X-Message-Number: 7386
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 21:44:45 -0500 (EST)
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
Subject: Australia

Peter Merel writes: 

> Note also that the percentage of the world's population that lives in
> non-industrialised countries is increasing - in 2025, according to the
> World Resources Institute, it will be 84%.  

84% of the world's population will be living in countries that used to be
classified as non-industrialised at some particular point in the 20th
century.  If China now has more dollar-milliionaires than the US, at what
point will you reclassify it as industrialised?
 
> Throughout the developing world, population pressure on marginal land is
> contributing to massive deforestation and soil erosion. The best land for
> agriculture is already taken. Landless people have no alternative but to
> try to farm land that is not suited for farming, such as steep hillsides
> or forests.  Slash-and-burn clearing for agriculture is a leading cause
> of deforestation, and when fields are cut into steep hillsides, rain washes
> the topsoil away.

I note that most of Europe has been deforested in the past 2000 years; but
that it supports a larger population now than it used to in those days...  

I agree that reforestation is morally incumbent on those with the
opportunity to practise it.  (Scotland has done quite a lot.)

I note that China, with only slightly more land than Australia, holds 50
to 100 times as many people.

I look forward to the reforestation of Australia, massive immigration with
the opening up of borders, and its population increasing to a billion.

Recognise that I'm Australian myself, and can tease and be mostly serious
at the same time.....

> These effects have been implicated in the downfall of previous
> large-scale civilizations such as the Maya. 

Actually, the downfall of Mayan civilization was due to token warfare
evolving into unbelievable bloodbaths, with the execution and sacrificing
of captured cities' populations becoming both commonplace and religiously 
justified.  (1996 tv documentaries on the Maya are very different from
those of a few years ago.)

As to truck drivers...  Sometimes an Adolf Hitler or Jim Jones will
try to bring his society with him into mass suicide; sometimes a Ghenghis
Khan or Timur will determine that cities are a hindrance to nomadic
herding societies; sometimes leaders will destroy rather than create.

The Mayan collapse was due to lousy Central American truck drivers, not to
ecological mismanagement.

Australia is a very exciting place because of its enormous potential for
new creation.  I'm not surprised that the euthanasia debate is so alive
there.  (After all, Australia is one of the youngest societies in that
part of the world - say "Youth-in-Asia" ;)  So we should expect arguments
for and against radical social change, and open and heated debate.

And while I'm on my soap-box, there's one more thing I'd like to see: wipe
the bloody stingers out, so that people can swim in the sea in summer in
Queensland, NT and WA.

As for life extension, there's a reason people like to live in warm
climates: your internal thermostat switches off, you don't have to keep up
your internal heat generation, so your body temperature can actually be
cooler, plus you don't have to eat as much....  

Peter, I look forward to meeting you when I get back to Oz in the next few
years!  

Always optimistically,

Robin HL


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