Jacques Cousteau said, "to stabilize the world population we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say," he admitted, "but it's just as bad not to say it." This Hitlerian sentiment, published in UNESCO Courier in November 1991, is not rare among envirochondriacs.
So you are proposing that Jacques Cousteau suggested that we kill 350,000 people a day?
How does anyone know there is only enough water for five? Utterly discredited, yet an authority to liberals, is Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who has apparently not had a single prediction come true. America, he declared: would have widespread food rationing by the late 70s, would be "literally dying of thirst" by 1984, and would have 65 million famine deaths in the 80s.
Yes, but we all remember what happened to the little boy who cried wolf? A wolf finally did in fact appear.
Jack Fish, Brighton, Colorado public school teacher, school board member and local columnist insisted on KGOV.com's Bob Enyart Live that the reason for Somalia's famine was their over-population:
Enyart: What is Somalia's population?
Fish: I'm not sure.
Enyart: I'm not asking for an exact number, just to the nearest million.
Fish: I don't know.
Enyart: Well, then, if they are over populated, what is their population density per square mile?
Fish: I don't know.
Somalia's density is 29 people per square mile according to The 1994 World Almanac.
Apocalyptic doomsayers, these enviro-chondriacs flatly invent their facts. Somalia is under-populated, which often does produce famine. Compare Somalia's population density to countries in Western Europe. As a rule of thumb, countries with greater population density have higher standards of living, literacy rates, and life expectancies.
Somalia is a DESERT. Shouldn't that perhaps be factored into these statistics somehow. Isn't it odd that those countries that have the highest populations, and the highest standards of living, are also in temperate zones with adequate rainfall suitable for large scale agriculture. Funny how that works out.
The following numbers indicate the people per square mile for:
Nice Places ------Density-------Lousy Places--------------Density
Austria ----------243-------------Angola--------------------18
Belgium ----------848-------------Bolivi--------------------17
Denmark ----------310-------------Botswana-------------------5
England ----------613-------------Ctrl. Afr. Rep.-----------12
France ----------259-------------Chad----------------------10
Germany ----------583-------------Congo---------------------17
Ireland ----------129-------------Laos----------------------48
Israel ----------605-------------Liberia-------------------64
Italy ----------497-------------Libya----------------------6
Japan ----------830-------------Mozambique----------------50
Luxembourg -------400-------------Namibia--------------------4
Netherlands ------958-------------Niger---------------------16
Poland ----------317-------------Panama--------------------84
Rhode Is.---------848-------------Paraguay------------------31
Spain ------------200-------------Peru----------------------45
Switzerland ------428-------------Russia--------------------22
Athens -------30,237-------------Sudan---------------------29
Boston --------8,172-------------Somalia-------------------29
Paris -------20,185-------------Uruguay-------------------45
Rome -------43,949-------------Venezuela-----------------58
San Fran.-------9,315-------------Zaire---------------------43
Sydney -------10,460-------------Zambia--------------------30
Toronto -------20,420-------------Zimbabwe------------------73
Odd how the nice places are almost universally temperate, and the nasty places are almost universally desert, tundra, and rainforest. Hmmm..
Countries with lower population densities generally have lower standards of living. Notice the scarcity of human beings in the poor nations. Whereas some of the most beautiful places on earth, and certainly the most prosperous and desirable, have tremendously dense populations. Naples, Italy has 48,032 people per square mile and Madrid, Spain has 68,385 ppsm!
Enter the term 'carrying capacity'. Oddly enough, this is different for different climates. Whereas some of the more temperate climates (the beautiful places) on earth also happen to be quite amenable to providing the food necessary to sustain their larger populations, other locations do not. With technology, we can improve the carrying capacity of any climate (as we do in the U.S.), but it costs money, and requires technical skill, organization, and political will. Naturally these are also in short supply in areas of the planet where food and other resources are also scarce. Thus the U.S. is replete with an embarassment of riches, while the rest of the world struggles to put together the technical and political institutions to deal with their overburdened and overpopulated deserts.
In the Far East, Japan, at 830 people per square mile, has a much higher standard of living than countries liberals argue are over-populated such as China, at 315 and India at 700. Taiwan has one of the highest standards of living in the East, with 1,503 people per square mile, with five times the density as those of much lower prosperity on the mainland.
Both also have regular rainfall and quite extensive farming. The carrying capacities of these areas is 'not' infinite however, no matter how large they seem to be.
People are assets, not liabilities. Socialists and communists, however, since they must provide for so many helpless dependents, see people as consumers, rather than the producers most are. A few hundred years ago, famine was rampant in North America. Today, with a nearly thousand-fold increase in population, we not only feed ourselves but much of the left-wing world.
Famine was rampant in North America? When?
If the world's five-billion-plus people went to Colorado for a day, they could fit easily into one speck on the map of Colorado, the 404 square miles of Rocky Mountain National Park. They would not have to squeeze together like sardines, but could stand comfortably. The world's population would double before spilling over into the nearest town.
The sky is falling only in the chicken little minds of the over-population purveyor. Rather than a full house or a crowded lifeboat, an orbiting alien would view our world as nearly empty, as airline passengers can attest.
The question is not, "how many more people can we pack on this planet", because the answer to that is probably ten to fifty times the number we have right now. The question is, when you visit the local national forest, do you want it overcrowded with thousands of campers? How much of the existing forest and wildlands do you want to convert to food production? How many different species are enough, and how many should be allowed to quietly go extinct? And how many poor basket case starving surly anti-american hives of terrorism do we really want in the world.
Paul Ehrlich publicly bet a conservative economist that during the 1980s, natural resources would grow more scarce. Ehrlich choose five minerals to monitor. In 1990, losing the bet, Ehrlich made his wife sign the check, which amounted to over $500. The resources he was sure would become more scarce and therefore more expensive, in reality sold at reduced prices due to their greater availability world-wide.
What goes up must come down. There are resources which are underutilize (most of them I suspect even now), those which are utilized at parity, and those which are overutilized. Non-renewable resources such as oil, coal, and natural gas must someday 'run-out'. Even uranium which is used to fuel nuclear reactors will eventually be too costly to mine efficiently. Renewable resources such as refined metals, food, and others will never 'run-out', but become more expensive to recycle as they are utilized by more individuals.
What Ehrlich ignored, and what Enyart seems just and incorrectly to put unquestioned faith in, is our ability to use technology to more efficiently discover and utilize resources. The ability of technology to increase available resources and stretch the ones we have follows the law of diminishing returns. Eventually, some time in the future, additional investments in technology will not be justified by the efficiency they return. When this will be is quite unpredictable, as Ehrlich found to his lasting and well deserved humiliation, but again, this too is as ineluctable as the depletion of non-renewable resources.
Even the end-of-the-world prophets admit there is no global food shortage. Famine, like that in the former Soviet Union and in Somalia, results from false ideas, harmful religions and interventionist governments, not from too many people.
This is certainly true, but running it close to the bone on carrying capacity makes every little bit of political instability, drought, or famine a major disaster. But who wants to live a marginal lifestyl anyway. The best plan is to decide exactly how we want to live, and wisely keep within the limits that would allow us to live that way for a long period of time.
There is one point which I agree with Bob on, people are assets, and there are many benefits to having large numbers of people in cities and towns, contrary to what the tree-huggers may say. But it is wise to remember that somewhere out there there are in fact limits, and it is foolish to assume that they do not exist.
The Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University has estimated that, with current technology, the world could feed 100 billion people, while it is home to less than one-tenth that number, according to Robert Lee. Rapid progress in agri- and aqua-culture make it impossible to determine the upper limit of our future food supply.
But who would want to live in that world, I wonder?
Who do you throw overboard? The sailor, the doctor, the nurse? "No, the old woman is already sick," countless students have decided, "it's her time to go anyway." Planned Parenthood's founder and longtime president Margaret Sanger wrote that the handicapped, including the "blind, deaf, dumb, mute and epileptics," were the "dead weight of human waste." See her Pivot of Civilization, page 112, available through most public libraries.
Margaret Sanger wrote many things, but a good idea, like living within ones means, is a good idea no matter what one person one time said or did that has nothing to do with the idea.
With that anti-handicapped attitude from Planned Parenthood's founder, it is not surprising that they support killing handicapped unborn children, since they are only "human waste." It is not surprising that Planned Parenthood still gives out awards in Sanger's name.
When people decide that others are better off dead "for their own sake," it is not a far jump to Jacques Cousteau saying they are better off "eliminated" for the good of all. Whatever happened to one-for-all and all-for-one?
Historically, the over-population myth encouraged the brutal slaughter of the French Revolution. Greek philosophers feared the overcrowding of their ancient world. And even further back in time, the Babylonian and Assyrian accounts of the great flood held that, "the gods led by Enlil, agreed to cleanse the earth of an over-populated humanity."
I very much doubt these claims. However, the violence that comes from religious intolerance, conspiracy mongering and the other evils of society are pretty well understood.
Those who want ultimate control over others have long wielded the over-population myth. Yet 2,800 years ago wise Solomon knew that, "In the multitude of people is the king's honor, but in the lack of people is the destruction of the prince" (Proverbs 14:28).
And thus, Bob ends his missive with both thinly veiled conspiratorial innuendo, and a righteous call to arms.
