The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.
On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".
Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.
And so David Attenborough joins the most frightening lunatic fringe of the environmental movement: the "population control" nutcases.
There's another article on the BBC website, titled "Population: The elephant in the room", in which the writer makes the case for population control:
It's no far fetched possibility. Increasingly, environmental scientists insist we have overshot the Earth's carrying capacity.
I believe they are right; the proof is everywhere. Our inability to live as we do, at our current numbers, without causing pervasive environmental degradation is the very definition of carrying capacity overshoot.
This is pure garbage, and it's sinister garbage at that.
I should write on this at greater length, but I can't be bothered to right now. Suffice to say that despite the catchy name of the looney bin Attenborough has joined, there is no such thing as an optimum human population. Any balance struck between "people" and "wildlife" is an arbitrary, political one. There is no optimum. Demands for population control can't, logically, be demands for optimums or deep ecology-like "species equality", they're always arbitrary.
Basically, therefore, population control entails restricting the right of people to have children in the name of a political goal. Here's a fun quote from the other article I mentioned:
Some activists insist acting to influence population growth infringes on human rights; they maintain that it is best to leave the problem alone.
Let's dispense with this confused notion right now.
Yes, there have been past abuses in the name of "population control".
There have been abuses of health care and education too, but the idea of reacting by abandoning any of these causes is absurd.
Yes, because using government power to stop people from reproducing is exactly like health care and education.
Any talk of population control is, by definition, talk about human rights, in this case restricting them. This is one of the issues in which human rights and environmentalism clash dramatically.
In deep ecology, for instance, the priorities are clear:
The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
Here "flourishing" is an arbitrary term, but the message is clear. Nonhuman life must be allowed to "flourish", therefore human life must be reduced.
Deep ecology claims to advocate "equal rights" for all living things. That's a funny definition of equal rights when one form of life must be systematically displaced in favor of others.
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I personally maintain that deep ecology and all other movements are misanthropic, inhuman and against all concepts of human rights as we hold them. They appeal to some innate cruelty in people that makes them seek solutions in hecatombs, not in policy. It's no coincidence that the Jokela school shooter in Finland was a student of Pentti Linkola, a deep ecologist: he was a misanthope, and so was Linkola. Under Linkola's philosophy, the Jokela school shooting was a good thing as people died.
Population itself does not correlate with ecological damage. It's what the population does that causes damage. The article I quoted mentions, among other things, desertification in Africa as a result of overpopulation. Now this is just stupid. Desertification in Africa is caused by deforestation, largely a result of slash-and-burn farming but overall of using trees for firewood.
If your solution to this problem is "less people", then those fewer people will keep practising slash-and-burn agriculture and cutting down trees for firewood, and the problem will continue. On the other hand, a smarter way to fix the problem would be introducing modern agriculture and nuclear power. Then the trees don't need to be cut down any more.
Of course, this would mean advocating technology. As a rule, modern-day environmentalists prefer ludditism and hecatombs to technology. I believe most "deep ecologists" get such a kick out of being extreme and advocating insane solutions that they'd be deeply unwilling to make a sensible environmental case for, say, solving the desertification problem in Africa. Instead, they prefer the kind of sweeping proclamations like "we must reduce population" that have no basis in reality and can't be translated into policy. In my opinion, that isn't environmentalism.
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No call for reducing the human population is anything but misanthropy, very much by definition. The whole idea is founded on the mistaken belief that the world is approaching or even, to some lunatics, exceeding, its carrying capacity. It's doing no such thing. This planet could easily house billions more humans.
We're extremely unlikely to ever even approach the limits of our carrying capacity. If there's one thing we've seen, it's that once societies reach a certain level of sophistication population growth simply ends. None of the developed nations of the world are growing at very high rates.
If you really want to stop population growth, start working toward bringing the Third World up to our level of affluence. That will effectively reduce human population growth across the planet to marginal levels.
Then again, that would mean advocating technology. And for the environmentalist movement, technology is evil. So I guess not.
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