Cull the Herd

Not a cull - but a drastic voluntary reduction of the world's population would be in order.

It would be fair to say there is a direct link between the number of people in the world and the levels of greenhouse gases, plastic pollution of the seas etc.. In other words - double the number of people - double the pollution.

If we embark, theoretically, on a world-wide programme to decrease our use-age of fossil fuels and disposable plastics by 50% over a period of 30/40 years and the population doubles in the same period - as it has on previous form - then our efforts are cancelled out.

Somehow we don't hear too much about this side of the problem.

recedite wrote: »

But also the practical one. In third world countries they have a lot of kids, but they invest very little in their kids. Its a bit like buying lotto tickets. More tickets improves your odds. The hope is that at least one of them will do well, maybe even make it to a wealthy country and send back some money. Others might not do well, or even die. Its important to plan for old age when there is no pension and you rely on your relatives for food.

This actually causes the downward spiral into greater poverty and chaos. The country is poor, with no pensions, so people literally breed their own pensions, but since everyone is doing this, you have more young mouths to feed in a country that's already poor, now you have a huge number of children and adults have to put a huge effort in feeding and looking after children, and less time doing things that might create wealth and make the country less poor. The result is war, famine, and more poverty, rinse and repeat.

Where does religion stand on having children. Jesus says absolutely nothing about either contraception of abortion being wrong, it seems thoughts central to Irish religious and social piety, were of such little concern to him, he never felt the need to speak on the matter. In the old testament there's even instructions and a recipe for carrying out an abortion.

So, in Ireland, it was probably nothing to do with religion at all, and maybe a social class of people who saw themselves as the farmers of men, simply breeding more livestock in an attempt to achieve greater wealth for themselves.

In the west, kids cost you a lot of money to raise, and you'll still get your pension whether you have kids or not. In fact your pension will probably be better without kids, because more time was available to be spent on career and work.

Pensions don't come out of thin air. Regardless of how old people have secured a means of financing their old age, the material goods are all going to come from young people. Basically, you can't buy a young healthy nurse and store her in a hole in the ground and then dig her up decades later when you need them. If they're not there, they're not there. You can't be a farmer of men, if there's no men there for you to farm.

Deleted User wrote: »

People talk of overpopulation like it's some kind of self inflicted burden imposed on the planet by the third world. Is the real problem here not as least equally down to over consumption in the west? That plus under production, ie arable land being wasted on the likes of tobacco, arguably even sugar, because a handful of people who decide such things can make more money than they can from garden vegetables. We can produce enough food to go around, we just don't.

It's not that simple. Basically, what's happened many times throughout human history, is highly fertile land has been destroyed through farming methods that were productive until the problems kicked in. Something as simple as cutting too many trees on a hillside, can lead to droughts, floods, crops destroyed, fertile topsoil washed away, and basically the creation of uninhabitable environments. The stories in the bible about places being destroyed by God, for one reason or another, the evidence is these places were destroyed through bad farming decisions. So, certain events in the last few decades could simply have come down to the wrong person getting their hands on a chainsaw in the wrong place. Mao's famines were generally the result of some silly idea like cutting down trees to make more room for farm land. But even things that don't seem related, like killing wolves, can trigger an environmental collapse.