Don't get any ideas about a sustainable population...

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.

This article just goes to show that alot of people are breeding a race of imbeciles.. Notice where the article mentions that " There were kids chasing this poor kangaroo and it could have turned around and killed them, when they panic they can do all sorts of horrible things"..My answer to this is that its a shame this poor animal didnt take a couple of these Morons in the making out before it died this horrific death at the hands of this menace.. A kangaroo that died after it was harassed and chased by picnickers has prompted wildlife rescuers to call on the public to leave native animals alone. Rescuers were called to the Greenvale Reservoir on September 26 after reports a kangaroo was being chased, forcing it to keep running into a fence. By the time rescuers arrived, the animal "was bleeding everywhere” with broken teeth, a broken jaw, fractured eye socket and inflamed face from trying to escape through the fence. Wildlife rescuer Laurelle Erwin said they had no choice but to euthanise the male kangaroo. "People were just harassing him all day and it led to his death,” she said. Ms Erwin said hundreds of people were at the picnic site chasing the kangaroo and frightening it. The situation could have ended worse, with injuries making kangaroos "nervous and unpredictable”, she said. "There were kids chasing him, he could’ve turned around and killed them, when they panic they can do all sorts of things.” With more people expected to picnic and visit reserves in the lead-up to summer, Ms Erwin has called on the public to stay away from native animals. Ms Erwin was disappointed the public harassed the animal and said people needed more knowledge about how to treat wildlife properly. "It could’ve been prevented and we could’ve moved him on,” she said. RSPCA spokesman Tim Pilgrim said the public "should not attempt to chase or herd it away as the animal may become frightened or disoriented and injure itself”. He said the RSPCA was "very upset” that the kangaroo had to be put down. If you see injured wildlife call Wildlife Rescuers on 0417 506 941 or Wildlife Victoria on 1300 094 535. *Hume Leader

These "experts" selected for population committees by our politicians would not be able to design a camel! We don't need more committees, think tanks, consultations or studies about population. All we need to do is limit the baby bonus to two children per female, and limit immigration to 50,000 per year or less. We employ our politicians to be dynamic, to be thinkers and planners, and show some initiative and results. Even a child would understand that a finite vessel can't continually be added to or it will overflow! With the threat of food shortages from the demise of the Murray Darling food bowl, and the demolition of vineyards, market farms for urban sprawl, it does not take too much joining of dots to see that our main sources of population growth - immigration - must take some hard cuts. We are slaves to "political correctness" and fear of being called "racist". We must start public demonstrations, and resist being silenced by such ill-founded political manipulations.