Overpopulation Is Not the Problem

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In a rare departure from the perceived status quo the New York Times has published a critique on the so-called conventional wisdom that tells us that the earth is over populated and that unless we reduce population we are headed for disaster.

The following opinion piece, by Erle C. Ellis who is an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a visiting associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, appeared in the NY Times on September 9th  

BALTIMORE — MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable.

This is nonsense. Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.

The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible. And, of course, Homo sapiens went much further, learning over generations, once their preferred big game became rare or extinct, to make use of a far broader spectrum of species. They did this by extracting more nutrients from these species by cooking and grinding them, by propagating the most useful species and by burning woodlands to enhance hunting and foraging success.

Even before the last ice age had ended, thousands of years before agriculture, hunter-gatherer societies were well established across the earth and depended increasingly on sophisticated technological strategies to sustain growing populations in landscapes long ago transformed by their ancestors.

The planet’s carrying capacity for prehistoric human hunter-gatherers was probably no more than 100 million. But without their Paleolithic technologies and ways of life, the number would be far less — perhaps a few tens of millions. The rise of agriculture enabled even greater population growth requiring ever more intensive land-use practices to gain more sustenance from the same old land. At their peak, those agricultural systems might have sustained as many as three billion people in poverty on near-vegetarian diets.

The world population is now estimated at 7.2 billion. But with current industrial technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that the more than nine billion people expected by 2050 as the population nears its peak could be supported as long as necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies are in place. Who knows what will be possible with the technologies of the future? The important message from these rough numbers should be clear. There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity. We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish.

Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this? My experience is likely to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic mathematics of population growth — that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance with their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics: there is only one earth, of course!

It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists, geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists.

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement.

There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever.

The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.

Population trends cloud Europe's post-recession outlook

The Independent reports that population trends are clouding Europe's post-recession outlook. This is in fact an issue that some commentators have been warning about for a number of years. For a nation’s population to survive it is necessary that the minimum fertility rate should not fall below 2.1. Most European nation states are below this level, many being as low as 1.2 - 1.5. See my BLOG POST of August 2010

Much has also been written about the consequences of this population collapse for national economies and national pension funds, which will inevitably lead to further recession and eventual collapse.

One of the basic questions to be answered is why is this happening, why are whole nations choosing a path that will lead to economic suicide? There are many answers to this question but the most obvious ones are often overlooked because they are inconvenient truths. The now, almost global, push for more and more access to contraception and abortion is central to the population collapse and European Governments should take cognizance of this before it is too late.

The following is the text of the Independent article.

Slowly but unsurely, Europe is facing up to population trends that will sap long-run economic growth and force nations to choose between cutting pensions and welfare benefits or paying higher taxes to maintain them.

Some countries are getting an early taste of difficulties that await Europe as the continent's baby boomers retire and, because of flagging fertility rates, the average age of those left in the labour force rises.

In France, trade unions are planning protests against modest plans to rein in the country's pension funding gap of €14bn and rising.

Spain, pressed by the European Commission, is drawing up reforms to tackle underfunding in its pension system that forced the government to dip into the social security reserve fund last year.

"There's a recognition that something needs to be done, and it's just a question of the pace at which they move," said Edward Hugh, an economist and demographer in Barcelona.

Spain's pension plight is partly cyclical: more than 3 million workers have lost their jobs since the onset of recession and have stopped paying into the pensions system.

Emigration is making the funding crunch worse. More than half a million foreign workers - lured to Spain during the boom years - have left since the start of 2010, while young Spaniards are moving abroad in droves in search of jobs.

Spain, Portugal and Ireland all lost about 2pc of their working-age adults between 2010 and the first quarter of 2013, said Marchel Alexandrovich, an economist with Jefferies, an investment bank, in London.

In the medium term, he said, this raises the question of who pays for pensions and age-related health care costs in countries that are educating their youngsters only to see many of them emigrate and pay taxes elsewhere.

"Without some corresponding system of fiscal transfers (i.e. U.S.-style federal taxes), this is not a sustainable arrangement," Alexandrovich said in a note.

VICIOUS CIRCLES

Spain is also paying the price of a low fertility rate for the past 25 years - a trend compounded by the recession - which is reducing the number of entrants to the workforce.

The risk is that low fertility, high emigration and a rapidly ageing labour force form a vicious economic circle.

"So even when the recession ends, the damage to some euro area economies will be more permanent than may be commonly recognised," Alexandrovich said.

With fewer workers having to pay for more retirees, Spaniards who are braced for lower pensions will tend to save rather than spend, holding back the recovery and thus further eroding the tax base, Hugh fears.

"Since they're not going to get the kind of economic recovery they're expecting, and since young people are leaving, they're going to have to do even more pension reforms than they imagine," Hugh said.

Countries across Europe are feeling the demographic pinch.

Bulgaria's population has shrunk by 582,000 people in the past 10 years to 7.3 million. In 1985 it was almost 9 million. The Baltic states have also witnessed extensive emigration.

NOT ENOUGH BABIES

Many countries fall well short of the total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children that women need to bear to hold the population constant in the absence of net migration.

The TFR in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia fell by more than 30pc between 1990 and 2011. Hungary had a TFR of just 1.2 live births per woman in 2011, with Poland and Romania at 1.3 - considered by demographers to be the danger level.

Germany is already experiencing the fallout of a fertility rate that has been far below replacement level for 30 years.

Across the 28-member European Union, Germany has the smallest proportion of people in the 0-14 age bracket, the joint-highest proportion of pensioners (with Italy) and the highest median age, according to the European Commission.

Germany's domestic labour force fell by 70,000 in the past year. Immigration is coming to the rescue for now - foreigners accounted for all the employment growth in 2012, Alexandrovich said - but the country's growth prospects are darkening.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reckons Germany's potential growth will fall to less than 1 percent a year after 2020, from an already low 1.5pc today, due to population ageing.

By 2050 France and Britain, with much more favourable demographic profiles, are projected to have bigger economies than Germany, whose population is set to shrink to just over 70 million from nearly 82 million now.

The danger of intergenerational conflict as fewer workers have to provide for more pensioners is a future risk, but adverse demographics are already affecting parts of the economy.

Car sales in Germany are falling in part because an ageing population drives less, exacerbating industry-wide overcapacity, according to Douglas Roberts, an economist with Standard Life in Edinburgh.

"As with changing pension conditions, restructuring of a major industry such as autos will be difficult and meet major resistance both from unions and governments," he said.

More broadly, a shrinking workforce will make it harder to meet future pensions - as Detroit has discovered - and to service the increased public and private debt that Europe has racked up in recent decades, especially since the recession.

The Commission's central projection is that EU employment will fall by 5 million, or 2.5pc, between 2010 and 2030.

Rich economies will lose more than 1 percentage point of annual growth in the decade 2012-2021, mainly due to the ageing of their workforces, a 2012 Bank of Spain research paper found.

Not everyone is confident that Europe will rise to the challenge and make its welfare states affordable.

"Age-related spending plus slow-to-negative growth in labour forces will keep driving most developed nations toward bankruptcy until they reform their governments and financial sectors," wrote Leigh Skene with Lombard Street Research, a London consultancy.

The Demographic Bomb

We reported recently on the World Congress of Families which will take place in Madrid later this week. One of the topics to be dealt with during the Congress is the evil of population control.
This is in advance of a UN meeting the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development which will be held in Rio De Janerio next month and already UN agencies such as UNFPA are detetrmined to include population control, under various guises, in the conference as one of the ways of reducing so called global warming and its effects by decreasing human activity.
Of course when the global warming proved to be an unsustainable name it was renamed "climate change" This approach was previously put forward by the Chinese government in 2009 during a summit which took place in Copenhagen.

The coersive and draconian population control methods of the Chinese are well known and rejected by all right thinking people and yet they are now being proposed as the solution. Sadly we have heard of solutions like this before and even a so called "final solution". World governments must not go down this pathway.

The following trailer for the Demographic Bomb gives another side to the story

Population Growth; debunking the myths

I Blogged earlier this month on the issue of global demographics and population growth, the announcement by the UN of the birth of baby 7 billion. see this link

The Population Research Institute (PRI) has produced a series of videos explaining in simple terms the implications of population growth and exposes the myths being spread by populations controllers, which sadly are believed by many.

I have linked to three of the PRI videos below. It should be noted that the information presented in these videos is based on solid scientific research.

Thoughts on Baby 7 Bilion

Alan Titley, a columnist with the Irish Times newspaper, presented his readers recently with a prayer ‘for the seven billionth person’.   It is a sort of wish list of beautiful prayers, and I will do my best to convey in English what Mr. Titley has given us in his original Irish:

May you come safely from the womb, because there are many who do not.

May you come safely from the cradle if you are a girl in India, or in China, because there are many girl children who will not.

May you survive the knife if you are a girl in those countries where it is considered a good thing to destroy your femininity.

May you be spared from hunger if your stomach is swollen with want rather than plenty.

May you have parents who will not abandon you.

May you have some small attribute that no-one else ever had.

[…]

May you see the sun every morning.

May you see the beauty [of nature] that not all can see.

[…]

There are many more deep and thoughtful prayers included in this quiet piece, and the whole is something that should be treasured and acknowledged.

World Population reaches 7 billion

Much has been said and written about the arrival of baby seven billion. No one knows exactly how many people there are on this earth however the number crunchers decided that Oct 31st 2011 would suffice as "Baby 7B" day and "hey presto" there are now seven billion human beings on earth.
According to the UN, Danica May Camacho born on Monday, October 31, was declared  the world's seven billionth baby. She was born in the Phillipine capital of Manila and weighed 5.5 pounds, however in an effort to be fair the UN also symbolically chose several other babies as the world's seven billionth inhabitant.
So just what are the implications of this news? the answer varies according to who is questioned.
The population controllers see it as a problem and ask questions like can the earth sustain such large numbers. they also point to the continuing population growth and the environmental damage caused by humans. UNFPA use the opportunity to demand more and more access to so called reproductive health services which of course include the full list of contraceptive methods together with abortion.
All of the questions raised by the population controllers are more than adequately dealt with by Stephen Mosher of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal Virginia.
Steve Writes;

As our numbers have grown, incomes have soared. In 1800, when there were only 1 billion of us, per capita income worldwide was a mere $100. By 1927 our numbers had doubled, but incomes had already increased five times to $500. By the time we reached 3 billion in 1960, income had tripled again to $1500. Today, as we pass the 7 billion mark, per capita income has soared to $9,000.

In 2100, when the population will be between 7 and 8 billion (and falling), it is projected to be $30,000 in current dollars.

Driving the so-called "population explosion" has been a real explosion in health and longevity. As late as the 19th century, four out of every 10 children died before reaching age five. Today under-five mortality is under 6 percent and falling. Two hundred years ago, human life expectancy was under 30 years. Today it is 69 years and climbing.

As people live longer, naturally there are more of us around at any given time.

By nearly every measure of well-being, from infant mortality and life expectancy to educational level and caloric intake, life in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has been getting dramatically better. According to the World Bank, the average income in the developing world has quadrupled since 1960.

Enough grain is produced for every person on earth to consume 3,500 calories daily. There is no need for anyone to starve in the midst of this plenty.

Population has more than doubled since 1960, but crop yields per hectare have kept pace. World food and resource production has never been higher.

Economies continue to expand, productivity is up, and pollution is declining. Life spans are lengthening, poverty is down, and political freedom is growing. The human race has never been so well off.

In fact, underpopulation, not overpopulation, is the real threat that much of the world faces today. Some 80 countries representing over half the world's population suffer from below replacement fertilitydefined as less than 2.1 children per woman.

The populations of the developed nations today are static or declining. The UN predicts that, by 2050, Russia's population will have declined by 25 million people, Japan's by 21 million, Italy's by 16 million, and Germany's and Spain's by 9 million each. Europe and Japan are projected to lose half their population by 2100.

Countries with below replacement rate fertility will eventually die out. It's just a question of time.

Even in the developing world family size has shrunk, from around 5 children per woman in 1960 to less than 3 today. And the decline continues.

According to the UN's "low variant projection"historically the most accuratethe population of the world will peak at 8 plus billion in 2040 or so, and then begin to decline.

High fertility rates are becoming rare. The UN numbers for 2010 show only 10 countries with population increase rates at or above 3.0 percent.

By 2050, persons aged 65 and above will be almost twice as numerous as children 15 years and younger. The economic consequences of population aging will be closing schools, declining stock markets, and moribund economies.

Ignoring these facts, the population controllers continue to spread their myth of overpopulation.

The UNFPA and other population control organizations are loath to report the truth about falling fertility rates worldwide, since they raise funds by frightening people with the specter of overpopulation. They tell us that too many babies are being born to poor people in developing countries. This is tantamount to saying that only the wealthy should be allowed to have children, and is a new form of global racism.

We should stop funding population control programs, and instead turn our attention to real problems, such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and infectious diseases. As mortality rates fall, so will birth rates.

Let us also join together in celebrating the birth of Baby Seven Billion. He or she is a sign of our future, our hope and our prosperity.

People are our greatest resource. Extraordinarily gifted people have helped to enrich civilization and lengthen life spans. But the fact is, everyone, rich or poor, is a unique creation with something priceless to offer to the rest of us.
Baby Seven Billion, boy or girl, red or yellow, black or white, is not a liability, but an asset. Not a curse, but a blessing. For all of us. 

Moscow Demographic Summit: "Family and the Future of Humankind"

The World Congress of Families (WCF) report  that the Moscow Demographic Summit: "Family and the Future of Humankind" held on June 29-30 was a great success.  According to the WCF website for the event this was the first ever International Demographic Summit to be held on Earth and the first time an international Pro-Life and Pro-Family event of this scale took place in Russia. It was held the Russian State Social University, Russia's largest university. More than 1,000 participants took part in the Summit: 300 foreign guests (including top demography & family researchers, scientists and activists, US Congressmen and Senators) and 700 participants from all over Russia and the CIS.

The summit concluded with the adoption of a Declaration demanding that governments everywhere adopt pro-family demographic policies.  

Translated from Russian, The Declaration states in part:

"We, participants of the Moscow Demographic Summit, representing families from various social, ethnic and religious communities, leading experts in the field of the family and demography, public activists, NGOs, leaders of parents associations, representatives of the leading business, educational and diplomatic institutions, members of national Governments and Parliaments and other responsible forces of the civil society, representing 65 countries of the world, hereby declare that the Natural Family is the basic unit of society and the fundamental social value, that is a necessary prerequisite for the very existence of world civilizations and the whole humankind.

"We express our deep concern about the dangers of the approaching worldwide depopulation. Despite wrong and biased information about 'overpopulation' threat promoted by some mass media and international institutions, in reality already for several decades in a row we have been witnessing a global process of demographic degradation.... In the nearest historical period, the negative demographic trends can bring about extinction of whole peoples, destruction of States, and disappearance of unique cultures and civilizations. Even according to conservative estimates by the UN, within next three decades, the total fertility rate will go down  below the population replacement level all over the world. In reality, it can happen much earlier, thus making the whole world community face the unprecedented social and historical problem of humankind survival.

"We are alarmed by the fact that the family institution is in a state of grave social crisis which consists in the destruction of universal family, conjugal and parental roles based on traditional family values; in the disruption of the reproductive function of the family; in an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, caused by the imposition of contraceptive thinking (in terms of safe sex) and destructive premarital and extramarital sex patterns; in widespread divorce; in the spreading of cohabitation without marriage; in increasing numbers of single-parent families; a wave of social deviations (abortions, homosexuality, pedophilia, drug addiction, refusal of marriage and childbearing (the child-free phenomenon), prostitution, pornography, etc.); disruption of the process of socialization of young generations; cutting of ties among relatives and alienation of different generations within one family, etc.

"We call on the governments of all nations and on international institutions to develop immediately a pro-family demographic policy and to adopt a special international pro-family strategy and action plan aimed at consolidating family and marriage, protecting human life from conception to natural death, increasing birth rates, and averting the menace of depopulation."

Click here to read the Declaration of the Moscow Demographic Summit in its entiriety

India's Population Policies

The BBC report today on a new population control measure in India. Health officials in the Indian state of Rajasthan are apparently launching a new campaign to try reduce the high population growth in the area.

They are encouraging both men and women to volunteer for sterilisation, and in return are offering a car and other prizes for those who come forward. Among the rewards on offer is the Indian-made Tata Nano - the world's cheapest car.

This report comes hard on the heels of a report in the Foreign Policy Magazine "where have all the girls gone" 

This is in fact a very interesting article and whilst I would not agree with everything it says it makes a number of very important observations on the problems arising from the issue of sex selection. The article also points to the underlying international hostility to population growth and attributes the policy in the right direction. 

The answer to the question where have all the girls gone is of course very simple they have not been spirited away by some modern day "pied piper" they have been terminated. I have included some extracts from the very long article below but have included a link to the complete article above

[...] The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global "population explosion," anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation were among the organizations that poured money into stanching the birth rate abroad, while the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council helped coordinate efforts on the ground. As these organizations backed research into barriers to couples accepting contraception, one of the obstacles quickly identified was that in most parts of the world, but particularly in fast-growing Asia, people continued to have children until they got a boy. As demographer S.N. Agarwala explained in a paper on India he presented at a 1963 IPPF conference in Singapore: "[S]ome religious rites, especially those connected with the death of the parents, can be performed only by the male child.... [T]hose who have only daughters try their best to have at least one male child." Even in the United States, surveys suggested a preference for sons.[...]

[...] In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, "where the entire problem was population." The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for "research into reproductive biology." And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female -- a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination.

Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex determination became possible using amniocentesis. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex. An estimated 1,000 women carrying female fetuses underwent abortions. The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. In his autobiography, Segal professed to being shocked to learn that doctors at AIIMS were using a variation on his instructions to perform sex-selective abortions. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. (The minutes from the meeting describe "sex determination at conception" -- now finally available today through advances in assisted reproductive technology -- but in-utero sex determination was the form of sex selection furthest along at that point.) [...]

 

Attempts to reverse Russia's declining population

The Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues (PNCI) reports that Russian Members of Parliament have teamed up with the Russian Orthodox Church to introduce legislation to dramatically reduce abortions. Russia, which according to a 2004 UN survey has one of the world's highest abortion rates at 53.7 per 100 women, also has one of the lowest birth rates.  See report

The proposal would ban free abortions at government clinics, make the morning-after pill only available with a prescription, and require spousal consent for married women and parental consent for adolescents seeking abortions. Yelena Mizulina, sponsor and chair of the State Duma Committee for Women's Affairs, Family and Children, added that the legislation would also institute a week-long waiting period for abortion and create "safe haven" centers for women to leave babies under six months. 

While the Russian Health Ministry's data, reaching 1.3 million abortions in 2009, does show a decline in the numbers of abortions, Mizulina points out that the Ministry does not include abortions at private clinics and from the morning-after pill and suggests the number is closer to 6 million abortions.   

The World Congress of Families has also made arrangements for a major conference on World population decline in Moscow at the end of this month. The first summit on the worldwide phenomenon of rapidly declining birthrates – The Moscow Demographic Summit: Family and The Future of Humankind -- will take place at the Russian State Social University, June 29-30, sponsored by the World Congress of Families. 

World Congress of Families Managing Director Larry Jacobs noted: 

“Russia is ground-zero for demographic winter. With an average birthrate of 2.1 children per woman needed just to replace current population, Russia’s is only 1.2. Little wonder Russia’s population has declined from 148.5 million in 1995 to 143 million today. Some demographers believe it could fall below 120 million by mid-point in this century. Adding to the tragedy, it’s estimated that there are 4 million abortions a year in Russia, and only 1.7 million live births.”

Ted Turner on climate change and China's one child policy

Mr. Ted Turner, ‘media mogul’, and long-time advocate of population control, has said that the ‘environmental stress’ on the planet Earth requires ‘radical solutions’. Such solutions, he says, would include that countries should follow China’s one-child policies in order to reduce global population over time.   He has also suggested that ‘fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.’   

But former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson (she who decided to cut short her position as president in order to take up a more ‘important’ role at the United Nations, and who has now once again returned to Ireland with a new personal venture for which she may be receiving a handsome grant from the Irish government), considers that radical solutions for population control, such as that suggested by Ted Turner, might backfire.  She clearly agrees with the goal however it is simply the methodology she considers to be too radical, ‘If we do it the wrong way’, Mary Robinson is quoted as saying, ‘we can divide the world.  A lot of people in the climate world could communicate this very badly.’   Indeed.  We know where Mary Robinson’s concerns lie.

Just a comment – funny how the phrase ‘global warming’ has gone out of fashion and is hardly used at all nowadays, certainly not after the snow, ice, and freezing temperatures of recent weeks.  No, it’s now called ‘climate change’ – so that any weather conditions can be used to justify the ‘over-population’ myth.

World Population Day 2010 ‘Everyone Counts’

World Population Day was established in 1989 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to call attention to urgent global issues.

The theme for this year’s population day, Sunday July 11 2010, “Everyone Counts” is a really important one and whatever the intention of UNFPA was in choosing the theme, it affirms the lives of every living human being irrespective of who they are and whether they are born or unborn. There are of course many groups of people throughout the world who are suffering from lack of food, water, health care and other essentials of life and every one of these lives counts. It incumbent on first world countries to ensure, that everyone can access the means of survival. Yes everyone, every human being counts

I say of UNFPA ‘whatever their intention was’ because they proclaim the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. Their stated goals are to advance

“policies and programs to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.”

Sadly UNFPA, despite their wonderful rhetoric, are not known for upholding the right to life of unborn babies, they have a long history of being more interested in population control and the establishment of a human right to abortion than accepting that unborn babies are human beings who actually count, human beings with an equal right to life.

There are some rights, which the state has authority to confer (such as citizenship) but there are also fundamental rights of human beings. Fundamental rights, including the right to life, are inherent to, and derive from, the dignity of the human person. These rights are not bestowed by governments but must be recognised by them and protected in law. The right to life and equality is enshrined in a number of international human rights instruments.

Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins the articulation of the human values to be defended in terms of human rights.

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person."

There is no basis for dividing up the human family into persons and non-persons, but there is agreement from science that from fertilisation we all share a common humanity, that we are all members of the "human family", to use the Declaration's words. The attempts to disenfranchise some members of the human family from moral consideration has led to justifications of intolerable abuses of human rights including slavery and genocide. The Declaration, following the United Nations Charter, rejects discrimination against any members of the "human family", and requires the "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family".

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) states that: "The child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth." This is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world.
Article 6 of the CRC is also relevant
States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life.
States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.

The destruction of human life by abortion is the greatest human rights struggle of our time. The World Health Organization estimates that 42 million abortions are performed worldwide each year—a profound violation of the equal dignity and rights of human beings and one that requires urgent and sustained attention to ensure the survival of every human being particularly the most vulnerable every one of whom definitely counts.

More on the tired notion of population control saving the planet

I have blogged on the population issue before and will no doubt return to it again, because the penny is beginning to drop with some governments that their policies in pushing contraception and abortion has caused major population depletion, which combined with population ageing will ultimately cause economic collapse

The Guardian weekend magazine (13 February 2010)published an article,"Climate change: calling planet birth" on the subject of population control for the so called ‘saving of the planet’.

‘Twelve years ago, the American author Bill McKibben published a short book entitled Maybe One: A Personal And Environmental Argument For Much Smaller Families.’ This is how the article starts. It’s a long article, and it makes for some interesting reading. Here are a few extracts:

‘… Even commentators who warn of the evils of overpopulation, proudly trumpeting their willingness to raise controversial issues in defiance of “political correctness”, only rarely emphasise the notion that we – rather than those in the developing world – might consider doing less of the populating. […]
‘If you live in Britain or the US in 2010, there is nothing you can do to reduce your impact on the environment that even comes close to the effects of having one fewer child. This makes intuitive sense: every new human is a new consumer with their own carbon footprint, along with their own potentially limitless chain of descendants.
‘[…]The Stop At Two position caused a minor furore last year when Jonathon Porritt, the veteran environmentalist and then a government adviser on sustainability, told an interviewer, “I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible.”’

Commenting on this statement, Josephine Quintavalle – described as ‘the pro-life campaigner’ – is quoted as saying: ‘This seems to be the same old thing: save the world but kill a human.’

The article ends with a quote from The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman (2007) – ‘At such far-more-manageable numbers […]’ [referring, presumably, to the aftermath of a massive population control] ‘we would have the benefit of all our progress, plus the wisdom to keep our presence under control. That wisdom would come partly from losses and extinctions too late to reverse, but also from the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful. The evidence wouldn’t hide in statistics. It would be outside every human’s window, where refreshed air would fill each season with more birdsong.’

The only problem with such an idyllic picture of the world is – who is left to enjoy it?

Demographic Bomb

One of the ways currently being proposed of reducing global warming and its effects is todecrease human activity and the proposal suggests that the best way to do so is to decrease population. This was seriously proposed by the Chinese government last week during the summit currently taking place in Copenhagen .

The coercive and draconian population control methods of the Chinese are well known and rejected by all right thinking people and yet they are now being proposed as the solution. Sadly we have heard of solutions like this before and even a so called "final solution". World governments must not go down this pathway.

The following trailer for the Demographic Bomb gives another side to the story

Swallowing the Myth

As a postscript to the population myth video I presented a few days ago, here are a few quotes from a recent ‘opinion piece’ in an Irish newspaper: ‘Earlier this month, the UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) marked World Population Day by stating

“an investment in contraceptive services can be recouped at least four times over by reducing the need for public spending on health, education and other social services”.’

The columnist goes on to tell us that:‘

There are two ways for human numbers to achieve sustainable levels. The first is the laissez faire approach, in which population continues to spiral until nature, via famine, disease and wars, cruelly regulates our numbers. The other route is to support initiatives – including contraception and empowerment for women – to achieve the same result. For humanity to continue on its current path without expecting the severest of consequences is, says [David] Attenborough, a silent lie. “This absurd taboo betrays our children.” …. The UNFPA [also] estimates that family planning alone would reduce maternal deaths by 40 per cent.’

Have I missed something in these contradictory statements or is this simply a case of blind repitition of anti life ideology?

People as Pestilence

A group calling itself ‘Sustainable Population Australia (SPA)’ has declared that Australia’s 22 million people must be reduced to 7 million in order to avoid ‘environmental suicide’. The way in which this population control pressure group would plan to reduce the Australian population is to restrict every couple to one baby – on the lines of the infamous One Child policy enforced in China.
The group’s national president has also called for the abolition of the government baby bonus paid for all children in a family after the first child.

The Australian Democrats party, however, to which the national president of the group originally belonged, has distanced itself from her proposals, and the party has issued a statement, as follows: ‘It is a core belief of the Australian Democrats that we must work together to find practical solutions to all our problems that do not infringe the right of Australians to choose how they want to live their lives.’

The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, commented that: ‘We need to start rethinking this [anti-natal] attitude if we want enough people around when we are old to care for us, pay taxes to support us, and if necessary, go to war to defend us.’

Holy See Critical of UN Population Reduction Mentality

In a hard hitting speech to the United Nations, International Commission on population and Development (ICPD+ 15) Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN, strongly criticized the "population reduction" mentality evident in the conference preparatory documents

The Archbishop commenced by pointing out that the preparatory documents for the conference were influenced by a strongly anti-life attitude, "In reading the preparatory documents for this session of the Commission one cannot help but get the impression that populations are seen as the hindrance to greater social and economic development rather than vital contributors to the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and greater sustainable development," he said.

Archbishop Migliore also said that 15 years ago"many demographic experts and politicians" were forecasting an apocalyptic vision of a "population explosion." Nevertheless he continued, "now, fifteen years later, the population growth has begun to slow, food production continues to rise to the point where it is capable of supporting a larger global population and is even being diverted to the production of fuel." “It is almost ironic” according to the Archbishop,” that environmental destruction is perpetrated primarily by States with lower growth rates and that developed countries are supporting population growth at home while simultaneously working to reduce it in developing countries."

The Archbishop continued “the increased birth rates in Africa over the last decades have been identified by experts as lowering the elderly dependency ratio and presenting the population with a plentiful workforce capable of providing the Continent with an unprecedented advantage in economic terms over regions whose ageing populations show growing economic challenges. To capitalize on this opportunity, for Africa and ultimately for the whole world, greater commitment must be made to provide economic assistance and investment in human capital and infrastructure to support economic growth. Consequently, additional funding programs which focus upon lowering population growth rather than fostering an environment for development will slow, not expedite, the achievement of the MDGs.”

Population in the news again

In Britain, the chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission has said that people who have more than two children are 'irresponsible'. John Porritt feels very strongly about this and would like lowering the population to become the priority for green groups. As a campaigner, I would respectfully suggest that Mr Porritt read Steve Mosher's book Population Control which challenges the Malthusian myths that are still being spread by UN agencies - with disastrous consequences.

As the thoroughly unembarrassed father of seven children, I would respectfully ask Mr Porritt to mind his own business. Couples are perfectly capable of determining how many chidlren they can sensibly bring into the world without resort to contraception and abortion (advocated by Jonathan Porritt) and most definitely without his admonitions.

Go Home! Make Babies!

I couldn't suppress a smile, reading this CNN story about a laudable project in Japan to encourage couples to have more children. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, well below replacement level and unlike most other countries with a looming underpopulation crisis, the authorities are attempting to turn things around. Workers at Canon are being encouraged to go home early twice a week to spend more time with their familes and, well, make babies. Well done, Japan.

Among the comments on the article I found this gem tagged Lionel

Think of it! Every baby is born a consumer: milk, wipes, diapers, clothing, toys---- and becomes a producer and a tax-payer. Where would our economy be today if had the 40 Million+ babies that have been aborted. Hats off to Japan!

h/t Standing on my Head

Nature is a harsh judge

Mary Magdalen has a link to an extract from a documentary on the demographic crisis facing the western world. Fr Blake expresses a certain degree of anxiety about such videos because of the possible racialist agenda (not enough of us, way too many of you in a manner of speaking) of these documentaries, but I am not sure this is what the video is attempting to convey.

In any case, as one message in the combox stated rather ominously:

Fr Ray, as the (immigrant) mother of two babies and counting, I would agree that economic policies make it very hard for families in this country but that is not the real issue, it is the social expectation that 'two children are enough' and that babies are a burden who cramp your lifestyle. I come across this attitude among Christians all the time, including among 'orthodox' Catholics.

My children are mixed race and I have no time whatsoever for people who moan about shrinking indigenous populations when those populations themselves are contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. God is merciful, nature is harsh.

Mosher on Population

In an interview on Fox News, Steve Mosher of Population Research Institute (see previous post) reacts to the news that the population of America is increasing, particularly among minorities.

Steve Mosher's major point is that people are an asset not a problem and an increasing birth rate is a sign of stability and optimism within a country. He compares America's positive population growth and economic situation with Europe, where 'they are opening cemeteries and closing maternity hospitals.' It is difficult to listen to as a European but rings horribly true.