Malthusianism

Banksy: Another subject of ridicule on spiked

I am curious to know just how many people subscribe to spiked or are aware of the opinions expressed by Brendan O’Neill and other disciples of Frank Furedi. The website’s predecessor was the magazine LM or Living Marxism, a publication bankrupt in 2000 after losing a lawsuit to British Independent Television News (ITN) due to an article published by LM entitled “The picture that fooled the world”. The picture in question depicted a starving Bosnian Muslim behind a barbed wire fence that ITN claimed had been taken at a Serbian prison camp during the Bosnian war. A horrified world began to contemplate that once again, genocide was occurring on our watch and lessons supposedly learnt from regimes such as Pol Pot and the Nazis had been forgotten.

Enter LM Magazine.

According to LM’s author Thomas Deichmann, the picture was actually depicting a refugee and ITN’s opportunistic photographer had deliberately taken the photo with a barbed wire fence in the foreground to simulate the plight of a prisoner. In other words, the emaciated figure in the photograph was not a prisoner at all. This explanation fitted Deichmann’s claim that genocide was not actually taking place in the former Yugoslavia, the opposing sides were simply fighting a war.

Browsing through the articles on spiked and LM you will find many other examples of human apologist articles including some claiming that genocide never actually occurred in Rwanda either.

The overwhelming common theme throughout the site is the hatred of the environmental movement and any other cause that “stifles” human advancement such as the animal rights movement. The philosophy at spiked is that any activity is worth doing as long as it benefits humankind. Any person opposing this philosophy is dismissed as a misanthropic, miserablilist, Malthusian member of the left that resides in an inner city area drinking chardonnay, latte or any other elitist beverage you care to mention.

A straw man here and a straw man there

The routine denigration of people opposing their homogenous world view is something that spiked excells at and the undisputed king of this tactic is Brendan O’Neill. His often camp narrative is laced with straw men and largely directed at teasing and namecalling his oponents with scant regard to addressing the underlying issue. A recent piece by O’Neill for The Australian is a perfect example of this. In the article O’Neill depicts the left leaning public worshipping at the alter of Julian Assange and ridicules supporters of Wikileaks. spiked consider themselves to be champions of free speech however they have nothing but contempt for “St Julian of Assange” and anybody that supports Wikileaks.

O’Neill saves most of his energy for those that oppose an increase in human population. He has stated that the earth can support hundreds of billions of people and that anthropogenic climate change is an alarmist concept invented by the “green elite” – that chardonnay sipping, latte drinking lot mentioned earlier. It seems that Thomas Malthus got it wrong. When he was busily working out the concept of carrying capacity and the problem of human overpopulation he forgot to factor in the variable of human ingenuity. That’s right, human technology lets us off the hook. spiked envision a world whereby the human race settles every scrap of land and then begins the process of colonising other planets. Call them cornucopian, call them futurists, call them craaazy, just don’t call them a cult or bring up their rather dodgy Marxist / Communist origins.

The gang at spiked make no concessions for those other factors in the population puzzle that more than offset advances in technology. Human stupidity, human greed and human ignorance do not rate a mention. Instead, O’Neill argues that population alarmists fail to appreciate the contribution human beings have made towards the development of planet Earth, after all :

Without us it (the earth) would just be another ball spinning through space stuffed with useless coal and pointless uranium

Selective “faith” in science

You see the people of spiked have a lot of faith in the scientists of the world that form the cutting edge of human ingenuity and achievement. That is, unless the person is a climate scientist and belongs to the 97% majority of climate scientists that believe AGW to be very real. These people are referred to as “authority figures in white coats” or even described as “men in white coats who have replaced men of white cloth”. Yep that’s right, the subject of climate science is referred to as a religion with the scientists delivering the sermon. AGW, like it’s predecessor pollution is a subject only raised by those with alarmist tendencies – the folk at spiked (like the bloggers at The Australian) never waste an opportunity to ridicule the concept of AGW yet go weak at the knees at every advancement in biotechnology or engineering feat.

The subject of carrying capacity and finite resources is an alien concept to O’Neill, he firmly believes the earth to contain an infinite amount of resources and therefore an unlimited ability to support an infinite number of people. Once again, technology will see us through. O’Neill points out that in the past Romans have worn jewellery made out of coal and in the 20th century uranium was used to make glass and these people didn’t have a clue at the time this resource could be used for a more worthwhile purpose. This rather simplistic way of looking at how we once used these valuable resources does not convince me that resources are infinite. At least a piece of coal jewellery or a uranium glass vase can still be used today. What can you do with a cloud of carbon dioxide or a rod of spent uranium?

Another key point in O’Neill’s argument is that the Neo-Malthusians constantly refer to people as consumers when they ought to be labelled as producers. He takes great delight in pointing out that misanthropic miserabilists don’t see individual people as resources on this planet but dehumanise them by referring to them collectively as consuming masses producing nothing more than pollution and generally making life more difficult for the rest of us. O’Neill will casually link the modern Malthusian with unqualified support of China’s one child policy and even eugenics studies when the subject of family planning is raised in third world countries. He does have a habit of pigeon-holing people into the most extreme camps and doesn’t concede that the majority of people concerned about human overpopulation are moderates and see human overpopulation as a threat to humans in itself. No, in O’Neill’s world if you are not jumping for joy when the human population hits 7 billion this year then you are misanthropic. If you’re not with us you’re against us.

The website is run as a not-for-profit but the writers at spiked make no attempt to attract potential subscribers, on the contrary they make every attempt to alienate the reader of almost every persuasion – at least once. For example, a catholic reader may be offended by the myriad of articles published that are pro-abortion and pro-stem cell research. A non-catholic reader may be offended by O’Neill’s defence of the catholic church during the sex scandal that accompanied the pope’s visit to the UK last year.

The rights of non-humans

You would not have to be an animal rights activist to be offended by Helene Guldberg’s rather provocatively titled article :

Animals are useless, unless humans make use of them

Helene’s groundbreaking research has led her to the conclusion that there is actually quite a huge difference in the learning capacity of humans as compared to apes. We now know that all of the buildings around us, all of the stuff that’s been invented and every piece of culture handed down throughout the ages is the work of human beings. No ape made any contribution whatsoever. Furthermore, she’s written a book about it entitled “Just Another Ape?” I’m not sure why her book title isn’t quite as colourful as her article in spiked, maybe O’Neill comes up with the websites titles. I do know that a book outlining the differences between humans and apes would be a fizzer compared to one highlighting the similarities. Helene does attempt to spice up the article however:

This is not to say I’d advocate wanton cruelty to animals. Destructiveness for the sake of being destructive - such as taking pleasure from hammering nails into the eyes of cats - is degrading to humans. It is inhumane and uncivilized. But it is only so because of what it tells us about the person who is carrying out the act and the effect it has on other humans. That’s because animals only have value in relations to humans. They have no value in and of themselves.

So there you have it.

Hammering nails into the eyes of a cat is only wrong because the perpetrator is now considered to be a sadist and others have to deal with it? Maybe they should have used that statement for the title….

Going to Helene’s website you may notice that her book “Just Another Ape?” is recommended by a fellow that wrote another book entitled “Not a Chimp”. Suffice to say you would need a strong stomach when joining this pair for a coffee. Advocating vivisection is what Dr Helene Guldberg does when she is not lecturing in child development or co-editing spiked.

An organisation that conducts animal research such as a drug or cosmetic company will usually hide the practice from public view and not get dragged into an argument about what is right or wrong. Helene and other contributors on spiked take a different approach. If you manage to convince yourself that any non-human has no fear and feels no pain then you are well on your way – animal cruelty is but a thing of the past. Stripping an animal of its sentience will help banish that nagging empathy you may feel…….

This is sound advice coming from a person lecturing in child development. For more handy tips on parenting don’t miss Helene’s other book entitled “Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear”

Corporate Funding

You would be excused for thinking that spiked is merely a front for lobby groups, PR companies or think-tanks and you may very well be right. The site does excellent work for drug companies, oil companies, the tobacco industry and property developers throughout the world (to mention just a few) but spiked maintain they are not in the pockets of corporations. Sponsors listed on their site include drug companies such as Pfizer and others such as Cadbury Schweppes and Hill & Knowlton.

Hill & Knowlton?

Some readers may recall an incident that occurred in 1990 in the lead up to the first gulf war. It is now known that the PR company Hill & Knowlton were responsible for the following misinformation:

One controversial maneuver was the arrangement of the testimony of the Kuwait ambassador's daughter as “Nurse Nayirah” to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990. Nayirah falsely testified that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing hundreds of premature babies at the al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City. This lie had an enormous emotional impact on the decision in US-American politics and public to support the war against Iraq. It was mentioned several times by president George H.W. Bush and other war-supporting people to manipulate the public opinion

The people at spiked routinely condemn western governments meddling in the affairs of arab nations. O’Neill himself wrote :

in the first Gulf War of 1991, US soldiers (like the rest of us) were fed a diet of propaganda about Iraqis doing nasty things to Kuwaiti women and children; even during the supposedly humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1993, American troops referred to Somalis derogatively as 'skinnies', viewing them as gun-toting lunatics high on quat.

You would think that the PR company responsible for cooking up this diet of propaganda would be public enemy number one at spiked but you would be wrong.

spiked and Hill & Knowlton openly partner up for various events such as seminars and appear to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. It’s difficult to imagine how O’Neill can reconcile this and the simple answer is…. He can’t.

How spiked can ally themselves with the PR firm responsible for spreading lies about babies being killed by Iraqi soldiers in the lead up to the first gulf war seems almost beyond belief. O’Neill’s disgust with this propaganda seems laughable and surely reflects his lack of sincerity about this issue and for that matter any issue.

As a footnote it’s worth pointing out another passage in O’Neill’s article from 2003:

During the Second World War, particularly in the run-up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, US propaganda depicted the Japanese as 'vermin'; in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s American troops were, according to one Vietnam vet, encouraged to see the enemy as 'less than human'

Perhaps the US military should make Helen Guldberg’s works required reading once they have overcome their perception that the enemy is human. A soldier’s ability to hammer nails into the eyes of the enemy (minus the guilt) would surely be a useful quality to possess out in the field. Just remember son, they have no value in and of themselves…. The rest is easy.

""There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive."
Lester Brown

In “Ishmael”, Daniel Quinn used the character of a gorilla to get outside of our politically correct, green-left box of humanitarianism, as conditioned by a heritage of agrarian-born “Sky-God” religions, socialism and feminism. Seen from a gorilla’s point of view, our social and environmental problems could seem open to solutions that our Judeo-Marxist inhibitions will not allow on the table.

"It is definitely the view of humanity from a non-human point of view, so that our perceived virtues are not necessarily virtues when they're perceived from the outside," Quinn explained. "The food race is a good example, the race between growing more food and birthing more people. We perceive generally that this race can be won by agriculture, so we cheer when we hear that agriculture has made some advance to support a growing population ¬ whereas in fact the race is unwinnable. It's like the arms race of the '70s and the '80s. ... There's no winning of the arms race. There's no winning of the food race either."

I would add an amendment to Quinn's dictum:The food race is a race that humanity cannot afford to win. The capability of continuing to expand the food supply to meet a growing human population which in turn would demand more food would be as calamitous as the discovery of a cheap energy source that could fuel all of consumption needs and wants. We are in desperate need of limiting factors, and nothing is more limiting than hitting a brick wall called “Imminent Mass Starvation”. The lack of food is the only effective contraceptive on the market today. We talk of voluntary family planning, or a One-Child Per-Family law miraculously applied world-wide, but the fact is, this is like betting your life’s savings on a lottery ticket. We have run out of time and haven’t the luxury of wishing on a star that a vast grassroots constituency for population reduction will emerge and rise up to impose their will on governments. The politically incorrect fact is that the balance of birth and death must be restored by working on both sides of the equation by being aggressively pro-active in preventing life and passively determined not to extend it at all costs.

So Mr. Brown, it is not too late to get out of your box. You must consider the possibility that civilization is not "sustainable", and that your quest to find a way to feed 9 billion people is a fool's errand. We cannot sustainably feed 9 billion, or 0.9 billion people for that matter---and trying to do that will only degrade our environment to a point where the prospects for species survival are even further diminished. You must come to realize that it is a matter of historical record that, like other species, left to our own devices the number of humans will expand to meet a higher level of food supply. Calling that realization immoral or callous is like railing against the Law of Gravity. A cap on food supply will be applied whether we like it or not. If it is done by nature, billions more people will suffer starvation down the road than will perish now if we reflexively resort to food relief without strings attached, that is, the implementation of an effective birth control regime. I suspect that even that condition will not suffice to bring population levels down quickly enough. As Peter Goodchild observed, lower birth rates must combine with higher death rates to avoid full catastrophe. The question may be, which is more valuable, our Judeo-Christian sensibilities---or the continuity of our species itself? So far the answer has been "Virtuous and extinct".

Tim Murray
September 5, 2010

Source of illustration http://awliya.wordpress.com/

Progress ideology and colonial racism in 19th, 20th and 21st century US politics

Margaret Sanger, nurse, feminist, and family planning pioneer, has been accused of a racist agenda to reduce the black population of the US, but this is to single her out unfairly among her peers. Her project was really a neo-malthusian one which attempted to empower poor women, black or white. Her most strongly held policy was that it was up to the woman to decide whether she wanted a child or not.

She has been quoted as if she were advocating eugenics for the black population of the US but that case: "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members," [Source:Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, Blessed Are The Barren; The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, Ignatius Press, 1991, pp. 17-18.] relies on misinterpretation. It seems pretty clear that Sanger, despite her upper social-class blinkers, was attempting to empower black women by appealing to black spokespeople so that US blacks would not mistaken her efforts as eugenicist. She succeeded and one of her spokespersons was Martin Luther King.

Right to Life and similar associations have often mis-used the above quote as a political tool against contraception, abortion and feminism, but pro-life banning of abortion and contraception has been misused in turn to promote large populations of labourers among the dispossessed for centuries. They have also been used to promote war - for instance by Hitler and Petain. In these cases, rather than look at racism in pro-lifers or in neo-malthusians, it would be better to ask the question, "Who benefits?"

Racist ideology then and now

The ruling classes of the 19th and 20th century colonial world used racist ideology to justify as progress the empire's oppression of the peoples it dispossessed. Most people accepted this ideology without question, because they learned it from the newspapers, from schools, and in universities. How could millions of immigrants have justified the massive dispossession of Indian nationals, Indian Americans, Black Africans and Aboriginal Australians and the disempowerment and political disruption of Chinese and Japanese, Pacific Islanders and so many others - in any other way? Otherwise intelligent people rarely had occasion to question this view of the world, without which so-called 'economic progress' could not and cannot continue. Humanitarians among the upper classes saw it as their duty to assist the unfortunate or the oppressed to rise somehow out of what was seen as their natural and historical state. Most of the time they would not have had any idea of the depths to which their own governments sank. See for instance this record of experiments on Africans by the US government until 1972.

The Celts as backward peoples

Malthus himself evolved his political theory in a society where the Irish were deemed congenitally stupid and recalcitrant and this had been used as an excuse from Elizabeth 1's time to dispossess them violently, destroy their forests for wood, and force them to labour for Anglo-settlers. A reading of Chrétien de Troyes' Le Conte du Graal (written in 1179) will show that, in Roman times on the continent, Celts were treated as hapless fools as well by their Roman dispossessors,

"Sire, sachiez tot entresait
Que Galois sont tuit par nature
Plus fol que bestes en pasture."

["Sire, everyone knows that Celts are all by nature sillier than grazing cattle"]

( Source: Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal[1179], ed. Charles Mela, Livre de Poche ( Lettres Gothiques 14 ), Paris, 1990v. 236-238 )".

Depending on the sectarian perspective, in the past and today, 'improvement' might be brought by 'bringing civilisation' as the Romans called it, preaching Christian or other religions, through education, through the provision of 'jobs' and industry, through hygiene and mechanised agriculture. Anything but returning land to people and getting out of their countries. Anything, even promoting larger populations of the dispossessed and the new possessors, which can only, of course, make things worse for all.

There is little difference between colonial ideology and corporate ideology in globalism, as we can observe in so many examples - from the ongoing calvary of 'free' Nigerians living near Nigerian oil-fields or of Australians in Australia (which remains a British possession), as land-prices and population are inflated to please property developers and mainstream press (which markets property), contributing to the re-dispossession of black and white Australians alike.

Racism and counter-racism arguments focus away from land-rights and dispossession

Obviously new methods of birth control are a poor second to not stuffing up the original steady-state societies of exploited countries. Malthusian and neomalthusian approaches, however, whilst usually not recognising the original damage and fault, nor restoring land-rights, nonetheless attempt to empower those who, through dispossession and authoritarian population-boosting, are exploited through their numbers and vulnerability.

Most of us swallow culturally vectored political stupidities whole

With any political program, it is necessary to always to look at the pieces that make up the whole, and discard the bits that don't make sense.

Sanger was born in 1879 and died in 1966. Although she had an enlightened attitude to women's rights, which was reflected in support from women who appreciated her efforts on their behalf, like many of her educated fellows, Margaret misinterpreted Darwin's theory in Spencerian terms. Here, for example are her ideas about human development, in which she says ghastly things about Australian Aborigines.

"It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets." Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

Ironic in a neo-malthusian, if you know that Malthus's first work was inspired by Joseph Banks's observations about the low birth-rate and small population of Australian aboriginals, whose lot he compared favorably to that of the overpopulous British of the late 18th century. See: "Thomas Malthus and Australian Thought"

Sanger, like most doctors and nurses of her time, was also frightened by masturbation:

In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.

Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

At least she had moved on from the general belief that siphilis was caused by masturbation. In fact she was persecuted for her militant attempts to educate people in how to avoid infection from siphilis and other venereal diseases. Siphilis, in common with HIV, has a long, virtually silent lead-up time. In the pre-antibiotic era it was a leading reason for long-term institutionalisation in physical and mental hospitals, but also for many still-births and congenital malformities. In mental hospitals it was known as 'General paralysis of the insane', cause, 'masturbation'. [Interestingly for Australians, in the first volume of the Australian 3 novel work by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, writing as Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930) we read of how the narrator's father, a doctor, was ferried across the Yarra River to the psychiatric hospital ('round the bend') because he had succumbed to general paralysis of the insane.]

Faked photograph

This photograph is faked for ideological purposes; it is a mock-up from Jill Stanek's Pro-life Pulse. There is a website that holds a contest each year for the best PhotoShopped creation depicting the event.
http://margaretsanger.blogspot.com/2008/12/winner-of-2008-margaret-sanger-at-ku.html It looks like they have expanded to video this year.

There is no real information about the event, no copy of invitations, her speech, or her motivations to talk to the Klan meeting. At the time, the American Birth Control League was trying to organize birth control leagues in NJ and gather support for legislative bills.

Sanger's account of her trip to talk to the Klu Klux Klan

Source:Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger An Autobiography 1971 reprint by Dover Publications, Inc. of the 1938 original published by W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 366-367.

"All the world over, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women's psychology in the matter of childbearing essentially the same, no matter what the class, religion, or economic status. Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.

My letter of instruction told me what train to take, to walk from the station two blocks straight ahead, then two to the left. I would see a sedan parked in front of a restaurant. If I wished I could have ten minutes for a cup of coffee or bite to eat, because no supper would be served later.

I obeyed orders implicitly, walked the blocks, saw the car, found the restaurant, went in and ordered some cocoa, stayed my allotted ten minutes, then approached the car hesitatingly and spoke to the driver. I received no reply. She might have been totally deaf as far as I was 1 concerned. Mustering up my courage, I climbed in and settled back. Without a turn of the head, a smile, or a word to let me know I was right, she stepped on the self-starter. For fifteen minutes we wound around the streets. It must have been towards six in the afternoon. We took this lonely lane and that through the woods, and an hour later pulled up in a vacant space near a body of water beside a large, unpainted, barnish building.

My driver got out, talked with several other women, then said to me severely, "Wait here. We will come for you." She disappeared. More cars buzzed up the dusty road into the parking place. Occasionally men dropped wives who walked hurriedly and silently within. This went on mystically until night closed down and I was alone in the dark. A few gleams came through chinks in the window curtains. Even though it was May, I grew chillier and chillier.

After three hours I was summoned at last and entered a bright corridor filled with wraps. As someone came out of the hall I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses. I waited another twenty minutes. It was warmer and I did not mind so much. Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak.

Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.

In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o'clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in a hotel."

Sanger can be seen as an imperfect human being like all human beings, but who rose above most of her fellows and did great good with great courage. This document and others available about the context and personages in the history of family planning and population policy are of great importance for human beings to understand the political systems we live in today. They contain both inspirations and cautions.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is a historical editing project sponsored by the Department of History at New York University. The Project was formed by Dr. Esther Katz in 1985 to locate, arrange, edit, research, and publish the papers of the noted birth control pioneer.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project has published a two-series microfilm edition, the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition Smith College Collections and the Collected Documents Series. Work on the Smith College Collections entailed the rearrangement and organization of over 50,000 Sanger documents in the Margaret Sanger collection and seventeen other collections at the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College Archives. Work on the Collected Documents Series included a ten-year international search of over 1,500 archives and private collections, photocopying material and organizing over 9,000 documents for publication. Both series have been published with a printed reel guide that includes an item-level index by University Publications of America, a division of Lexis-Nexis.

The Project is currently working on a four-volume book edition of Sanger's Papers, to be published by the University of Illinois Press. The first two volumes, subtitled The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 and Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 have been published.

The Project also published an electronic edition of a small sample of documents related to Sanger's Woman Rebel and is working on a larger electronic edition of Sanger's speeches and articles.

History records that Karl Marx had a fierce disregard for Thomas Malthus and his theory. Blaming the poor for their poverty was just not on for the socialist revolutionary from Trier, Germany. The system---capitalism---was to blame for everything. Dump capitalism, institute socialism, and people will presumably stop bonking. For Frederick Engels, socialism was like salt peter, it alone "makes possible that moral restraint of the propagative instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest remedy for over-population."

This attitude still can be found in contemporary Marxist literature. Joel Kovel, for example, in the introduction to his book The Enemy of Nature, anticipated that critics would fault him for not giving sufficient weight to questions of population growth. He made no apologies. "At no point (in the book) does overpopulation appear among the chief candidates for the mantle of prime or efficient cause of the ecological crisis.I see it as a secondary dynamic-not secondary in importance, but in the sense of being determined by other features of the system. I remain a deeply committed adversary to the recurrent neo-Malthusianism that holds that if only the lower classes would stop their wanton breeding, all will be well; and I hold that human beings have ample power to regulate population so long as they have power over the terms of their social existence. To me, giving people that power is the main point, for which purpose we need a world where there are no more lower classes, and where all people are in control of their lives."

The problem Joel, is that while we are waiting for your utopia to arrive, the world is adding 80 million people a year. We have to try to do something to stop that now.

And by the way, what was the socialist track-record in halting population growth in the third world, when "the people" were control of their lives (but apparently not of their hormones)? How did they do in Kenya, Tanzania, and Egypt under Nasser. How are they doing under the Marxist Mugabe in Zimbabwe? Why after trying their "classless" society did the Communist Chinese government find it necessary to institute a one-child policy?

Marxists still, after 150 years, engage in the fantasy that our species need obey no limits, that abundance is at hand if the world is rationally and democratically organized under "worker's control". "Malthus was right in asserting that there is always a surplus population; that there are always too many people in the world; he is wrong only when he asserts that there are more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence."

Engels made that statement more than a century ago, before Peak Oil. Modern Marxists have no such excuse.

The second to last word goes to my comrade, Chairman Albert Bartlett:

"Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum to food."

The last word is mine, a corollary of the above:

"Oil depletion. The ultimate contraceptive."