Gaea's revenge
January 14th 2010 02:06
People come to universities to hear interesting ideas – and, increasingly, conspiracy theories. Just today, for example, I overheard someone explaining to their acquaintance that the real cause of world hunger is high food prices, engineered by large multinationals to squeeze the maximum possible profit out of recent all-time record harvests which were apparently enough to feed the entire world. I didn’t have time to stop and ask the obvious questions (what sort of nutrition value would each of the 6.3 billion people on Earth get? How do you expect farmers to make a living if they just give their crops away? etc.), and I wonder if they even had the answers to them.
I always try to understand the arguments in favor of positions I don’t agree with, but I must admit to being absolutely perplexed by claims that any country needs more population. Anyone who claims with a straight face that this planet is not overpopulated already has clearly never been to Hong Kong or Bangkok. Even Melbourne has severely strained water supplies and public infrastructure, despite having a population of “only” around three million and a much larger land area (which makes Kevin Rudd’s repeated claims that Australia needs more population especially confusing and irritating). Given that overpopulation and the resulting conflict over resources has been shown to contribute to not only elevated stress, anxiety, and dysfunction in individuals but also conflict between nations and ethnic groups, there is no basis to claim that any country needs to grow its population for economic or security reasons. There is not even, in truth, any historical evidence to support this; unless you have a different explanation for why Switzerland has traditionally been considered a more successful country than Russia, or how a few thousand Dutch merchants and soldiers controlled tens of millions of Indonesians for more than four centuries?
There is a version of the story of the Trojan War that holds that the golden apples of discord were created not by Eris but by Gaea herself, who was so stressed and dismayed at the overpopulation of the Achaean world that she yearned for a cataclysm that would reduce their numbers to a more manageable level. You are free to scoff at the story and its lesson, if you like. But ask everyone who died in Darfur in gun battles over farmland. Ask the Israeli Air Force pilots who prevented the Syrian army’s corps of engineers from diverting the Jordan River’s headwaters. Ask everyone who was left homeless by the twelve or so earthquakes that struck Haiti, one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, over a couple of hours. I doubt they’d find the idea so ridiculous.
I always try to understand the arguments in favor of positions I don’t agree with, but I must admit to being absolutely perplexed by claims that any country needs more population. Anyone who claims with a straight face that this planet is not overpopulated already has clearly never been to Hong Kong or Bangkok. Even Melbourne has severely strained water supplies and public infrastructure, despite having a population of “only” around three million and a much larger land area (which makes Kevin Rudd’s repeated claims that Australia needs more population especially confusing and irritating). Given that overpopulation and the resulting conflict over resources has been shown to contribute to not only elevated stress, anxiety, and dysfunction in individuals but also conflict between nations and ethnic groups, there is no basis to claim that any country needs to grow its population for economic or security reasons. There is not even, in truth, any historical evidence to support this; unless you have a different explanation for why Switzerland has traditionally been considered a more successful country than Russia, or how a few thousand Dutch merchants and soldiers controlled tens of millions of Indonesians for more than four centuries?
There is a version of the story of the Trojan War that holds that the golden apples of discord were created not by Eris but by Gaea herself, who was so stressed and dismayed at the overpopulation of the Achaean world that she yearned for a cataclysm that would reduce their numbers to a more manageable level. You are free to scoff at the story and its lesson, if you like. But ask everyone who died in Darfur in gun battles over farmland. Ask the Israeli Air Force pilots who prevented the Syrian army’s corps of engineers from diverting the Jordan River’s headwaters. Ask everyone who was left homeless by the twelve or so earthquakes that struck Haiti, one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, over a couple of hours. I doubt they’d find the idea so ridiculous.
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