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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)
On Sat, 30 Nov 1996 20:30:55 -0700, mfriesel@ix.netcom.com "noted":
>>The biggest problem is society's inability to accomodate swelling
>>populations. Is this a porblem wiht management, or a problem of
>>population? I think both. Incompetant management coupled with
>>increasing demand on a system -> crisis.
David Lloyd-Jones <dlj@pobox.com> wrote:
>If the management is so incompetent, howcome malnutrition is dropping
>in both absolute and relative terms, most infectious diseases are
>substantially under control, literacy is spreading like wildfire, and
>the birth rate is dropping everywhere?
Uhm, actually, infectious diseases aren't going down - not everywhere.
Malaria is spreading - the incidence of waterborne disease in the US has
been on the rise since the 1970s (well over 1 million people a year become
ill in the US and this number is assumed to be underreported). There are
many emerging diseases and many reemerging diseases (i.e. Tuberculosis).
You can check out the CDC web page (http://www.cdc.gov) for more
information. Of course, then there's the influenza pandemic....
Some things are getting better and some things are getting worse but the
bottom line is that some things need to change - or else. It won't simply
be a matter of a few or even many people dying - it'll be a matter of a
lot of people dying and wholesale degradation of the environment we depend
so very heavily on. We don't live in a vacumn. As for the economics,
well, we're going to have to pay for it - one way or the other. Money
isn't the end all, it isn't what gives us a reason for existance. It's a
tool we use - we need to treat it as such rather than as something more
important than humans and the environment we live in.
joan
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