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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)



In article <57fggi$j7s@spider.cc.manhattan.edu>, Matt Regan <mregan26@st
udent.manhattan.edu> writes
>yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>
>
>>What are those "bizarre and unfounded charges"? Are you denying that the
>>Vatican is the main sponsor of overpopulation in the world today?
>
>
>
>Yes I am.   Most overpopulation (I can't belive Im saying even this)
>is created by NATIVE cultures that push having large families. the
>only reason i see for you to attack the church is that you do not have
>the moxie to go after the real culprits, the third wolrd countries
>standing social order themselves
>
>Matt Regan
>mregan26@student.manhattan.edu
>
>
the world problem is over consumption, not over population. consider the
following quote from "Preserving Wildness'  by Wendell Berry, the
American writer, farmer, and ecologist

....There is great danger in the perception that 'there are too many
people', whatever truth may be in it, for this is a premise from which
it is too likely that somebody, sooner or later, will proceed to a
determination of who are the surplus. If we conclude that there are too
many, it is hard to avoid the further conclusion that there are some we
do not need.  But how many do we need, and which ones?  Which ones, now
apparently unnecessary, may turn out later to be indispensable? We do
not know; it is part of our mystery, our wildness, that we do not know.

I would argue that, at least for us in the United States, the conclusion
that 'there are too many people' is premature, not because I know that
there are not too many people, but because I do not think we are
prepared to come to such a conclusion.  I grant that questions about
population size need to be asked, but they are not the first questions
that need to be asked.

The 'population problem', initially, should be examined as a problem,
not of quantity, but of pattern. Before we conclude that we have too
many people, we must ask if we have people who are misused, people who
are misplaced, or people who are abusing the places they have.  The
facts of most immediate importance may be, not how many we are, but what
we are and what we are doing.  At any rate the attempt to solve our
problems by reducing our numbers may be a distraction from the
overriding population statistic of our time: that one human with a
nuclear bomb and the will to use it is 100 per cent too many. I would
argue that it is not human fecundity that is overcrowding the world so
much as technological multipliers of the power of individual humans. The
worst disease of the world now is probably the ideology of technological
heroism, according to which more and more people willingly cause large
scale effects that they do not foresee and that they cannot control.
This is the ideology of the professional class of the industrial nations
- a class whose allegiance to communities and places has been dissolved
by their economic motives and by their educations. These are people who
will go anywhere and jeopardize anything in order to assure the success
of their careers.

We may or may not have room for more people, but it is certain that we
do not have room for more technological heroics.  We do not need any
more technological heroics.  we do not need any more thousand dollar
solutions to ten dollar problems or million dollar solutions to thousand
dollar problems - or multi billion dollar solutions where there was
never a problem at all.  we have no way to compute the inhabitability of
our places: we cannot weigh or measure the pleasures we take in them; we
cannot say how many dollars domestic tranquillity is worth. And yet we
must now learn to bear in mind the memory of communities destroyed,
disfigured or made desolate by technological events, as well as the
memory of families dispossessed, displaced, and impoverished by 'labour-
saving' machines.  The issue of human obsolescence may be more urgent
for us now than the issue of human population.

''
cmb     



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