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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (17949)	12/3/2007 1:38:09 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Neo, I don't recall your "tangled bank" reference but that could be due to senescence. <You views on population growth are not in tune with biology. > Thanks for picking that one. It's one of my favourites and has been for several decades. Once upon a time, in Club of Rome days, I thought that human population growth was a problem. Not as much as others who thought it was willfully dangerous to produce children. I was gung ho to have children anyway as it didn't seem much of a problem to me and certainly not in my neck of the woods. More recently, such as a decade or 15 years ago, it became obvious to me that not only was population growth not a problem but that population implosion was assured. It was in 1985 that I was amused to see a government graph showing a large envelope of predicted oil prices for ensuing years and decades with the actual price almost immediately dropping below the low graph and continuing to fall. The NZ government was busy trying to save NZ from the "shortage" of oil, coming up with all sorts of alternative fuels ideas and dopey projects such as the electrification of the main trunk railway, Mobil's syngas plant, tallow ester diesel fuel. My job was to run them for BP Oil. I had already learned that governments are not worth the paper they are written on. So the "Omigod the human population bomb" worries of governments sat lightly on my shoulders. Let's rewind back to the 1960s. I had a maths professor who liked to pontificate a bit before his lectures, I think to give people time to arrive and also to extend his classes beyond rote learning. Those who didn't want to listen, simply timed their arrival even later, so there were even more late arrivals than in normal lectures. One of his homilies was about human reproduction. I can't recall all of it, but it was to the effect that Go- was very cunning. Not only did H- ensure reproduction by the joy of having little children and hearing the pitter patter of little feet, H- also made it pleasurable. There was an element of jest in the "joy of little children", as anyone who has a two year old who has learned to say "No!!" can attest. Those of us who escape adolescent malevolence are very grateful. As you can see, his comment made an impression on me, more so than "tangled banks". At about the same time, contraceptive pills were becoming available and many young women were availing themselves of their utility. Since then, human birth rates have rapidly declined. One element of God'- plan for getting babies was removed. H- was left with only the joyful patter of little feet to encourage breeding [not to mention painful births, crying in the night, lack of sleep, loss of income, increase in expenses, disruption of social context, marital battles though some people see challenges as problems to be avoided rather than Everests to be scaled]. Having children was once a cultural norm. As fewer babies are born, fewer women have any experience of them growing up and the cultural norm of having pittering and pattering little feet is lost, like incantations to Aztec Go-s [I'm not sure if Aztec Gods are supposed to have a hyphen or just Jewish ones] become culturally irrelevant [though some still burble mantras while they dance naked around their campfire clutching their little gold totems]. Then along comes government pressure as in China and India and it's not surprising that reproduction rates plummet. Peak People [TM] is assured [even without the exigencies of the "tangled bank" limiting growth]. My calculations show the year of Peak People to be 2037. That assumes we don't get a chicken flu wipe out half of us and that all-out nuclear war doesn't cause a huge loss. I forget precisely how I got 2037 and it might have included a bit of eeny, meany, miney, mo which is a mathematical variable used in complex calculations like the Einstein's gravitational constant. Biology includes brains. <You views on population growth are not in tune with biology.> Humans are not brainless reproductive tracts, like worms or frogs. People think, plan, predict, imagine, and change the future to make it how they want it to be. So, there you have it. The short version. Now you are enlightened, you can change your view of human population growth. <a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, > Humans don't need to "struggle for life". Obesity is more of a problem these days. Mqurice