Environmentalism

Have you ever seen the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It encompasses a floating island of plastic debris out in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas, about 60 to 90 feet thick, 1,000 miles off San Francisco. It kills millions of marine creatures and avian life in our oceans across the world annually. Over 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of Earth’s oceans. BY FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE.

“Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die” Gore Vidal.

Jill Quirk (President Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) Victorian and Tasmanian Branches, and National Representative) will host Dr Geoff Mosley to speak at the AGM, this Saturday, 7/7/2012, at 2PM. Dr Mosley was Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation from 1973 to 1986 and is currently the Australian Director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. Given the raging population growth and six new suburbs bearing down upon our Green Wedges, SPA Victoria's AGM is of great importance to Victorians.

The late Michael Crichton was partially right. The environmental movement in an increasingly secular society has assumed the mantle of Christianity. This is most particularly true, I would submit, in its obsession with motivations and intentions, as if nature gave a damn what we "intended". Too often those in the "environment justice" coalition choose politically correct pursuits and ignore their ecologically incorrect consequences.

You hear people like Rob Adams and Marcus Spiller saying there is nothing you can do about population growth in Victoria and Australia. Wrong. For a start the government should cancel the Live in Victoria website that invites people to come to Victoria and which explains how to get a visa. There is one in every state (Qld, NSW, the ACT, Tasmania, SA, WA, NT). They should all be pulled off the web. Pop Poll Results now available: 66% against further growth.

Imagine trying to drive your car from Alice Springs to Melbourne or from Vancouver to Winnipeg on one tank of gas. One passenger, the environmentalist, suggests that by driving at moderate speed, the car will run for more miles per gallon. Another passenger, the techno-optimist, believes that if the car has a tune-up, it will go farther on that tank of gas than if it didn't. The socialist passenger, meanwhile, believes that conflict in the car between the two privileged people in the front and the 5 people jammed in the back could cause you to drive off the road. Guess what. They are all right---the car would probably go further if you followed their advice. One problem. The difference would be marginal. The car would still fall well short of its destination. Living 'smaller', increasing technological efficiency and achieving equality would make but a trivial and short-lived impact on overshoot. To suggest otherwise reflects a serious lack of perspective and scale.

That is our predicament. We won't make it with 7 billion people, and the preoccupation with green living, technological efficiencies and wealth redistribution will not make a dent on overshoot. The focus then, must be on rapid population decline. The fight for sustainability cannot be a war fought on all fronts, but a single-minded determination to remove the first stumbling block to solving all other problems.

It has almost become commonplace now for prominent environmentalists like David Suzuki to declare that economic growth cannot continue in a finite world. Even Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been heard to quote Paul Ehrlich's old line that "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". The problem is, however, that they do not follow this insight through to its logical conclusion. What does economic growth consist of? If population growth is a critical ingredient of economic growth, then what drives population growth? And if migration to affluent countries promotes population growth in both the nations of emigration and the recipient countries, must not any credible strategy to fight economic growth involve tightening borders and restricting this flow?

If one checks the policies of the Australian Greens Party ('The Greens') on its website - of their 44 policies, some 28 are NOT directly related to environmental conservation, but instead 'social justice'. So where is the so-called 'Greens' Party headed and if most of their policies are NOT concentrated on core green conservation - does this political party deserve to retain its morally mandate for driving the 'green agenda' and should it morally brand itself big G 'Green'?

The resolution to rapidly reduce the human population involves patient choreography. First it must be seen to be necessary, and then an effective procedure has to be established with all options on the table. Ethical considerations must wait their term, and when they are called upon, the question can only be, not what is humane or inhumane, but what is the least inhumane of effective options. The choice is often not between Good and Evil, but between greater or lesser evils.

Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a paradigm-shift. In this article, John Feeney manages to be both concise and comprehensive. So many shrill voices locate our problem in the capitalist economic system, in the paradigm of economic growth, in obsolete technology, in greed or selfishness, in irresponsible living habits, in organized religion and so forth. But it goes much deeper than that. Not only is industrial civilization unsustainable, but so is civilization itself. "Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is unsustainable."

Population activists have been frequently accused of taking a simplistic approach to our environmental crisis. We are told that it is not just about human numbers, but how we choose to live. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is the environmental movement that is guilty of over-simplification. If they concede that population growth is a worthy concern, it is usually an afterthought, and typically framed as a global problem that afflicts distant continents. Their maniacal obsession with per capita consumption invites a countervailing stress on over-population.

Melanie Phillips accuses environmentalists who advocate small populations as "innately totalitarian", like "Stalin to Hitler to Mao." But Hitler gave out prizes to women who had the biggest families and Mao said that "Every child that is born has two hands to feed himself." Mao caused overpopulation in China. Hitler wanted space for Germany's population to grow. Is Melanie Phillips a professional ignoramus? See also Reproductive liberty and ecological meltdown