The cuckoos in the green movement - the anti-pops

In the context of global warming, amongst the tussle of “my scientific experts are better than yours”, there lurks an insidious element waiting to foist their Malthusian principles on an unsuspecting public. These people are the anti-populationists (anti-pops).

They want to turn capitalism back to the 1700s and reduce Australia’s population to 7 million by 2050. Aren’t you glad you were born now rather than not being born in 20 years time?

While most of the Sustainable Population Lobby are geneticists or statisticians and who think the Cultural Revolution involved a lot of dancing and eating dim sims, their fear campaigns of a Malthusian world a-brim with ravenous people (usually Africans, Indians and Chinese) makes for fantastic reading - thoroughly enjoyable if you like movies such as Soylent Green or ZPG.

The anti-pops have two aims: sterlisation programs for both males and females, starting with the most populous countries in Asia and tying carbon production with family birth numbers in Australia.

While the Sustainable Population Lobby and their Trotskyist and Luddite followers are few in number, their racist propaganda has found considerable sympathy in middle Australia.

If you think of Australia - or the world for that matter - as a box with finite hard resources where information cannot get in or out, and if you think of people as rabbits, eating and breeding, breeding and eating, it’s half understandable in a purely instrumentalist way to say - “let's cut the population”.

While humans are consumers, we are far more than “breeders” to use an anti-pop expression. We are creaters of capital, of innovation, of opportunities. Human history is replete with inventions, developing new technology and adapting to changing environments.

The fact that solar energy and wind power uses the sun’s energy defeats the simplistic closed circuit thinking of the anti-pops. Human creativity, imagination and ingenuity defy quantification.

If you herded the world’s population in to Tasmania, you would have the population density of Manhattan. Admittedly it wouldn’t be much fun, but if you want a visual reference, there it is.

It’s worth looking at global population to debunk some myths. First of all global population is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and then drop off to about 7 billion in the next century. Keep in mind that these are projections. Global population is now approximately 6.7 billion.

They do not factor in the excellent work that the plethora of aid organisations such as Oxfam, Opportunity International, the Christian Children’s Fund, World Vision, UNICEF, the UN Development program, Save the Children, to name just a few, do in providing food, microfinance, education and healthcare, all of which help to pull people out of poverty and reduce population.

According to World Vision, 25 years ago, 60,000 children died everyday. Two years ago it was down to 30,000 and this year it’s 25,000.