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Re: The Limits To Growth



Louis Schmittroth (louis@cs.athabascau.ca) wrote:
: >:  If McCarthy and the Pope are criminals, what do you see as your own
: >: relationship to this fast-breaking tragedy ? Do you have a "solution" ?

: >Put a book by Paul Ehrlich in every hotel room!

: >Yuri.

: If a book by Paul Ehrlich in every hotel room has an effect comparable to
: the Gideon's bibles, then we are doomed!

: And, no I don't have any alternatives, and if we have to vote on who is the
: biggest criminal, I agree with Yuri that the Pope is worse than McCarthy.

OK, I have a solution.  Make Paul Ehrlich the Pope.  That should do it!

Seriously though, I doubt if many of you have seen third world 
overpopulation.  It is really heartbreaking to see children hungry.
Whatever the cause of the poverty, continuing to have more people
does nothing but worsen an already unbearable situation. 

I think there would be an instructive lesson for people who advocate
that there is no population problem if they were to remain hungry for
just 3 days.  After that they may gain insight into the plight of 
people who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition.  Perhaps then
they may be less enthusiastic about the notion of how many trillions
of people the earth can hypothetically support.  The problem is here
and now.  It is totally uncivilized to not understand the existing
problem.  It is criminal to advocate that more humans be brought
into this world to suffer hellish conditions.

Bertrand Russell wrote that the sign of a truly civilized human being
is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.  I think
that there are too many people who have a great facility with 
arithmetic - just like computers: full of number crunching ability
and no capacity for wisdom, empathy or compassion.  Blightly calculating
that there are only 700 million malnourished people in the world
and not 800 million is great for nitpicking on the usenet.  But
can we comprehend what it must be like to be each of those 700 
million?  Are we talking of living, breathing, feeling beings or
are we talking of memory chips and 700 million seem such an
insignificantly small number compared to 2 gibabytes that it is 
of little consequence?

Maybe there is no population problem as the detractors of Ehrlich
claim.  But there is a problem: nearly a billion people live in 
circumstances that are hellish.  And the present economy/structure/
politics/technology/consciousness of the world is not fit to correct
that problem.  Therefore the best we can do now is to reduce the
extent of the problem while we try to find a way out.  

The Pope is a criminal; so is the 'Ghoul of Calcutta: Mother Teresa'.
Indict them.

Atanu

	        Lesser vehicle, greater vehicle -- no matter
	       All vehicles will be towed at owner's expense!

	     _____________atanu@are.berkeley.edu_______________
		      Univ. of California at Berkeley
			  RESOURCE ECONOMICS
             ============________________________============== 


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