
humans on this planet to a sustainable number.


Yet, no one proposes this obvious solution. No
one is even willing to discuss it.


It is the Elephant in every room.


Except here.

Were We Lied to About Contemporary African Pirates ? | Africans Love for Accountable Goverment | Niggers in Self Denial

At this juncture, should we not suspect that we have been lied to about almost everything for at least 2,000 years?


Idaho Observer

Receiving a high school diploma or a college degree is a sign that the state recognizes we are adequately instructed to live as adults in our culture. While state-sanctioned adequacy may be satisfactory to many, some of us begin questioning. Once we discover that we have been lied to about one thing, the Pandora’s box of lies opens to reveal more lies.

At some point we must stop, take a deep breath and commence with an inventory of what we were taught by the state compared to what we have learned independently. If we are honest and objective, it becomes apparent that there is no truly apolitical font of perfect truth outside of ourselves.

Though our tendency is to selectively believe what we want to believe and reject anything that conflicts with those beliefs, logic tells us that, if we were lied to about one of our core beliefs, we could have been lied to about others as well.

What if we have been lied to about everything for so many generations that the more we learn about our world the less we really know about it? If that is the case, then what we think we know about science, spirituality, property, family, community, ourselves and each other needs to be rethought.

The conditions that gave birth to the age in which we are living, an age that is coming to an end, began when one family figured out how to finance the powerlust of two or more opposing kings and pit them, one against another, in war. The phenomenal wealth and power that has been afforded this family has allowed it to influence everything we have "known" to be true since the mid-1700s.

Under these circumstances, our duty to God and family is to rethink our entire system of beliefs. Revelation and the Rothschild Connection ought to get you started. But, just for a warmup, challenge yourself with the thoughts below:

************************

You are not now, nor have you ever, been told the truth about "pirates"

By Johann Hari

The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy"from 1650 to 1730, the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government.

Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book "Villains of All Nations," historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then—plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry—you ended up in a floating wooden hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship and, if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains and made their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly—and subversively—that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves. The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live."

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump nuclear waste in their seas.

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, told me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury—you name it."

Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention." At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: Seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods and they are starving.

Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka, 100 km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a "tax" on them. They call themselves the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia" and it’s not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters...We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."

William Scott would understand those words. No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable and yes, some are clearly just gangsters—especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country’s territorial waters."

During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different? Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia’s criminals. The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail today—but who is the robber?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place —wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching to 3,300 km. Imagine how easy it would be—without any coastguard or army—to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on Maryland and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places—but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.

Source: Idaho Observer

______________________________________________________________

Less than 50 percent of Africans want democracy

PR Inside | I Luv SA

JOHANNESBURG (AP) - More Africans than ever want democracy, though violent, rigged elections and failure to translate freedom into better lives have left a bad impression among some, according to a survey published Monday.

Only 45 percent of African citizens support democracy, up from 40 percent in 2005.

Afrobarometer, which has done such surveys every three years since 1999, questioned more than 25,000 people in 19 countries for the latest survey. The poll was run by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and Benin's Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy, with support from Michigan State University at Lansing in the United States. It had a margin of error of plus or minus three percent.

Afrobarometer found the demand for democracy - and democracy itself - advancing in various countries, including Botswana, Cape Verde and Ghana, and democracy declining and at risk in Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria and Senegal.

In Botswana, which has had uninterrupted democracy since independence from Britain in 1966, 91 percent of respondents considered their country a full democracy or one having only minor problems - the survey's most favourable rating.

Perhaps the most telling figure came from Madagascar, the Indian Ocean island where an army-backed politician in March ousted a democratically elected president who failed to tackle endemic poverty.

Only 14 percent of the island's people want democracy, according to the survey.

'For us, liberty is the same as anarchy,' Doline Rasoamananoro, a 57-year-old nurse told AP, disgusted by violent protests that killed scores of people and helped bring down the president. 'Madagascar needs to be managed by a person with an iron fist,' she said. 'It needs a lot of discipline, even a bit of dictatorship.'

Most Africans interviewed rejected that: 79 percent rejected strongman rule, 75 percent rejected military rule and 73 percent rejected a one-party system.

However, only 57 percent rejected all three alternatives to democracy, and just 45 percent are listed by Afrobarometer as "fully demanding democracy" by both rejecting all three alternatives and explicitly supporting democracy.

In Madagascar, 42-year-old business consultant Tovo Rakoto-Andrianome said people need to be educated about democracy and that, given his country's experience, «I am not surprised that many end up being disgusted by democracy.

Only 43 percent of Kenyans believe they live in a democratic state since marred elections led to tribally charged violence in which hundreds of people were slaughtered last year.

Zimbabwe had the largest gap, with demand at 53 percent and supply at 10 percent, according to a survey from 2005. Violence after elections last year prevented a survey in that country in 2008.

Only 48 percent in South Africa gave their country high marks for democracy, reflecting unhappiness that economic gains in one of the continent's youngest democracies have not translated into better lives for the poor majority.

Robert Mattes, an American political scientist at South Africa's University of Cape Town who helped analyze the survey results, said ambivalence about democracy in countries like South Africa also reflected the people's loyalty to liberation movements turned political parties. Groups like the African National Congress in South Africa dominate politics across the continent.

Source: PR Inside | I Luv SA

______________________________________________________________

How niggers stay in self denial

Uncle Tom Rants

Ask the ordinary "street nigger" which group commits crimes far out of proportion to their race, and they will tell you white folks.

This is because the "street nigger" really believes this, but stats always proves them wrong. You can hardly turn on the tv without seeing some dumb assed Jungle Bunny in handcuffs being arrested. It does not take an Einstein to see that blacks only comprise only 13% of the total population in this country, yet, the jails and prisons are filled to the max with nigger criminals over 50%, all claiming they are innocent. I'll just be they are.

One might ask, "Uncle Tom, why do you dwell on Black people so much"? I dwell on them because the rest of the Black community is afraid to say anything, except when a white cop kills one of these savages. The next question I'm asked is,"why do you call them savages?". It's because in my eyes, there are only two groups, the civilized, and the savages! These two groups are found in all racial groups all over the world.

Every day, there's an account of one of these savages taking the life of someone, and the Black community seems not to care. I'm always reminded by some goddamned liberal "Kneegrow" that whites commit crimes too, and that is true, but I ask, which community is affected more? With these Nigger "Brood Sows" pumping out baby after baby, getting the federal government to take care of these little bastards, what do you expect?

I can tell you what to expect, MORE NIGGER CRIMINALS! With a boy growing in a fatherless househole not having a FATHER to guide him in the direction he should go, what else would you expect? The savage Nigger Buck, is no different from a common dog that breeds with every dog that is in heat, then walks away with no obligation to his offspring.

Niggers have been systematically brainwashed by the Jew owned media, that's it's ok to father offspring without feeling obligated, after all Jewishwood is on every day bragging about some movie star and his girlfriend,(brood sow) just having their first baby! This is perfectly according to Jewishwood! I wonder how many bastard babies the Jews are having out of wedlock.

It's quite easy to see, the dumb nigger has not a clue about money. A nigger will kill a hard working cab driver, in order to steal less that $200.00! The primitive nigger mind, cannot fathom stealing $50,000 or more, because his primitive mind tells him that $200.00 is a lot of money.

My conclusion, niggers will continue to get locked up in our jais and prisons, simply because of their low IQ will not allow them to use logic and planning, thus they will continue to fill the jails and prisons far out of proportion of the rest of the races in this country, and their black asses should be there.

And you can say,"Uncle Tom told me so.

Source: Uncle Tom Rants

National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line -- then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
~ Killing Times: The Killing Times are Here: Population Policy || Depopulation or Perish || Tragedy of the Commons ~

______________________________________________________________

National Security Study Memorandum 200:

Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, April 1974

Center for Population & Security

20 KEY POINTS FROM THE MAIN BODY OF THE REPORT

All readers are urged to read the detailed main body of the report which is presented in full in Appendix Two. This will give the reader a better appreciation of the gravity of this new threat to U.S. and global security and the actions the many departments of our government felt were necessary in order to address this grave new threat -- a threat greater than nuclear war. These 20 important points will be discussed in the remaining chapters of this book.

On the magnitude and urgency of the problem:

1. "... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures." [Page 194]
   
   
2. "... it is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals." [Page 15]
   
   
3. "... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources -- in this rough order of importance -- all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities." [Page 66]
   
   
4. "Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence." [Page 69]
   
   
5. "In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes." [Page 84]
   
   
6. The report gives three examples of population wars: the El Salvador-Honduras "Soccer War" [Page 71]; the Nigerian Civil War [Page 71]; and, the Pakistan-India-Bangladesh War, 1970-71. [Page 72]
   
   
7. "... population growth over the years will seriously negate reasonable prospects for the sound social and economic development of the peoples involved." [Page 98]
   
   
8. "Past experience gives little assistance to predicting the course of these developments because the speed of today's population growth, migrations, and urbanization far exceeds anything the world has ever seen before. Moreover, the consequences of such population factors can no longer be evaded by moving to new hunting or grazing lands, by conquering new territory, by discovering or colonizing new continents, or by emigration in large numbers.
   
   The world has ample warning that we all must make more rapid efforts at social and economic development to avoid or mitigate these gloomy prospects. We should be warned also that we all must move as rapidly as possible toward stabilizing national and world population growth." [Page 85]
   
   
   Leadership is vital
   
   
9. "Successful family planning requires strong local dedication and commitment that cannot over the long run be enforced from the outside." [Page 106]
   
   
10. "... it is vital that leaders of major LDCs themselves take the lead in advancing family planning and population stabilization, not only within the UN and other international organizations but also through bilateral contacts with leaders of other LDCs." [Page 112]
    
    
11. "These programs will have only modest success until there is much stronger and wider acceptance of their real importance by leadership groups. Such acceptance and support will be essential to assure that the population information, education and service programs have vital moral backing, administrative capacity, technical skills and government financing." [Page 195]
    
    
    What must be done:
    
    
12. "Control of population growth and migration must be a part of any program for improvement of lasting value." [Page 81]
    
    
13. "... the Conference adopted by acclamation (only the Holy See stating a general reservation) a complete World Population Plan of Action" [Page 87]
    
    
14. "Our objective should be to assure that developing countries make family planning information, education and means available to all their peoples by 1980." [Page 130]
    
    
15. "Only nominal attention is [currently] given to population education or sex education in schools..." [Page 158]
    
    "Recommendation: That US agencies stress the importance of education of the next generation of parents, starting in elementary schools, toward a two-child family ideal. That AID stimulate specific efforts to develop means of educating children of elementary school age to the ideal of the two-child family..." [Page 159]
    
    
16. "...there is general agreement that up to the point when cost per acceptor rises rapidly, family planning expenditures are generally considered the best investment a country can make in its own future," [Page 53]
    
    
    Contradiction of the Holy See's answer to the population problem:
    
    
17. "Clearly development per se is a powerful determinant of fertility. However, since it is unlikely that most LDCs will develop sufficiently during the next 25-30 years, it is crucial to identify those sectors that most directly and powerfully affect fertility." [Page 99]
    
    
18. "There is also even less cause for optimism on the rapidity of socio-economic progress that would generate rapid fertility reduction in the poor LDCs, than on the feasibility of extending family planning services to those in their populations who may wish to take advantage of them." [Page 99]
    
    
19. "But we can be certain of the desirable direction of change and can state as a plausible objective the target of achieving replacement fertility rates by the year 2000." [Page 99]
    
    
    Abortion is vital to the solution:
    
    
20. "While the agencies participating in this study have no specific recommendations to propose on abortion, the following issues are believed important and should be considered in the context of a global population strategy...Certain facts about abortion need to be appreciated:
    

    " -- No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion". [Page 182]
    

    " -- Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today." [Page 183]
    

    " -- It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques..." [Page 185]

*************

National Security Study Memorandum 200:

Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, April 1974

Center for Population & Security

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover letter | Cover page | Executive Summary


PART ONE. ANALYTICAL SECTION

• I. World Demographic Trends
  
• II. Population and World Food Supplies
  
• III. Minerals and Fuel
  
• IV. Economic Development and Population Growth
  
• V. Implications of Population Pressures for National Security
  
• VI. World Population Conference

PART TWO POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

• I. Introduction - A U.S. Global Population Strategy
  • A. Basic Global Strategy
    
  • B. Key Country priorities in U.S. and Multilateral Population Assistance
    
  • C. Instruments and Modalities for Population Assistance
    
  • D. Provision and Development of Family Planning Services, Information and Technology
    
  • E. Creating Conditions Conducive to Fertility Decline
    
  • F. Development of World-Wide Political and Popular Commitment to Population Stabilization and Its Associated Improvement of Individual Quality of Life.
    
  • An Alternative View
    
  • Conclusion
  
  
• II. Action to Create Conditions for Fertility Decline: Population and a Development Assistance Strategy
  • General Strategy and Resource Allocations for AID Assistance
    
  • Functional Assistance Programs to Create Conditions for Fertility Decline
    • Introduction
      
    • Providing Minimal Levels of Education, Especially for Women
      
    • Reducing Infant and Child Mortality
      
    • Expanding Wage Employment Opportunities, Especially for Women
      
    • Developing Alternatives to the Social Security Role Provided By Children to Aging Parents
      
    • Pursuing Development Strategies that Skew Income Growth Toward the Poor, Especially Rural Development Focussing on Rural Poverty
      
    • Concentration on Education and Indoctrination of The Rising Generation of Children Regarding the Desirability of Smaller Family Size
      
    • General Recommendation for UN Agencies
  • Food for Peace Program and Population
  
  
• III. International Organizations and other Multilateral Population Programs
  • UN Organization and Specialized Agencies
    
  • Encouraging Private Organizations
  
  
• IV. Provision and Development of Family Planning Services, Information and Technology
  
  • Research to Improve Fertility Control Technology
    
  • Development of Low-cost Delivery Systems
    
    • Discussion
      • Abortion
  • Utilization of Mass Media and Satellite Communications Systems for Family Planning
  
  
• V. Action to Develop World-Wide Political and Popular ???
  
  • Commitment to Population Stability
    • Discussion:
      
    • Recommendations:
      • 1. Executive Branch
        
      • 2. World Population Conference
        
      • 3. Department of State
        
      • 4. A.I.D. should expand its programs to increase the understanding of LDC leaders regarding the consequences of rapid population growth and their commitment to undertaking remedial actions.
        
      • 5. USIA.

Sources: Center for Population & Security
Pres. Nixon's Cover Letter (PDF:2P) :: NSSM 200 (PDF:123P)

Paul Ehrlich (Population Time Bomb): 7 Steps Toward a Sustainable Society | The Dominant Animal & The State of the World

The ancient saying, "The rich get richer, and the poor get children," has more wisdom in it than does the demographic transition theory.

The moral is surely obvious: never globalize a problem if it can possibly be solved locally. It may be chic but it is not wise to tack the adjective global onto the names of problems that are merely widespread -- for example, "global hunger," "global poverty," and the global population problem."

We will make no progress with population problems, which are a root cause of both hunger and poverty, until we deglobalize them. Populations, like potholes, are produced locally, and, unlike atmospheric pollution, remain local unless some people are so unwise as to globalize them by permitting population excesses to migrate into the better-endowed countries. Marx's formula, "to each according to his needs" is a recipe for national suicide.

We are not faced with a single global population problem but, rather, with about 180 separate national population problems. All population controls must be applied locally; local governments are the agents best prepared to choose local means. Means must fit local traditions. For one nation to attempt to impose its ethical principles on another is to violate national sovereignty and endanger international peace. The only legitimate demand that nations can make on one another is this: "Don't try to solve your population problem by exporting your excess people to us." All nations should take this position, and most do. Unfortunately, many Americans seem to believe that our nation can solve everyone else's population problems.
~ The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits | There is No Global Population Problem!? ~

Seven Steps Toward a Sustainable Society

Paul Ehlrich | Island Press: Eco-Compass

A central problem of the human predicament discussed in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment is that we’re small-group animals trying to live in ever more gigantic groups - and not doing very well at it. If catastrophe can be avoided, we’re stuck with gigantic groups for a century or more, and very large groups “forever.” It therefore behooves humanity to start asking itself how to maintain the small group coherence and interests that make people comfortable while greatly damping down intergroup competition and substantially enhancing the intergroup cooperation desperately needed to solve the human predicament.

Can human cultural evolution be directed away from its current trajectory toward disaster and diverted toward creating a prosperous and equitable long-term future for society? The answer is, “yes, it could” if the small-group animal “family” attitudes can be properly channeled. The basic requirements would be quite simple - a set of overlapping and intertwined ethical-environmental steps toward sustainability such as suggested below and over the next few weeks here at the “Eco-Compass” blog. Whether such steps will be taken is, of course, an entirely different question. But here’s the first of the steps we should take:


One: Put births on a par with deaths.

Human beings have always fought against early death from accident, hunger and sickness, and in the past century or so have employed improved sanitation and the use of pesticides and antibiotics to good effect in raising life-expectancy. But given the horrendous potential consequences of the explosion of human numbers following reduction of the death rate, we must pay equivalent attention to reducing the birthrate as well. As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living - including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multigenerational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations retaining a happy, sustainable life style.

To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies. The goal must be to halt population increase as soon as humanely possible, and then start reducing human numbers until births and deaths balance at population size that can be maintained without irreparable damage to our life-support systems.


Two: Put conserving on a par with consuming.

At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie.

One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets. A high priority should be rethinking how we use the resources available to us - as individuals and societies - manage manufactured and natural capital (our ecological assets) carefully, and distribute their benefits more equitably. Success there, if it were combined with a decline in numbers, should eventually permit most people to live satisfactory lives. Of course, success would require abandoning the insane idea that growth in consumption is automatically good and can continue forever, No physical quantity can do that, including the total bulk of the human population (which at recent exponential growth rates would equal the total mass of the universe in less than 10,000 years).


Three: Transform the consumption of education.

Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” - something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others-and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament - the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations. Education reform is also crucial. In the future, both the need for sustainability and the multi-dimensional environmental, social, political, and economic requirements to achieve it must be central elements of education around the world. Unless a much larger fraction of the human population becomes aware of the predicament we all face and its possible solutions, sustainability is unlikely to be reached.

There exists today what I like to call a “culture gap.” When I lived with the Inuit (Eskimos) more than a half century ago every Inuit individual possessed the vast majority of the non-genetic information (culture) available to the Inuit community. Women knew how seal hunting was done; men knew the use of a woman’s knife. Perhaps a shaman had a few secret chants, but in general everyone was “fully educated.” In our global society that has changed completely. Even the most educated people do not possess even one millionth of the non-genetic information housed in human brains, libraries, computer disks, arts, and artifacts. Given the parts, I could not begin to assemble the computer on which I am writing this. How many readers of this blog could explain quantum physics or ecosystem science, or recite the poems of Shakespeare? There is a huge gap between what society knows collectively, and what people know individually. We obviously cannot close the culture gap across the board, but we could narrow it selectively. In short, we must strive to narrow the culture gap in the most crucial areas related to reaching sustainability..


Four: Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.

A novel synthetic chemical added to the plastic in a sports bottle may increase its durability or prolong its life. But if it leaches into the bottle’s contents or into the environment and functions in tiny doses as a cancer-causing agent, is the risk worth the benefit? In general, benefit-cost analyses are not done frequently or carefully enough before the introduction of new technologies. Freons (chlorofluorocarbons) looked extremely beneficial until it was discovered they could destroy the ozone layer and with it all life on land. Risk cannot be avoided completely. But a cultural change toward more careful analyses and deployment only of technologies that carry very clear benefits will help humanity keep the odds in its favor. It is an example of where the small group alone just can’t produce the necessary cultural evolution - information from the large-group institutions of governments and international science necessarily must be integrated into the process.


Five: Rapidly expand our empathy.

We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups. Although we no longer can associate exclusively with a clan “family” of, say, 125 relatives, most of us have a group of “pseudokin”—friends and close associates of about the same number. In both cases, we develop a sort of “we” versus “them” culture, with the “themness” increasing with physical and cultural distance.

People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time—not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future. Can affluent people in the West learn to care enough about a starving child in Darfur to take real action to save her? If society takes step five, the answer will be “yes,” and we’ll be on the kind of road that could lead to a level of global cooperation that might allow a billion, perhaps three billion small-group animals to live together sustainably in relative peace.


Six: Decide what kind of world we all want.

What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?

While the U.S. GDP has increased almost five times since 1958, satisfaction, as shown by polls, has not increased at all. The situation in other countries is similar. Must all nations then strive to emulate the American superconsuming life style? Or should all of humanity strive together to seek a more equitable global society, which could replace today’s bipolar super-rich—desperately poor population in which the split widens as growth continues. We could initiate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) to begin a discussion of what economic, social, and political systems will best fulfill a small-group animal’s desires as it struggles to live in gigantic groups. How, for example, do we take advantage of the enormous benefits that market mechanisms provide to societies while constraining their propensity to do gigantic damage when unregulated? Starting and maintaining a global cultural discussion is a step that would help determine the kinds of lifestyles people really want., Armed with that knowledge, we could try to establish as accurately as possible the conditions of population size, consumption patterns, economic arrangements, and technologies required to make such lifestyles sustainable.


Seven: Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability.

This is closely related to step six. In the 200,000 year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.

All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. “Totally impractical,” people will say, “not gonna happen.” Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don’t change our ways, they’ll be changed for us.

Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He is the author of hundreds of scientific papers, and numerous books including The Population Bomb and Betrayal of Science and Reason (Island Press, 1997). His latest book is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, which he co-authored with his wife Anne.

Source: Island Press: Eco-Compass

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The Dominant Animal and The State of the World

According to Paul Ehlrich | ForaTV (01:28:38)

Paul Ehrlich gives a seminar at the Long Now Foundation about the evolution of human culture and its effect on the environment. A perspective of the State of the World, from ecologists, biologists, etc.

Chapters: [chapter link goes directly to Fora.tv page & chapter]
Human Dominance of Earth | Early Human Evolution | Cultural Evolution | Big Cultural Steps | Human Effects on Environment | Population | Global Climate Change | Toxification of Earth | Epidemic Problems | Resource Wars | Changing Human Behaviour | Drilling for Oil | Questions

Source: Fora.TV

Kremlin: Energy Conflicts Could bring Military Clashes, Russian Security Strategy | Asia Impending Conflicts Over Water: Major Rivers 'Drying Up'

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production.

To think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.
~ Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, Energy Bulletin | Population Growth: Most Powerful Force on Earth, Money&Markets ~

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Energy conflicts could bring military clashes, Russian security strategy warns

Kremlin names Arctic as potential flashpoint
Moscow fears widening weapons gap with US

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused Europe of coveting Rusia's mineral resources.

Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 May 2009 16.40 BST

The growing struggle for the world's energy reserves could spill over into military clashes, according to a new Kremlin security strategy published today. The paper also identified US missile defence programmes as one of the main challenges facing the country, and named the Arctic as a new area for potential conflict, together with the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caspian Sea.

"In a competition for resources, it can't be ruled out that military force could be used for resolving emerging problems," the document said, adding: "The existing balance of forces near the borders of the Russian Federation and its allies can be violated."

Today's document reflects the sharp deterioration in relations between Russia and the west over the last decade.

The Kremlin's last national security strategy was published in January 2000 shortly after Vladimir Putin took over as president, from an ailing Boris Yeltsin. Written against the backdrop of the Kremlin's brutal second war in Chechnya, that document identified terrorism as the main threat to the country's security, and sought to portray Moscow's struggle against Chechen separatists as part of the "war on terror".

With Chechnya now largely pacified, Russia's strategic concerns have changed. Moscow's biggest fears appear to be the widening gap between the US and Russia's military capabilities and the sharpening global scramble for rapidly disappearing oil and gas.

The document, which will form Russia's national security strategy until 2020, also warns of the threat posed to Russia by Nato. The paper says Moscow wants a "fully fledged strategic partnership" with Washington but is opposed to the US's plans to develop a missile defence system in central Europe.

Ruben Sergeyev, a Moscow-based defence analyst, said: "This new doctrine makes clear that the main threat to Russia is the activities of western countries."

He went on: "Russia is seriously concerned about the growing gap between the US and Russia in the military field, and about America's attempts to dwarf Russia's nuclear potential by creating new arms systems, placed close to Russia's borders and in space. It is also worried about the US's high-precision, long-range, non-nuclear weapons."

Barack Obama has vowed to reset relations with Moscow, which under his predecessor sunk to a record post-cold war low. Obama has promised to agree a new strategic arms reduction treaty with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, in July, when he arrives in Moscow on his first presidential visit.

But there remain substantial differences between the two sides. The Kremlin remains vehemently opposed to Nato membership for Ukraine and pro-western Georgia, the scene of last summer's Russian invasion. For its part, the US rejects Medvedev's claim that Russia has "privileged interests" in neighbouring post-Soviet states.

Today the paper's author, Nicholas Patrushev – a close ally of Putin and the former head of Russia's FSB spy agency – said it was "unacceptable" for the US to position "military infrastructure" on Russia's borders. He told Izvestiya the Kremlin would pursue a "rational and pragmatic foreign policy, which excluded costly confrontation".

Intriguingly, Patrushev listed the Barents sea shelf and other Arctic regions as a new potential battleground, together with the territory once occupied by the Soviet Union, and Mongolia. Russia is one of several countries in the northern hemisphere that has laid claim to the polar region, and recently dispatched military units to the area.

The Kremlin's ambitions have alarmed the five other countries with an Arctic coastline. Each country has exploitation rights over a 200-mile zone extending north from its borders, but Moscow is claiming a much greater chunk of the Arctic on the grounds that an underwater ridge runs between the North Pole and Russia's continental shelf.

Source: The Guardian :: Radio Liberty

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Asia may see more conflicts over water: World’s major rivers ‘drying up’

Optimum Population Trust

Posted on May 8, 2009

Asia may see more conflicts over scarce water resources in the coming years as climate change and population growth threaten access to the most basic natural resource, a report warned on Friday.

Water problems in Asia are already severe, with one in five people, or 700 million, not having access to safe drinking water and half the region’s population lacking access to basic sanitation, according to the report produced by the Asia Society, a New York-based think tank.

Population growth, rapid urbanization and climate change are expected to worsen the situation, according to the report, “Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future.”

It said water disputes between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan and the complex relations governing the vast Mekong River, which is shared by China and its southern neighbors, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The report said while water issues have more often generated cooperation than conflict between nations in the past, demographic pressures and water scarcity would be unprecedented in the coming decades.

“The potential for conflicts sparked by the direct and indirect impacts of an increasingly volatile water supply should not be underestimated, particularly in the light of rising concerns about climate change,” it said.

“No matter how we approach water resources — whether it is on the basis of quality and quantity, or as the most potent manifestation of extreme climatic events — hydropolitics is likely to be a growing force in Asian security,” it said.

While Asia is home to more than half the world’s population, it has less fresh water per person than any other populated continent, the report said. Asia’s population is expected to rise by nearly 500 million within 10 years.

“The majority of Asia’s water problems are not attributable to an actual shortage, but rather are the result of poor water governance,” it said. “They are solvable through more effective governance and better management practices.”

The report makes 10 recommendations to governments in Asia, including greater regional cooperation and ensuring that water management organizations work directly with those responsible for defense and diplomacy.

It also urged more investment, both public and private, in efficient water management and infrastructure.

Ecological leaders should not only look to governments for change, said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Civil action is needed to give rise to a movement for water access and quality, he said in an address to the Asia Society in New York.

“Our governments are incompetent … in an institutional sense,” said Sachs, a member of the society’s leadership group on water security. “Our governments are overwhelmed. There’s no use to calling on them to do things in the old-fashioned way.”

Source: Optimum Population Trust :: Reuters

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World’s major rivers ‘drying up’

Optimum Population Trust

Water levels in some of the world’s most important rivers have declined significantly over the past 50 years, US researchers say.

They say the reduced flows are linked to climate change and will have a major impact as the human population grows.

The only area with a significant increase in water flows was the Arctic due to a greater snow and ice melting.

The study was published in the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Journal of Climate.

Rainfall patterns ‘altered’

From the Yellow river in northern China to the Ganges in India to the Colorado river in the United States - the US scientists say that the major sources of fresh water for much of the world’s population are in decline.

The researchers analysed water flows in more than 900 rivers over a 50-year period to 2004.

They found that there was an overall decline in the amount of water flowing into the world’s oceans.

Much of the reduction has been caused by human activities such as the building of dams and the diversion of water for agriculture.

But the researchers highlighted the contribution of climate change, saying that rising temperatures were altering rainfall patterns and increasing rates of evaporation.

The authors say they are concerned that the decline in freshwater sources will continue with serious repercussions for a growing global population.

While some major rivers, including the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, have larger water flows, there is concern that the increased volume comes from the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas.

This means that in future these rivers might decline significantly as the glaciers disappear.

Sources: Optimum Population Trust :: BBC :: Reuters :: Guardian

Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, by Richard Heinberg; Energy Bulletin/MuseLetter

“... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures...... it is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals.”
“... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources -- in this rough order of importance -- all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities.”
“...there is general agreement that up to the point when cost per acceptor rises rapidly, family planning expenditures are generally considered the best investment a country can make in its own future.”
~ National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth ~

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Population, Resources, and Human Idealism

by Richard Heinberg, Museletter

Urinetown is a funny, smart, Tony Award-winning musical. Its action takes place in a city of the future where, as the result of severe and ongoing water shortages, private toilets have been banned. A giant corporation, the Urine Good Company (UGC for short), is in charge of all pay-per-pee services. The gradually escalating price is still affordable to a well-off few, but teeming masses of poor have to scrape together piles of spare change every day in order to take care of their private business. This, announces policeman-narrator Officer Lockstock, is “the central conceit of the show.”

The cast includes a greedy villain (Caldwell B. Cladwell, the CEO of UGC), a courageous hero (Bobby Strong, a poor lad who works for UGC collecting fees at a down-scale public toilet), and a big-hearted heroine (Hope, Cladwell’s daughter). Bobby and Hope fall in love; Strong leads a rebellion against UGC; the “terrorists” take Hope hostage. She sings the uplifting “Follow Your Heart,” assuring herself and everyone else that love will win the day, but every line is tongue-in-cheek. Though Bobby is soon killed by UGC minions, Hope manages to gain ultimate power, disposing of her father and telling her followers that the time of deprivation is over. In the last scene, she sings the fervent anthem “I See a River,” envisioning a new era when all can pee as much as they like, whenever they like, wherever they like. However, by the end of the scene the entire cast—excepting the narrator—has perished in an ecological catastrophe. Officer Lockstock’s epilogue tells the sorry tale:

Of course, it wasn’t long before the water became silty, brackish, and then dried up altogether. Cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption. . . . Hope, however, chose to ignore the warning signs, choosing instead to bask in the people’s love as long as it lasted. Hope eventually joined her father in a manner not quite so gentle. As for the people of this town? Well, they did the best they could. But they were prepared for the world they inherited . . . . For when the water dried up, they recognized their town for the first time for what it really was. What it was always waiting to be . . .

The Chorus sings: “This is Urinetown! Always it’s been Urinetown! This place it’s called Urinetown!” And with their unison cry of “Hail Malthus!”, the curtain falls.

The entire play is a send-up of the musical comedy genre, and the audience goes home laughing at gags and humming memorable tunes. Many reviewers have emphasized the infectious zaniness of the play, seemingly missing its explicit message (that idealism and good intentions are insufficient responses to problems of population pressure and resource depletion). Maybe that’s just as well: Urinetown succeeds so well as comedy and theater that even people utterly immune to its insights still have a good time; thus more people are drawn to see it, including those who do “get it.”

So what’s the significance of the play’s last line, “Hail Malthus”?

* * *

Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was a British political economist who theorized that unchecked population growth must eventually outstrip increases in food production. His most famous writing was the Essay on Population (1798), in which he explained in simple terms the connection between population pressure and human misery. The following passage from “The History of Economic Thought” website () summarizes his ideas succinctly:

Actual (checked) population growth is kept in line with food supply growth by “positive checks” (starvation, disease and the like, elevating the death rate) and “preventive checks” (i.e. postponement of marriage, etc. that keep down the birthrate), both of which are characterized by “misery and vice.” Malthus’s hypothesis implied that actual population always has a tendency to push above the food supply. Because of this tendency, any attempt to ameliorate the condition of the lower classes by increasing their incomes or improving agricultural productivity would be fruitless, as the extra means of subsistence would be completely absorbed by an induced boost in population. As long as this tendency remains, Malthus argued, the “perfectibility” of society will always be out of reach.

No wonder the term Malthusian almost always has negative connotations. Indeed, Malthus became anathema to utopians of the left and right, who envision a world with no limits. He has been reviled as a “hard-hearted monster,” a “prophet of doom,” and an “enemy of the working class.”

The summary goes on:

In his much-expanded and revised 1803 edition of the Essay, Malthus concentrated on bringing empirical evidence to bear (much of it acquired on his extensive travels to Germany, Russia and Scandinavia). He also introduced the possibility of “moral restraint” (voluntary abstinence which leads to neither misery nor vice) bringing the unchecked population growth rate down to a point where the tendency is gone.
In practical policy terms, this meant inculcating the lower classes with middle-class virtues. He believed this could be done with the introduction of universal suffrage, state-run education for the poor and, more controversially, the elimination of the Poor Laws and the establishment of an unfettered nation-wide labor market.
He also argued that once the poor had a taste for luxury, then they would demand a higher standard of living for themselves before starting a family. Thus . . . Malthus is suggesting the possibility of “demographic transition,” i.e. that sufficiently high incomes may be enough by themselves to reduce fertility.

Malthus believed that a general famine would occur in the near future unless his policies were implemented; in this he was clearly wrong. There have indeed been localized famines in the decades since his death (e.g., in Ireland, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Ethiopia), but these have provided only a minor brake on global population—which has surged by over 500 percent in the interim. This failure of prediction is the main cudgel wielded by generations of Malthus-bashers, who attribute the growth of world food production over the past century-and-a-half primarily to human ingenuity. As knowledge expands, so does our ability to sustain more people.

But increased knowledge and cleverness can account for only a portion of the added global human carrying capacity. The main factor has been the use of fossil fuels for clearing land, pumping irrigation water, fueling tractors and other farm equipment, fertilizing soils, killing pests, and transporting produce ever further distances to support people in remote urban centers who would otherwise be unable to sustain themselves. Malthus could hardly have foreseen the contributions of fossil fuels to economic expansion and population growth during the past two centuries. And so, taking into account the inevitable, now-commencing winding down of that brief, incomparably opulent fossil-fuel fiesta, it may be better to say that Malthus wasn’t wrong, he was just ahead of his time.

But if the depletion and decline of fossil fuels proves Malthus to have been ultimately correct in his forecast of human dieoff, what does that say for the rest of his message—his calls to abolish the Poor Laws and thus end “welfare as we know it,” and his implicit view that the “perfectibility of society will always be out of reach”?

* * *

William Stanton is a retired geologist and contemporary author who has taken up Malthus’s mantle in a well-researched but grim and controversial book, The Rapid Growth of Human Populations, 1750–2000. In it, he compiles population data on virtually every nation: each page features a country chart accompanied by a paragraph or two describing the unique historical circumstances that caused the line on the graph to assume its particular shape. Want to know the population history of the Maldives? The chart and explanatory paragraphs are on page 196. This typically takes up about half of each page; the other half is devoted to the running text, a sometimes highly opinionated discussion of population and resources.

As a thorough and proud Malthusian, Stanton takes an uncompromising stance toward multiculturalism, the welfare state, and immigration: he considers conventional liberal attitudes toward these subjects forms of “sentimentality” that only make humanity’s problems worse. Here are some representative passages from pages 73–74:

Compassion is a luxury available to people enjoying peace and plenty, who are confident of their place in society. . . . They apply it to the hungry, needy, or oppressed. It makes them feel virtuous—until the needy try to take advantage of the givers. . . .
Human ‘rights’ often conflict with each other. For example, if a couple insists on their ‘right’ to have lots of babies, the family that results may lose its ‘right’ to enjoy a comfortable standard of living. . . .

In a more recent essay, “Oil and People,” published in the ASPO newsletter #55 (July 2005) , Stanton writes:

So the population reduction scenario with the best chance of success has to be Darwinian in all its aspects, with none of the sentimentality that shrouded the second half of the 20th Century in a dense fog of political correctness. . . . The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state. Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.
The scenario is: Immigration is banned. Unauthorised arrives are treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.

In a reply comment, also posted on the website under the title “Triumph of the Will(iam),” writer “guamanian” opines:

William Stanton’s Essay “Öl und Volk” is best read in the original, preferably out loud in a shrill Austrian accent with suitable stiff-armed gestures and much goose-stepping. . . . Invoking Victorian-parlour Social Darwinism, and railing against “the Western world’s unintelligent devotion to . . . human rights and the sanctity of human life,” Stanton presents as a solution to energy descent the classic Fascist (or Corporatist) State, in which the powerless individual serves the homeland, for the greater good of, if not all, then at least of some.

Other readers offered similar comments. Colin Campbell had the last word in the discussion:

I think [Stanton] was proposing some sort of managed decline (as for example by hanging criminals) rather than just letting Nature take its course in which the strong eat the weak. I think he was simply suggesting how Britain might react and achieve in isolation the reduction imposed by Nature. I don't think there was anything particularly xenophobic: the Nigerians would be equally free to solve their same problem however they might. . . .

* * *

Al Bartlett, retired professor of physics at the University of Colorado, developed a lecture in the early 1970s that he has since delivered over 2000 times. Titled Arithmetic, Population, and Energy, the talk takes his audience along on an exploration of the meaning of steady growth (so many percent per year)—which is of course the sacred basis of all modern economies. As Bartlett makes clear, no steady rate of growth in population or resource consumption is sustainable.

During the course of the lecture, he asks, “Well, what can we do about this? What makes the population problem worse, and what reduces it?” On the screen he projects a slide with two columns of words. On the left-hand column are the principal factors leading to population growth; on the right, factors leading to a decrease of population.

Table of Options

Increase populations*******************Decrease Populations
Procreation ****************************Abstention
Motherhood *************************** Contraception/Abortion
Large Families *************************Small families
Immigration ***************************Stopping Immigration
Medicine ******************************Public Health
Sanitation *****************************Disease
Peace *********************************War
Law and Order *************************Murder/Violence
Scientific Agriculture *****************    Famine
Accident Prevention *******************  Accidents
Clean Air ***************************** Pollution (Smoking)


Ignorance of the Problem

Bartlett notes that population growth will cease at some point: the mathematics assures us of that (otherwise, in just a few centuries, the entire surface of the planet would be covered with humans). Moreover, we need not do anything to solve the population problem: nature will take care of that for us. Sooner or later, from the right-hand column nature will choose some method or methods of limiting human numbers. But the options chosen may not be to our liking. The only way we can avoid having to live with (or die by) nature’s choices is to proactively choose for ourselves which options from the right-hand column we would prefer voluntarily to implement. Hesitating in our choice, or failing to implement it, leads us directly back to nature’s options.

* * *

Toward the end of his lecture, Bartlett quotes Isaac Asimov, from an interview with Bill Moyers recorded in 1989. Moyers asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?” Asimov replied:

It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to stay as long as you want for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, Aren’t you through yet? and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]. Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.

Urinetown, indeed.

* * *

All of this is dreary and distressing, and that’s why most people prefer simply to avoid the topic. None of us wants to have to choose anything from Bartlett’s second column. Even the most agreeable items (abstention, abortion, contraception, and small families) are controversial, especially if proposed as anything other than individual, voluntary options. Stopping immigration is enormously controversial, as immigrants already often face discrimination in many forms. In each case, one or another group would object that human rights are being sacrificed. Yet nature does not negotiate: the Earth is a bounded sphere, and human population growth and consumption growth will be reined in. So it appears we must give up at least some human rights if we are to avoid nature’s choices—which have traditionally consisted of famine, disease, and war.

Should we then throw human rights to the wind, as Stanton seems to do? Capital punishment, corporal punishment, compulsory infanticide or abortion—wouldn’t adopting these as policy be equivalent to rolling back two or more centuries of gains in humanitarian thinking and social practice? And could such policies ever gain hold in a truly democratic society, or does the avoidance of demographic collapse thus also imply authoritarian governance?

I don’t think it has to. And I’m not about to give up on humanitarianism. But there is an essential lesson here. If we want peace, democracy, and human rights, we must work to create the ecological condition essential for these things to exist: i.e., a stable human population at—or slightly less than—the environment’s long-term carrying capacity.

This is a lesson that ancient humans internalized, to one degree or another. But during the first half of the fossil-fuel era we could afford to forget it: we were creating new temporary carrying capacity left and right. We could dream of “freedom of the bathroom”—human rights to food, education, health care, housing, and so on—no matter how many of us there were. Now, as that phantom carrying capacity is set to disappear, and as the human population is overshooting the natural limits of topsoil, water, fish, and fuels, the ideals we have come to hold are being threatened.

I do not advocate an absolute ecological determinism (as Stanton comes very close to doing): even given population pressure and resource depletion, some societies do better than others (at least temporarily) at maintaining a humane social environment. Peak Oil doesn’t necessarily lead to Soylent Green — unless we ignore the lesson.

To do so—to think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.

The proponents of fascistic “solutions” (I’m not suggesting that Stanton is in that category, by the way) are likely to justify their calls for war and ethnic cleansing with an appeal to human nature: we must abandon our recently acquired squeamishness and sentimentality and do what any self-respecting cave-man would have done when faced with a resource crisis—make sure that it is they who starve or are exterminated, and that it is our genes that are passed along.

Human nature does indeed contain the potential for demographic competition, even to the point of genocide. But it is important to remember that the real “cave men”—our hunter-gatherer ancestors—lived by sharing and enjoyed a gift economy. Our modern “sentimentality,” in the form of concerns for equity and the welfare of those who would otherwise be left behind, is rooted in ancient sensibilities.

Yet while hunter-gatherers embodied the egalitarian ideal, we must remember that their ethic also included the imperative to hew to ecological limits. Infanticide was the last resort when contraception and the suppression of fertility through extended lactation and maintenance of low levels of body fat failed.

An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits is a setup for disaster. But demographic competition by way of fascism, as a response to population-resource crises, is an admission of failure; and it is less an expression of human nature than of the ugly habits formed through the past few thousand civilized years of extreme inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism.

The longer we wait, the fewer our options. Social liberals and progressives who fail to talk about population and resource issues and propose workable solutions are merely helping to create their own worst nightmare.

Source: Energy Bulletin