You are touching on what some (among them perhaps also politicians but at least people whose lifeblood is philosophy, ethics, and such) might consider a point worthy of consideration, so i’ve started this new thread.
Does the fact that there are 7 billion humans alive right now give them or their children any future rights as to viability? In other words, do human societies (we all) owe us all (ourselves) and our children and their children, etc., the physical and structural resources (energy, infrastructure, education, health care, etc.) that are needed to keep them alive in such numbers? Does nature owe humans such things? And what if the resources humans demand, or wish for, exceed what nature is capable of giving?
You are touching on what some (among them perhaps also politicians but at least people whose lifeblood is philosophy, ethics, and such) might consider a point worthy of consideration, so I’ve started this new thread.
Does the fact that there are 7 billion humans alive right now give them or their children any future rights as to viability? In other words, do human societies (we all) owe us all (ourselves) and our children and their children, etc., the physical and structural resources (energy, infrastructure, education, health care, etc.) that are needed to keep them alive in such numbers? Does nature owe humans such things? And what if the resources humans demand, or wish for, exceed what nature is capable of giving?[/quote]
Easy. Answers in order to Qs presented: No, No, haha No, and take a picture of any landfill from here to Mexico City and that’s what happens.
In other words, we don’t have any rights to anything. Now, do we have an obligation to secure the future of our children? Yes.
I’d sort of guessed this would winkle it’s way out eventually, as you’d definitely alluded to such thinking. Before we get down to the nitty gritty of determining numbers, how do you propose to get rid of the excess?
As for nature owing us humans anything, we humans are part of nature, I would think.
I would say the right to life is a basic human right. If we question anyone else’s right to life we become inhuman ourselves. The right to reproduce similarly so. Who has the authority and under what circumstances are we going to deny another human being that right? There is no answer to that question, only approximations.
If people are concerned about population growth we need to work harder to improve the standard of living and education of women in poor countries with excessive population growth. These are the two things that have been shown to slow birth rates down, not draconian measures designed to deprive certain human beings of rights that richer ones enjoy.
Since I was a kid I’ve been shown images of starving adorable little children in Africa and Asia, (usually TV comercials posted by various bottom feeding Christian group asking for my money), yet somehow both continents seem to be expanding their populations exponentially; etimated to be 6 billion by 2050. I say enough is enough. If these humans want to breed like animals then they can [try to] live like them too. I have no doubt that famine and not disease will disallow the true population projections, but I’m only being inhumane; the rest of you: keep sending in your dollar a day…
[quote=“achdizzy1099”]Since I was a kid I’ve been shown images of starving adorable little children in Africa and Asia, (usually TV comercials posted by various bottom feeding Christian group asking for my money), yet somehow both continents seem to be expanding their populations exponentially; etimated to be 6 billion by 2050. I say enough is enough. If these humans want to breed like animals then they can [try to] live like them too. I have no doubt that famine and not disease will disallow the true population projections, but I’m only being inhumane; the rest of you: keep sending in your dollar a day…
T[/quote]
Where to start?
The image of the starving African is misleading. To begin with, Africa isn’t a country. It’s so big you can fit Europe, the USA and China into it. There are many countries in Africa that are doing just fine. However there are also many people with a vested interest in maintaining the image of the starving African, not least those aid organisations begging for your dollar. There is a huge aid industry that keeps a lot of people in jobs and feeling good about themselves. I have had some experience of the aid industry close to, and since then I’ve always been selective about when and how I give. Some organisations try to do good, others are basically keeping themselves in business.
Even with those organisations that are genuinely trying to make a sustainable difference, you have to question the long term good of the process. There are leading figures and academics in African countries now who are calling for a stop to aid. This is because they believe it has encouraged a culture of dependence. It also has the affect of absolving governments of their responsibilities towards their people. Why bother setting up good health or education systems when some do-gooder will come in and do it for you? For example, in the Pakistan floods last year, people were flying from the UK to Pakistan, buying food in one part of the country and driving it to the areas where people were starving. You have to ask why the Pakistani government wasn’t doing that themselves.
Of course then there is also the aspect of aid dollars somehow being converted to Mercedes cars for government officials but that’s been done to death so let’s not go there.
Rather than give money to help people out, what we should be doing is making world trade systems fairer. Western governments have an interest in keeping poor countries poor. That way they don’t have to compete with them. Therefore they subsidise own farmers so that farmers in developing countries can’t compete. There are also various schemes which actively depress the markets in developing countries. One that goes on here in the UK is the collection of clothing for ‘charity’. What happens is these used clothes are sold by the kilo to companies which sell them in poorer countries. Local manufacturers can’t compete.
Another thing that can be done is quite simply educate women and empower them. There is good evidence that doing this has huge benefits in societies where there is poverty and a high birth rate. For example, one study I read found that if they gave a man a job he’d spend about 40% of his wage on his family, whereas a woman would spend 90%.
Anyone who’s interested in this subject should check out Hans Rosling’s presentations on the TED website.
The Hans Rosling presentation was OK. Unfortunately h’se just another grant seeking narcissist: misleading. Many or his slides use logarithmic scales to enhance his argument. He did acknowledge this at one point, but for some reason at the end of the presentation he displayed an animated ‘annual income’ graphic comparing the USA to China over a 29 year period (1970 - 1999). The purpose of the graphic was to display China’s wealth as an encroaching ‘ghost’ over the USA “It’s pretty scary” he said. The crowd got a chuckle. I assume he is looking for Red Scare shock value with this sort of thing. He is also hoping no one notices the logarithmic scale of the x-axis. Clearly the mean income for 1999 dollars is somewhere around $5000 USD per year in China, while the USA is maybe $50,000 or so. It’s all done for effect. A man who likes effect is hard to level with back here in reality.
I don’t think he’s lacking in intelligence or heart, but he’s over simplifying a very complicated situation. He’s also trying to promote new age data analysis while at the same time skewing it to suit his own agenda.
[quote=“achdizzy1099”]The Hans Rosling presentation was OK. Unfortunately h’se just another grant seeking narcissist: misleading. Many or his slides use logarithmic scales to enhance his argument. He did acknowledge this at one point, but for some reason at the end of the presentation he displayed an animated ‘annual income’ graphic comparing the USA to China over a 29 year period (1970 - 1999). The purpose of the graphic was to display China’s wealth as an encroaching ‘ghost’ over the USA “It’s pretty scary” he said. The crowd got a chuckle. I assume he is looking for Red Scare shock value with this sort of thing. He is also hoping no one notices the logarithmic scale of the x-axis. Clearly the mean income for 1999 dollars is somewhere around $5000 USD per year in China, while the USA is maybe $50,000 or so. It’s all done for effect. A man who likes effect is hard to level with back here in reality.
I don’t think he’s lacking in intelligence or heart, but he’s over simplifying a very complicated situation. He’s also trying to promote new age data analysis while at the same time skewing it to suit his own agenda.
T[/quote]
Which presentation did you watch? There are several on the site.
If you doubt the correlation between improving living standards and decreasing birth rates, there is plenty of information about that on the web, as there is research on the positive effects of educating women in poor countries.
I touches me sometimes how flippantly the bourgeoisie bandy their “socio-economic” analysis with such cold-hearted aplomb. Must be comforting to be on the other side of the tracks.
When I was a kid this sort of statement was met with “No Shit Sherlock!”
All we need to do is bring the whole world into the middle class and vualla! problem solved. Now off to my next speaking engagement in Stockholm…
Of all the positive trends occurring in the world, population growth is not one of them. It cannot be curbed in our modern medical world. Medicine is a way of meddling with nature. When you meddle with nature there is always unintended consequences. We cannot educate our way out of this trend when so much food and medicine is available. There will be a tipping point, I don’t know when, but I do know where. It will not be fun and it cannot be avoided.
When I was a kid this sort of statement was met with “No Shit Sherlock!”
All we need to do is bring the whole world into the middle class and vualla! problem solved. Now off to my next speaking engagement in Stockholm…
Of all the positive trends occurring in the world, population growth is not one of them. It cannot be curbed in our modern medical world. Medicine is a way of meddling with nature. When you meddle with nature there is always unintended consequences. We cannot educate our way out of this trend when so much food and medicine is available. There will be a tipping point, I don’t know when, but I do know where. It will not be fun and it cannot be avoided.
T[/quote]
Well, what you’re classing as opinion has in fact been shown to be true over several decades. Despite massive famines, wars, natural disasters, and plagues such as AIDS and malaria, poor countries continue to over-populate themselves. Of course, what we class as over-population isn’t the case in terms of the exploitation of resources. If we look at what the different populations of the world actually use, then Western countries are the over-populated ones. But that’s another argument.
I don’t know what it is about the human psyche, but we seem to be half in love with this idea of some kind of apocalyptic revenge for other people’s irrational and destructive behaviour - i.e. having more children than is wise in the circumstances, in this case. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s a simple fact that the more adverse the situation is, the more people reproduce. I’m luckily not from a developing country but the reasoning is supposed to be that if you’re dirt poor, the only asset you have, the only resource you hold that may help you survive, is your children. So you have as many of them as you can. Whether this is a true reflection of people’s rationale I don’t know, but it is true that poverty goes hand in hand with over-population, and so far there has been no disaster massive enough to make any dent in that (and if there were, there is no way the West would escape unscathed).
Agreed… although the population growth curve does appear to show a decrease in the rate of the increase lately (in mathematical terms: “negative curvature” or “the second derivative is negative”) - something that gives rise to hope…
Yes. That’s why i am a fan of the precautionary principle and when it comes to human made systems prefer in principle small-scale (local, regional, etc.) systems over large-scale systems - and that goes for social-economic-political systems as much as for technology-related systems of any sort. That includes the notion that the colonial powers of the past and the superpowers of the more recent past and present have been bad news for the planet.
Indeed. And the key to an understanding of this issue is the theory of dynamic systems - in this context Wikipedia is, indeed, a great jump-off point for anybody who wants to open that can of worms… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory and the many links provided on that page.
(On an autobiographical note: it’s not that long ago that i left university, and systems theory was one of my favorite topics there.)
Yuli, it doesn’t surprise me you’re recently out of academia. Your confidence in man made knowledge systems strikes me as similar to that of Russian hydrologists and the certainty of their particular science. Lake Baikal, anybody?
I feel rather mischievous that you got inadvertently stuck in my fly trap… The characterization “recently out of academia” doesn’t provide any useful information in my case, sinc i’ve been going in and out of academia much of my - admittedly short - life (and i am actually right now preparing to go in yet again)…
Oh, i am sure you are confusing me with someone else: if you carefully read my posts in various threads on this BBS you will notice that i put the laws of nature above anything and everything that humans can dream up, that i am highly doubtful of the goodness of the industrial revolution and various grand schemes humans have implemented and are still trying to implement to “tame” or “exploit” nature (including the project that has led to the Lake Baikal disaster and including nuclear power, to name just a very current item), and that i generally put little faith in human systems of any sort (including economic and monetary systems) and instead prefer low-tech, low impact systems to any of the grand schemes “out there”, as well as a way of life close to nature. Just to clear up an apparent misconception here…
But let us return to the topic: addressing the various interesting questions people on this BBS have been bringing up would seem to me far more useful than any speculation about the persona “yuli”…
Well, if you think of all these resources, which we hold collectively, as analogous to an individual person’s patrimony, then I guess we have the right to use them up and leave our progeny in an impoverished state (unless you think of us as being fiduciaries in some way).
But if you think of the situation in terms of a fourth-dimensional version of nuisance or vicinage, then I guess unborn generations may have a cause of action against us, because the mess we made on our temporal land spilled over onto their temporal land.
And of course, I’m sure there are other ways of looking at it.