Monday, October 26, 2009

thoughts

(I am not sure I understand 100%, but this is what I got) Jacqueline Kasun argues that population planners have irrational arguments when it comes to attempting to control our families. She argues that their arguments stand between our freedoms to propagate. She begins her article by arguing that the only reason why people believe there is an environmental crisis in the first place is because we are educated on the fact that we are overcrowded. She relates this argument to Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat” analogy. That we assume there are limitations when “no such knowledge exists.” She states that the reason human beings crowd together, as we did so many years in the past, is because we need to work together as a unit. We need to give and receive together. A critical issue is the government and whether they truly have the right to preside over reproduction. I agree with Kasun that it is tough to make arguments against population growth when the numbers are unknown; however, her article was written in 1988. It has now been 30 years. In such time we have faced wars, different policies, and an environmental movement. The Earth now contains a stunning 6 billion people which is predicted to still increase. We now have the technology, like it or not, that enables us to see the reserves the world still has available, and to measure the death and birth rates of humanity. Even if we cannot predict them all, in another given 30 years we will have breached ever corner of this world. I hate technology just as much as Heilbroner and Kasun seem to argue, but at this point, it may be the only way we can propose a “better” method for population planning. I do not want to turn to governmental rule, especially as drastic as that in Chine, but I do agree that at the rate we are going the growth of population will inevitably outrun the growth of the food supply. However, Kasun does not throw out policy all together. Kasun does believe that we need governmental policy in order to reduce pollution, poverty, unemployment and hunger, but we should not make irrational policies when it comes to families. We just need to be aware of the people who want to use the environment and peoples’ degradation as an excuse to establish their own rule.

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