The cuckoos in the green movement - the anti-pops

About 95 per cent of the world's population growth has come from less developed regions. Yet foolishly the anti-pops attack western government’s and say they should implement social, economic and medical measures at home to reduce population growth.

This is like a drunk who has lost his house keys in the shrubs but persists in looking for them under the streetlight. Why? Because there’s more light.

Remember this: if you educate the women and children in numeracy, literacy and healthcare you are helping to lower birth rates. Pleas to convince a farmer in Bangladesh not to have five children, because they will be voracious bio-consumers and polluters, will fall on deaf ears.

The anti-pops slavishly follow the dictates of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a British-based think tank warning of the dire consequences of human proliferation. It boasts powerful voices including Gaia thinker James Lovelock and Paul Ehrlich, the man who became a household name in 1968 with his book The Population Bomb.

Mr Ehrlich's predictions of mass starvation have not come true and at 81, he is highly critical of documentaries such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

"And the problem is that the Al Gores and so on of the world actually refuse to look at what are the really inconvenient truths. What are the inconvenient truths? There's a misdistribution of power.” Enrlich and Lovelock are fatalists. They believe the earth is doomed.

The anti-pops are the cuckoos of the environmental movement. They pose a nasty wedge issue for the Greens. The Greens are a single issue environment party who have adopted a range of social justice and post materialist agendas. They are social progressives: pro-immigration and pro-refugees.

Yet the anti-pops are functionalists. They look at the world in terms of systems and measurement. People are numbers to be manipulated for the greater good. They say people who are pro-immigration and pro-refugees are namby-pamby sentimentalists who are contributing to a global catastrophe. This runs counter to the Greens notions of cultural diversity and social justice.

The anti-pops have assumed the high moral ground by saying that science is on their side. But this ignores the fact that science, by definition, doesn’t supply value judgments.

Science provides no justification for or against a particular policy. What we have here is a battle of underlying value judgments. When the anti-pops question what positive things humanity has done, and refer to a record of wastage and destruction, remember that they don’t regard human life as a positive value.

They think of humans as a form of noxious pest. “The problem” is people, and the instrument they are urging to fix the problem is policy.

No one has a right to speak for values over and above human values. When people speak for “the environment”, they are merely asserting that their preferred use of scarce resources should be preferred by others as well.

Ultimately environmental and population questions boil down to an ethical one - is social co-operation is to be based on violence and threats, as anti-pop policy suggests?

The anti-pops and their knuckle dragging followers remind one of the barrenness of modern intellectual thought, epitomised by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless.