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TOO MANY OVERPOPULATIONISTS
Sydney historian Alison Bashford puzzles at a lack of overpopulation panic:
The world population is 6.6 billion. This far exceeds early 20th-century predictions that it would reach about 3.9 billion by 2009. And yet overpopulation barely registers now as a public issue ...
This would have been inconceivable for earlier generations. And not just the 1970s generation, who read texts like Paul Erhlich’s The Population Bomb.
They also read Chariots of the Gods - a slightly more believable work.
In 1911 the Australian statistician Sir George Knibbs warned: “The limits of human expansion are much nearer than popular opinion imagines. The exhaustion of sources of energy is perilously near.”
Turned out he was wrong.
At the time, influential experts the world over were listening to Knibbs. His warnings circulated through the US and Britain, and from India to France. He was the Al Gore of an earlier generation.
As we’ve already noted.
His message found a ready audience: population growth was cast, not just by him, as “the world’s greatest crisis”, “the world’s basic problem” and “the greatest disaster of all time”. (Sound anything like the climate change warnings?)
Sounds exactly like climate change warnings. Is Bashford - having cited a discredited book and a pre-Gore whose predictions proved inaccurate - building towards a warning of her own, about misguided belief in end-of-worldism? Not exactly:
When John D. Rockefeller III called together world experts to his Population Council in 1952, his team still thought of the problem as Knibbs did: catastrophic, urgent, global. “Time is running out - there will be a crisis in a few generations,” Rockefeller wrote.
Reading through the Population Council’s deliberations I’m struck by how astutely his scientists grasped reproduction and energy consumption as twin sides of the coin.
Whoa! Wait up, sister. Knibbs was convinced in 1911 that we’d soon run out of energy, due to too many people; Rockefeller felt much the same (about the “problem”) forty years later. Both wrong. Not astute. Wrong. Following an excursion into eugenics - according to Bashford, discussion of overpopulation has been curbed by the unpleasant human-reducing notions of Knibbs and Rockefeller - Bashford reaches this surprising conclusion:
Past scientists and commentators typically saw the planetary problem as necessarily about both reproduction and resources. Population and global futures are linked. In many ways, this was understood much more clearly in the past.
Given the examples Bashford herself offers, it was clearly misunderstood. She’s an historian who doesn’t learn from history.
I am surveying my desk, and I see: (1) approximately 47 reports, memos and random notes scattered with wanton disregard for order; (2) 7 or 8 business cards, one of which (now that I examine it) includes the name of a bank that has ceased to exist; (3) numerous pens, pencils and loose paper clips; (4) a small U.S. flag; (5) two fugitive Cheerios, (6) an artist’s sketch of Tiger Stadium; (7) an old Webster’s Collegiate dicitionary, with the front cover torn off, and (8) the novel, Asmodeus, by Le Sage. Untidy, is what I’m getting at. Poorly organized, cluttered, messy. It is like a picture of Ms. Bashford’s cognitive machinery. Her article is poorly reasoned, it contains discredited sources, it asserts mere wishful thinking as a logical solution. ” ‘If a really efficient mode of utilising solar energy could be developed, then the energy aspect of food requirements would completely vanish as a problem,’ offered a key Rockefeller adviser.”
Oh, absolutely. And if a really efficient method of converting all these paper clips into gold doubloons could be developed, I could be typing this on a laptop sitting by the pool of my Scottsdale, Arizona mansion, instead of in a chilly office in an ugly federal building in Washington, DC. Just need to solve for ‘x’, I suppose, and then I’ll have the world’s most lucrative equation.
The world population is 6.6 billion. This far exceeds early 20th-century predictions that it would reach about 3.9 billion by 2009.
Another early 20th-century prediction.
Posted by flying pigs over mecca on 2008 04 07 at 01:37 PM • permalinkFortunately the gallant progressives of the day had a solution in mind. Read up on Margaret Sanger’s “Negro Project”...
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2008 04 07 at 03:08 PM • permalinkIt’s all about the self-loathing projecting their disappointment onto others.
Posted by localharbor on 2008 04 07 at 04:30 PM • permalinkIf you read the Article that Tim links to on dynamist.com, you’ll discover (Surprise! Surprise!) that Dr. Erlich (Why is it that so many of these Dr.‘s - Suzuki, Erlich, Evil, etc. aren’t real doctors but are taken more seriously than real medical doctors?), once his theory regarding depletion of resources fell apart, jumped onto global warming as one of the most promising young upstarts in the field of upcoming catastrophes. And the year was 1990, my friends.
Is it any coincidence that the Honourary Board of Governors of the David Suzuki Foundation (home base right here in home, sweet home, Canada) includes Dr. Paul Erlich, Maurice Strong, Sting, Gordon Lightfoot and Peter Garrett. It’s all becoming crystal clear to me now. Hmmmm… Do you think there’ll be a re-release of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as the first example of the dangers of global warming???
Posted by bobzorunkle on 2008 04 07 at 04:33 PM • permalinkTom Lehrer was all over this in 1959:
“...And we will all bake together when we bake,
There will be nobody present at the wake,
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
We’ll be three billion hunks of well-done steak!”Posted by Mary in LA on 2008 04 07 at 04:53 PM • permalinkThe world population is 6.6 billion. This far exceeds early 20th-century predictions that it would reach about 3.9 billion by 2009.
On the other hand it is far less than the 1970s predicted - which was 10 billion.
Posted by Quentin George on 2008 04 07 at 04:59 PM • permalinkDo you think there’ll be a re-release of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as the first example of the dangers of global warming???
Not unless they rewrite it, as the ship was sunk by a severe winter storm that showed up ahead of schedule - ``the year that November came early’’ as the lyrics have it. (It’s a good song BTW - sort of a 20th century ``Sir Patrick Spens’’ - though not exactly a party favorite.)
As to the overpopulation doomsayers, I have only two words for them: ``You first.’’
Posted by Sonetka's Mom on 2008 04 07 at 05:24 PM • permalink#2 Paco, are you some kind of neatness freak?
Posted by jaycee1953 on 2008 04 07 at 05:35 PM • permalink16 - Thanks, Quentin G. I was sure that the predictions of world population had been a lot higher in more recent times.
I read a few of those “Apocalypse very soon” books as a teenager. And where are those authors now?Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2008 04 07 at 05:54 PM • permalink#4 W-a-f-t-i
Silly as that was, some of them weren’t that far off.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 04 07 at 05:59 PM • permalink#21 Swinish
I read a few of those “Apocalypse very soon” books as a teenager. And where are those authors now?
Respected leaders of leftist academia.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 04 07 at 06:04 PM • permalinkWhat gets me about the Ehrlichs of this world is their sheer, unbridled chutzpah. Most of us, having made such ludicrously overblown and flat-out wrong predictions, would have hung our heads in shame, never to raise them again above the parapet to opine on anything more controversial than what colour the sky was. But undaunted, our heroes carry blithely along as if they hadn’t predicted a new Dust Bowl in the States or the starvation of the Indian people. They just say, “oh well, it didn’t happen exactly when we predicted, but Apocalypse v2.0 will be along real soon now.” Why people don’t throw rotten fruit at Paul Ehrlich’s head I will never know. Millenarian shysters like him deserve derision and contumely.
Posted by David Gillies on 2008 04 07 at 06:50 PM • permalinkMere facts will never budge these people. Recently watching the 2003 DVD of Soylent Green(1973), with a commentary track by the director Richard Fleischer, I wondered how he felt that these dystopian visions had so manifestly failed to come about. 30 years later, you can hear him on the commentary track, earnestly wailing “It’s just around the corner, folks…”
All those who make predictions about the future make the same mistake. Their understanding of the future is limited to the knowledge of the era in which they live.
So some “great thinker” such as Knibbs in 1911 is just as wrong about the future as Hollywood set designers in the Buck Rogers films of the 1930s or the fashion film makers linked at #4.And so it will be with today’s side-show fortune tellers such as Tim Flannery and Al Gore and all those at the Kev’s 2020 Summit. Their chances of being correct are very poor, even over the short 12 year window to 2020. When it gets to 100-year predictions like glowball warming, no one will get it right. That’s been the experience until now.
#29 - It was the truck around the corner, barrelling along to deliver food for the people. He didn’t see it coming either!
I understood a key attirbute of historians was their ability to make comparisons between past events and today. That is, how can you attempt to understand past events if you have a poor understanding of the present.
I guess I was misinformed, by an historian!
If there is one thing we have learnt from history, it is that you have to write a lot of essays. At least in geography, you can draw maps and spend long periods colouring in the ocean.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2008 04 07 at 07:27 PM • permalinkIs it true that we never learn any lesson from history?
The point is that its very difficult to learn from history because its very difficult to apply the lessons in the right way- as situations don’t repeat themselves. What history does teach though is a method of understanding people and consequently evaluating political actions in a better way- by understanding how someone thinks with a totally different value system to you* you can begin to think about how politics which ultimately is a clash of value systems works and how to reconcile people. C.S. Lewis in his allegory a pilgrims regress, imagined that history was a wise old pilgrim who had visited every ideological landscape and so understood them all- I think that is quite a good description of the historian’s job.*Must be an onerous task.
The one person who understood all this the best is Julian Simon, who argued that humans are the most scarce resource, that more people mean more ideas and innovation, which does more to solve problems of scarcity than all the conservation in the world.
Of course, Ed Norton in “The Honeymooners” who had it figured out much earlier, when he said (paraphrasing) “We need more people, so someone can figure out how to solve the overpopulation problem.”
The Harvard Chair in Australian Studies
Offers a Sample of Her Scholarship:Doom is coming - doom, I say;
It will be here any day -
Helen Caldicott agrees
That we’ll either burn or freeze.Through my research I have found
Zombies will live underground
And crawl out to eat the dead,
As Ted Turner, scholar, said.Psychic healers and my cat
Say, with proper funding, that
Spirits will communicate
Doomsday’s precise day and date.Kill yourselves, it’s not too late
To avoid a gruesome fate;
Trust me, I have seen the tapes -
Humans will be ruled by Apes!For Once in Her Life,
Alison Bashford Is Right:My evidence, you’ll find, is strong.
The experts I consult were wrong
At least a thousand times before;
They’re due to even up the score.That is my genius; I consult
With those who get the wrong result
So often that their losing streak
Defies the odds - it is a freak.Like those big losers, I can count
An absolutely huge amount
Of times that I have been dead wrong -
Oh Harvard, you’re where I belong!I predict we will never run out of dickheads.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2008 04 07 at 10:57 PM • permalinkSpot on Jim (#36). It’s a pity these nutcases didn’t learn anything from Simon:
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2008 04 07 at 11:09 PM • permalink#24 Marx always gives. Stalin, Mao, Mugabe….
Posted by stackja1945 on 2008 04 07 at 11:36 PM • permalinkPJ O’Rouke had an item along similar lines titles something like “Too many of you, not enough of me”, which summed up this fretful navel-gazing. Certainly a lot of places are pretty crowded but there’s a shitload of empty space as well. As a committed misanthrope though, I strongly believe there’s far too many imbeciles trodding the planet- a selective virus could be the answer, like one that only infects people who invent traffic calming and bus lanes, members of the Greens, PETA and the ELO, bicycle and safety nazis, smug Prius owners, dickheads who wheel a trolley into the 10 items and less lane in supermarkets, the cast, crew and viewers of My Kids a Star- ah fuck it, include the producers, writers and the dribbling turd who came up with the concept, shithooks who sit in the fast lane doing 90kph because it’s their duty to reduce accidents, anyone who has had any contact with the ABC, anyone who’s been seen in public in a Kevin 07 t-shirt, any white person sporting dreadlocks and anyone who thinks the welfare state is the greatest boon of civilisation thus far. There’s lots more, but this’ll do for starters.
I was also a little taken aback when some motherhood gong was handed out to some woman with 10 rug monkeys, who was a “student”. Perhaps she should study the label on a strip of Levlen ED- the term “wizards sleeve” or “throwing a banana up Queen Street” spring to mind.
Tanya Plumbhersack is talking to the getting older very quickly carrot head about the 600 homes designated for the homeless being a down payment for the future homeless in Australia.
That sounds to me like an incentive to become homeless or a script for past, current and future Labor Governments.
All care no responsibility.
Where’s Peter Costello?
Hmmm, Paco, I’m sure that all your paper-clip transfiguration problems can be solved… I’m sure among all my office detritus…ah, here it is!*dusts it off* one of your old prototypes!
The Pre-emptive Alchemy Capability Opificer!
You’ll have a bunch of near-doubloons as soon as you activate it. Your friend Wronwright has the remote control.Good luck!
Posted by carpefraise on 2008 04 08 at 05:56 AM • permalinkoh my God. What appalling logic. The last vestige of my faith in the education system, such as it was, is shattered.
Posted by daddy dave on 2008 04 08 at 06:50 AM • permalink#43 Habib:
“PJ O’Rouke had an item along similar lines titles something like ‘Too many of you, not enough of me’, which summed up this fretful navel-gazing.”
You are right though old P.J.‘s actual line on “overpopulation” was much more sarcastic: just enough of me, way too much of you.
It shows up in his superb book All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death and, as I recall, it was a swipe at that perennial ass Paul Ehrlich.
P.J. reduced his writing output after 9/11.
More’s the pity.
Posted by JJM Ballantyne on 2008 04 08 at 06:58 AM • permalink#43 Habib For President! More people means more ignorance to contend with in politics, on the roads and in daily life.
And they gravitate toward Southern California, where we are overrun with those who walked a thousand miles in their bare feet for a piece of the action, yet bring along the very cultural values that made their homelands such cesspools.
It can’t go on forever.
Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2008 04 08 at 11:21 AM • permalink
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Apparently, being absolutely ludicrously wrong has done nothing to harm the credibility of snake-oil doom-mongers like Knibbs and Erhlich in the eyes of the West-hating Left.
I have to wonder if their lives would have no meaning without a “sword of Damocles” hanging over their heads.
Apparently not.