Green Daily

What a loathsome, anti-human article.

Long life has been a cause of celebration, and wishing it on others a benediction, throughout history.

Better nutrition, greater safety and peace, and improved medicine have contributed greatly to human well-being.

Rooting instead for more death, especially premature death from smoking or any other source, is profoundly perverted and wrong.

People are not a plague of vermin to be culled or exterminated. Stop the anti-human hatred.

People are not just mouths to feed and sources of waste, but also minds and hearts and sources of beauty and inspiration. Each one adds something new and different.

And it's not just a matter of "sentimentality" but also physical reality. There are densely populated areas like Hong Kong and the Netherlands which are far more pleasant places to live than spread-out, sparsely populated ones like the Congo.

Finally, your premise of population "spiking" is wrong. First world countries, especially Japan, are suffering from catastrophic demographic decline, with more births than deaths, at least among the native born or the locally dominant/traditional ethnic group.

And even in the Third World, although population will continue to rise for some time due to "demographic momentum", birth rates are plummeting as well.

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Drat it, I meant about Japan more deaths than births. Lame, primitive, non-editable Blogsmith comment system.

And I realize the author or some defender will claim he was "joking", but at the heart of the "joke" is an anti-human attitude that is taken quite seriously.

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I have always pondered the effects of the life preservation mentality more so in grim situations where a person requires life support and becomes more of a machine whit the amount of tubes and equipment used to keep them functioning. We do have cause to be concerned about over population where as it is theorized that there are more people on earth now then have ever been.

"By 1 A.D., the world may have held about 300 million people. One estimate of the population of the Roman Empire, from Spain to Asia Minor, in 14 A.D., is 45 million. However, other historians set the figure twice as high, suggesting how imprecise population estimates of early historical periods can be.

By 1650, world population rose to about 500 million, not a large increase over the 1 A.D. estimate. The average annual rate of growth was actually lower from 1 A.D. to 1650 than the rate suggested above for the 8000 B.C. to 1 A.D. period. One reason for this abnormally slow growth was the Black Death. This dreaded scourge was not limited to 14th-century Europe. The epidemic may have begun about 542 A.D. in western Asia, spreading from there. It is believed that half the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in the sixth century, a total of 100 million deaths. Such large fluctuations in population size over long periods greatly compound the difficulty of estimating the number of people who have ever lived.

By 1800, however, world population had passed the 1 billion mark, and it has continued to grow since then to the current 6 billion."
This is from http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

The population does keep growing which in turn means we make more space for them and less for nature which affects resources, animal habitats and causes more pollution, because the earth does not grow with our numbers. This is a daunting thing to think about and not get emotional over as I agree life is precious but then again you have to ask yourself "what is an elderly person over the age of 100 really contributing to humanity by still being alive?" Granted there are some amazing people over 100 that can still be energetic and pass on valuable knowledge, but I would guess that majority of them are not able to function well enough to contribute much.

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I definitely perceived this piece as "satire". The last paragraph (There's got to be an argument for leading unhealthy lifestyles for the planet in there somewhere. Cigarette anyone?) can hardly be seen differently. Unless you were deeply offended and have little understanding for satire or black humor in general.

Yes, overpopulation is a problem. For any eco-system and from a species point of view. However, it is easy to tell people who depend on children for their survival at old age to not have as many children. Unless the concept of their elderly care does not change they will need to have many children. And it is usually not the number of people in underdeveloped countries who are problematic for our global environment. It is the number of people who begin living like Americans/Europeans (and you can hardly blame them for wanting this).

Is it really human-friendly to support unlimited human population growth the way we have for decades while it is very clear that this has only been possible with the availability of a limited resource (=fossil fuels)? We cannot feed 6.5 billion people without our fossil fuel based industrial agriculture. Hundred of millions will die when we run out of this stuff. I would say that knowing this and still supporting human population growth is not really pro-human. It is "us or them" sooner, or it is "us or more of them" later. You chose what you want to promote.

This said, while it is smarter to slow down or end certain activities, and people need to be educated (with words of discouragement in some cases), I don't want to live in a world that forces people to not have children or die younger. I hope this will remain their own choice.

Karsten
http://www.polluteless.com

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Carney although that is true for very few countries that is in fact wrong and merely an incorrect assumption as you can gather from my first post which is based on Facts, please refer to this specific line "By 1800, however, world population had passed the 1 billion mark, and it has continued to grow since then to the current 6 billion."
This is from http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx" There was a raise from 1 billion to 6 billion from the 1800s to now. Also with a raised standard of living that means we consume and waste vastly more then people did prior to our walking the earth so by stating that alone you have verified that our current population with the high standard of living is very bad for the planet.

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