9 posts tagged “d”
Conflicts between nations, tribes, classes, interest groups and ideologies will no doubt produce solutions which are quite different from our suggestions. But the most urgent cause at present is to make as many people as possible realize the gravity of the situation. Provoking discussion may be the best way of finding coherent and valid solutions. The problem is that of world development; it is too vast and complex, we repeat, to be solved by charity. Food aid without birth control will aggravate future difficulties; and support for corrupt, privileged minorities may strengthen the obstacles to development.
The new generation will find itself faced with difficulties such as the human race has never known before. We want to help to solve them but are not satisfied with the contribution we have made. The reader is, therefore, invited to take part in a constructive discussion.
In conclusion, I should like to acknowledge that widespread famine and terrible poverty do seem difficult to avoid. This should make us all the more determined to reduce their magnitude, since we are collectively responsible for our common destiny.
René Dumont and Bernhard Rosier in The Hungry Future (1969)
So human progenies, if unrestrain’d,
By climate friended, and by food sustain’d
O’er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.
Thus while new forms reviving tribes acquire
Each passing moment, as the old expire;
Like insects swarming in the noontide bower,
Rise into being, and exist an hour;
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breaths from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth’s vast surface kindles, as it rolls!
Erasmus Darwin in The Temple Of Nature Or The Origin Of Society, 1803, (Canto IV)
1. Any nation which limits its population becomes less numerous than nations which do not limit their populations. The former will then sooner or later be crowded out of existence by the latter.
2. A nation which limits its population forfeits the selection effects of natural biological competition and as a result must gradually degenerate.
3. The tendency of civilization to sterilize its ablest citizens accelerates this progress of degeneration.
4. The possibility that statesmen, perceiving these dangers, might agree upon a world-wide policy of limitation appears remote. How can they expect to agree among themselves in this area when they have failed to solve the far easier problem of military disarmament?
5. Even if agreement of nations could be obtained, there would be great difficulty in establishing limits to the number admissible for the various populations.
6. The problem of enforcement of population-limitation agreements would be extremely difficult.
7. The probabilities of fanatical opposition to population limitation would be enormous. Although existing opposition is not, in the main, strongly emotional, it is likely that at once population growth is forbidden by law, new creeds will emerge which will regard the practice as sinful.
8. The creedists, by multiplying more rapidly than the others, will make up an increasingly large fraction of the population, thus making enforcement increasingly difficult.
9. Natural selection will operate in favour of parental, as distinct from sexual instincts. Those persons who want large families will in general have more children than other, and to the extent that this characteristic can be inherited, it would spread throughout the population.
Sir Charles Galton Darwin in The Next Million Years, 1953
I am not optimistic that the plea to use much less energy will be heeded by governments, and certainly nothing I have written here will be welcomed by the global corporations, whose extinction I am explicitly calling for, but I know for a fact that there is already people all over the world, and especially in North America, who wan to be part of reversing the course we are on. We know that we must start sharing as if our lives depended on it – because they probably do.
For those who want to act, I hope this book will give you some useful facts, some good arguments, and a large dose of inspiration. We’re going to need all we can get. And don’t give up – we haven’t got time. Millions of people want action, want to do something, want it to mean something, and want it to last. The time is to act now, but not alone, like Gary Cooper; rather we must work together, in small groups and large, and start replacing the future with something that makes sense on a planet we have abuse for far too long.
With the risk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates, all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat fewer resources, on Earth. It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. If mere thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past-information that can save us. My main hope for my sons' generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter's.
Jared Diamond: The Easter Island’s End, in Discover Magazine, August 1995 (Essay)
My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world’s
interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archeologists and televison. While the Easter Islanders were busy deforesting the highlands of their overpopulated island for agricultural plantations in the 1400s, they had no way of knowing that, thousands miles to the east and west at the same time, Greenland Norse society and the Khmer Empire were simultaneously in terminal decline, while the Anasazi had collapsed a few centuries earlier, Classic Maya society a few more centuries before that, and Mycenean Greece 2,000 years before that. Today, though, we turn on our television sets or radios or pick up our newspaper, and we see, hear, or read about what happened in Somalia or Afghanistan a few hours earlier. Our television documentaries and books show us in graphic detail why the Easter Islanders, Classic Maya, and other past societies collapsed. Thus, we have the opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a degree. My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference.
Jared Diamond: Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed, 2005
In the overpopulated countries many of the characteristics of our civilization will survive, but they will be chiefly the superficialities because of life will be too hard to permit the people to go deeper. On the other hand, in the countries that have succeeded in limiting their numbers, progress will continue. New discoveries will be made which may tend to ease the life not only for these countries but of the whole world. Scientific knowledge will continue to advance. The torch of learning will still burn, and the greater names of the past will still be honoured.
I am very fully conscious that the view I have expressed run entirely counter to many of the optimistic hopes of the present age. I myself see little prospect of escape from the return to hard conditions of life, and much of my motive in setting my views down is the hope that that they can be contradicted by others who have a deeper knowledge than I can claim of the laws of nature.
Sir Charles Galton Darwin in The Evolution of Man (Ed. Sol Tax et al) 1960
The Olduvai theory states that the life expectancy of industrial civilization is approximately 100 years: c. 1930 to 2030. Ackerman's law defines it: e = Energy/Population. Its duration starts the year e reaches 30% of its average plateau value and ends the year e falls back to that value. ....:
Richard C. Duncan: The Olduvai Theory: Terminal Decline Imminent (Essay 2007)
Presumably Rose and his colleagues agree that human sexual desire has evolved by natural selection, in the same sense as anything ever evolves by natural selection. They therefore must agree that there have been genes influencing sexual desire – in the same sense as genes ever influence anything. Yet they presumably have no trouble with curbing their sexual desire when it is socially necessary to do so. What is dualist about that? Obviously nothing. And no more is it dualist for me to advocate rebelling ‘against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. We, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. As already noted, we do so in a small way every time we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way, too.
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, 1976/1989
