David Attenborough warns on population.

[Don]

Einion Yrth said:

Don said:

Here's my plan.

Offer £500 to any teenager male or female willing to be irreversibly sterilised.

Eugenics through market forces. Job done.

I doubt a monkey would suffice Donald lad.

Really? £1K perhaps? If you offer the loot from age 13?

Of course. You'd have to do stuff like offer child benefits only for the first child as well.

Personally I don't think policies like enforced sterilisation after childbirth are acceptable. Any active "harm" should not be possible for the State. It's got far too many powers already. But encouraging responsible behaviour is OK.

[Dracoro]

peterperkins said:

Simple one child per couple no if's or but's. Have more and they are forcibly adopted etc.

Tell me, how do you decide which twin is "forcibly adopted"?

[Don]

peterperkins said:

but that's the price of saving the planet.

It's not about saving the planet. The planet will be just fine. It's far less altruistic than that.

It's about preserving our lifestyle for future generations. You can be as consumptive as you want if there's only a few of you consuming. Any ecological damage you do can be absorbed by the biosphere - given it's small enough.

The problem is the human instinct to procreate is very, very strong.

[peterperkins]

Dracoro said:

peterperkins said:

Simple one child per couple no if's or but's. Have more and they are forcibly adopted etc.

Tell me, how do you decide which twin is "forcibly adopted"?

LOL If due to an accident of nature you get two or more at a single sitting then I'll let you off.

It's seperate pregnancies I meant.

[peterperkins]

Don said:

peterperkins said:

but that's the price of saving the planet.

It's not about saving the planet. The planet will be just fine. It's far less altruistic than that.

It's about preserving our lifestyle for future generations. You can be as consumptive as you want if there's only a few of you consuming. Any ecological damage you do can be absorbed by the biosphere - given it's small enough.

The problem is the human instinct to procreate is very, very strong.

I agree the instinct to procreate is strong, but we have evolved beyond simple instinct so are now in the position to do what's right/needed rather than what instinct tells us.

At this point in time it is about saving the planet, I agree with 20 people it would not be. But we haven't got 20 or 20 million we have 6,773,234,899 and rising.

[Traveller]

Finally someone tackling the key problem head on. All this green Eco propaganda is merely the side effect of over population. Too many people, too few resources. Less people thus more resources to go around. The fact that radical population growth policies will never be implementable in a democracy, because the first party to bring them in will be out of a job in no time at all.

A glaring example is the 2 most populace countries in the world, China and India. One has controlled it population growth, one has not. Hoping that as these societies become more industrialised, the problem will solve itself is not the answer. Europe took 200 years for population growth to stabilise, the world does not have the time. Humans are going to have to take responsibility for their urge to procreate.

We are setting ourselves up for a tragedy sooner or later. Be it a pandemic disease, resources wars, starvation, lots of nasty scenarios. The ultimate result unless we control numbers, is mass death of humans, either through the eventual collapse of our supporting ecological systems, naturally occurring disease in a mono culture or self inflicted scenarios like war. Some maybe fast events some maybe slow, but all will be nasty for us.

An interesting analogy for humans is fungus growing on a piece of bread, it grows unchecked until the resources run out, then it dies. Humans need a symbiotic relationship with our environment, not a parasitic, almost viral procreation, leading to our eventual self inflicted extinction or at least a catastrophic reduction in numbers to a level that can be supported by the Earth. Either we reduce the numbers on our own terms, or the environment will. Nature does not negotiate.

Edited by Traveller on Tuesday 14th April 10:38

[scorp]

Guam said:

Apart from sniping at posts do you actually have a proposed solution or are you just into irrellevant posts? Given I must be Dim and clearly have comprehension problems

You were equating the current political eco-bks (and their associated taxes) with over-population, a bad comparison, in my opinion, that was the point of my post. One is dubious with an hypothetical outcome (climate change) and the other is sure to fk us up (over-population). I would suggest it is naive to say that over-population has dubious implications, unlike climate change, which was what you were implying.

Guam said:

So how many kids do you have and what would you propose be done then?

Edited by Guam on Tuesday 14th April 07:24

A few, so yeah, i contributed to overpopulation, and no, i don't have a solution, that shouldn't prevent me from pointing something out. I would suggest a solution is needed otherwise necessity will take over and we will be killing each other for resources further down the line, not a happy ending in sight there (for the losers anyway..)

[JagLover]

Rather bizarre that their proposed remedy is to cut the UK's population. Without immigration the UK's poplulation would be falling in any case. The big increases in population are in places like India and Africa.

'Stop at 2' campaigns in the UK are simply more eco-mentalism.

[Jinx]

I seriously doubt it is a problem - the Earth is quite sparsely populated as a whole (I read a statistic somewhere that you could cram the entire human population onto the Isle of Wight) .
The problem is more to do with arable land, international borders and supply/demand. If it ever did get to a over population stage mankind has more than enough ways of reducing the load and will most likely endeavour to use some of those means (though I doubt population control will be the cited reason) .