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A recent article in favour of population growth is Rise of the Mega-cities And why they will save the human race by Doug Saunders. A brief note at the end of the article mentions that Doug Sanders is author of Arrival City: how the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping our World from which the article obviously derives much of its content. The article, itself, was two and a half pages in length including a page of photos . It also had a promotional page including a photo which comprised the front page of the Weekend Australian Magazine of 21-22 August 2010.

The fact that a major daily newspaper, the Australian can promote and print an article, which proposes such a clearly suicidal course for humanity as, instead, a solution to humankind's current predicament confirms that that this paper's continued ongoing influence gravely threatens our future.

In fact, Doug Saunders pretends to be in favour of global human population stability, but, mind you, only after humankind has continued to its conclusion what he claims is the current depopulation of rural areas by crowding ever more hundreds of millions into the world's cities. He insists that this will actually rescue billions now in grinding rural poverty by giving them access to more lucrative livelihoods, presumably in the factories of the larger cites.

He claims that it will actually be possible for the further industrialisation of farming that he argues must inevitably follow the depopulation of rural areas to make even more food available to feed not only the remaining residents of rural regions, but the billions of residents or the cities. In Saunders' words:

What about farming? Well, fewer than five per cent of Western populations are now employed in agriculture - sometimes as little as two per cent - and this is enough to produce more food, at low cost, than the their urban populations can consume. Now that the poor half of the world is once again experiencing food shortages, it is desperately important that this high-yield agriculture develop in the poor half of the world.

Of course, Saunders 'forgets' that "this high-yield agriculture" depends upon the availability of water and of energy stored in fossil fuel fertilisers. Australia and most regions of the world are running out of both the necessary water and the fossil fuels.

If Saunders is wrong, as he must surely be, then what ghastly fate awaits the hundreds of millions more crowded into cities a long way from the land, when the mechanised agricultural systems inevitably fail to produce anywhere near as much food as is needed by them? By comparison, the humanitarian disaster in which over a million inhabitants of the Soviet City of Leningrad died, mostly from starvation during its 900 day siege from 1941 until 1944 by the invading Germans, will look like a weekend picnic in comparison with what awaits the hundreds of millions crowded into the megacities of the future.

Living in non-urban areas the cause of poverty?

A lie that Saunders' thesis is based upon is that rural inhabitants can only possibly live in desperate poverty and only through urbanisation can they hope to achieve any kind of affluence.

He attempts to draw a distinction between 'rural' poverty on the one hand and 'urban' poverty on the othee, claiming the latter to be far more benign:

Urban poverty may force a mother to send her child onto the street to sell her goods; rural poverty will cause that child to die of starvation.

Why people, living in urban areas, have a guaranteed protection from starvation is not explained.

In reality, rural settlements, controlled from the grassroots up, have given much of humanity both good standards of living and a strong sense of community throughout most of our history. The desperately poor rural communities that Saunders holds up as the fate which must await anyone who does not live in a modern crowded suburbia is only the by-product of the form of industrialisation which has been imposed upon much of the world by Britain since the 18th century.

Australia's 2.1% population growth rate, mainly fueled by immigration and their babies, by 2050 will cumulatively reach 50 million, not the 30 million being deliberately under-estimated by growthists. Do the Future Value calculation using compound interest.

Those that argue for or are defeatist about Australia having an over-run population have vested interests in the self-centred gains they will reap from a Rudd (congested) Australia.₁

Government gets the short term economic growth results from the increased demand, but deliberately ignores the social impacts and the long term economic problems. Developers and the construction industry benefit from getting more sales and profit from land use development from more people demanding more housing. Banks benefit by selling more mortgages to more people. Miners and big business get cheap labour since importing skilled labour is a quick and money saving way to populate its workforce. Skilled immigration saves corporations millions by avoiding the training of its own workforce and local Australians. That skilled immigration means displacing local Australians is not a concern to such corporations. Immigrants benefit by gaining a better life in Australia than from where the came.

The consistent driver of all these growthists is self-interest, not the selfless betterment of Australia and Australians.

Beware of the inherent bias of organisations reporting statistics to suit their own ends. The euphemistically labelled Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), is a right wing lobby group set up and funded by big business (mining companies and banks) to further the growthist aims of big business.

CIS is about as independent as the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Peoples Democratic Republic of (North) Korea are democratic. It should be renamed 'Growth is Good'.

It is important to be mindful of the counter sustainabililty arguments being put by the growthists. Pro-growth, pro-immigration lobby group FECCA, is an acronym for Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia. In its June 2010 issue of FECCA's 'Australian Mosaic' magazine, FECCA rejects the following concerns:

FECCA rejects the claim 'Our cities are unable to sustain population increases'
FECCA argues: "A number of key academics refute this proposition, arguing
that our cities can sustain more people without increasing the strain on infrastructure and the environment. However, effective planning and urban consolidation and a focus on rural and regional development are certainly needed to enable this expansion."

FECCA rejects the claim: 'We will lose the ‘Australian way of life’ if immigration increases'
FECCA argues: "This argument can be dismissed by referring to Australia’s growth over the last 60 years – during which time we had a 300% increase in population from 7 million to 22 million. Very few would argue that our way of life is now poorer or less ‘Australian’ than it was in 1945."

FECCA rejects the claim: 'Our environment cannot sustain a growing population'
FECCA argues: "It is necessary to recognise that the world’s population
exists regardless of how many people are in Australia. What is most important is the environmental behaviour of all Australians. Taking steps to reduce our environmental footprint is the key to allowing for our necessary economic growth. As it happens, in many instances immigrants are better prepared to demonstrate good environmental behaviour, having past experience in saving resources in harsh environmental or economic climates."

Footnotes

1.[back] Editorial comment: In fact, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was replaced some months ago by his deputy Julia Gillard. Whilst candobetter is far from uncritical of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the fact that she acted against Kevin Rudd's appalling misrule that benefitted, most of all, Australia's wealthiest, and was subsequently re-elected as Prime Minister, in the face of hostility to her from the corporate sector and its newsmedia, is a rare triumph for democracy and accountability. Gillard explicitly rejected Rudd's "Big Australia" plans to boost Australia's population. For that she and her Government is now under intense pressure by Australia's business interests to reverse her stance.

This YouTube Broadcast, "Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs - Updated 2010" graphically illustrates my point that immigration, unless at a rate vastly higher than even its strongest proponents are prepared to publicly argue for, will do nothing for 99.9% of the Third World's impoverished. Although high immigration cannot hope to help the poor of these countries, it will almost certainly impoverish the poorest in countries like the Australia and the US and cause incalculable environmental harm.

As Roy Beck says, the only way we can hope to help all, or, indeed, even a substantial proportion of the world's poor is to help them where they live.

Opposition to high immigration is equated by Eugene with 'nationalism', as if to label anything as 'nationalistic' automatically discredits it. This is often a tactic of the left.

From such logic, it would follow that were ordinary Australians to achieve the control over their standard of living and quality of life (which they now don't have) a terrible risk would arise. It is as if Eugene were suggesting that, in the longer term, there would be similar consequences to infamous variants of 'nationalism' when millions died, such as in German Nazism, Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide of the 1990's, and the First World War.

It would be interesting if Eugene could provide us with a single example of a credible government at any time in history that could not have been accused of being tainted with the supposedly evil trait of nationalism. Contrary to mainstream leftist mythology, which holds early communist examples as pure and genuine, even the early Bolshevik government from 1917 until 1923 implemented programs based on narrow nationalism on more than one occasion.

The first example was the Brest-Litovsk treaty of 1918 in which the Bolshevik Government ceded vast quantities of territory formerly controlled by Tsarist Russia to Germany. The territory included almost all of the Ukraine and the three Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Because the leaders of the Bolshevik Party of Russia and of the Tsar's former Asian colonies allowed the Germans to brutalise the people of these countries, the Germans signed a peace deal with the Bolsheviks, thus permitting them to go on ruling. The Germans were thus able to avoid fighting a war against their former Russian enemies in the East. This freed them to almost win their war in the West against Britain, the British Commonwealth, France and the United States in its military offensive in 1918.

A second example was when the Red Army entered Polish Territory in 1920. Then too, the Soviet Union appealed to Russian nationalism. It even sought, and obtained, the help of the Russian Orthodox Church. Politically this led to the counter-ignition of Polish nationalism and the military defeat of the invading Russian Red Army by the Polish Armies led by right-wing Marshall Pilsudski.

So, if the early Russian 'Communist' government could not be held to be untainted by nationalism, who could be?

At least nationalism is one means by which a community can assert its own rights, as long as the leaders of that nation are committed to the welfare of all members of that community and not just to a wealthy elite. Without nationalism, the rights of the poorest of the national community are sold out to wealthy foreigners as they were in Vichy France, Holland, and Norway after 1940 or in Japanese-occupied Korea. How much better have recent 'non-nationalist' Australian governments been, where they have allowed land and strategic assets to be sold off to powerful foreign investors? By the way, a new sell-out looms now in the contemplation of a Chinese [nationalistic] government built new power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley. How different were the actions of those puppet regimes from past history?