X-Message-Number: 14661
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 18:43:38 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Overpopulation

Philip Rhoades wrote (#14645):
>Sure, survival is one thing - living well is another -
>living on a moon with only three sorts of vegetable to
>eat is not my idea of a good time . .

The future is soon going to catch up to opinions like this.
Why should your happiness depend on the number of kinds of
vegetables you get to eat?  I really believe that if you were
to examine David Pearce's http://www.hedweb.com with an open
mind---and, sorry, it's not an easy read---you might come to
agree that the potential we'll have soon---and the potential
that we  must realize that we must try to develop!---will make
many of our customary assumptions obsolete.

>You don't know what you've got till it's gone quite
>frequently - but in this case it is much worse, to a
>large extent we will never know what we have lost . .

Well, here goes a bit of scandalous heresy:  the number of
known species of beetle is in the hundreds of thousands.
How many are enough?

>We can't even control our own massive self-destruction
>and torment, let alone worry about other animals . .

Surely you are exaggerating for effect.  The human race is not
and never has undergone "massive self-destruction".  (All too
many environmentalists wish it had!)  And torment?  The physical
circumstances of more than half the world's people today are
vastly better and healthier than those of people many centuries
ago.  True, people are only a little happier, (and even that wouldn't
be true if it weren't for the fact that now, in the latter half
of the 20th century, a smaller proportion of people than ever
die of starvation, cold, disease, or violence).  The real reason
that people aren't any happier on the whole is because we were
not designed by nature to be happy.  Yet it doesn't have to be
this way!!

>If we can't get it right on our (still) wonderful little
>planet what makes you think we have any chance anywhere else?


We have to keep trying.  And things are getting much better!
Consider just the Western Hemisphere for concreteness.  Five
hundred years ago ritual torture and human sacrifice were an 
important component of Mesoamerican civilization.  The Spanish
came, suppressed these unbelievable and frightful practices,
and improved them only with... what are to our modern eyes
barbarous savagery and enslavement.  Whatever the (rightful)
complaints of various people throughout the hemisphere today,
no one should imagine that things are as bad as they were.
In the vast majority of places on Earth, the story is the same:
human kindness is winning, even if many people have completely
denied progress, probably just out of a deeply held cynicism.

>> If overpopulation is such a big problem, why are the most
>> densely populated parts of the earth generally the most properous?
>
>Two things:
>
>- Even if this were true - why can an automobile move at
>100mph down the highway - one minute before it runs out of gas?
>- China, India, Indonesia . . . ?

Basically, the answer is that the automobile has no built-in
market mechanism or other feedback device that recognizes when
the "price" of fuel is getting very high!   As for some nations,
China has lowered its population growth in order to advance
economically.  India might do better also if the population
rate were to slow (as it probably will).  But for many places,
such as the U.S. and especially Canada, given the extent to which
they've become so capitalist, they're simply grossly underpopulated!
That's why so many people want to move to the U.S., and why the
economy there has absolutely no trouble absorbing them.


Lee Corbin

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