Women's Rights and the Environment

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Gently Passing, Jul 24, 2008.

  1. Gently Passing Registered Senior Member

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    Paul Ehrlich, author of the famous apocalyptic vision, The Population Bomb, has released another book, The Dominant Animal, and despite the inaccuracy of some of his previous predictions his beliefs remain pretty much unchanged. Our Civilization, now global, is headed for collapse unless we do something.

    So what can we do?!

    Well there are many things we can do; kill millions of people in Nazi-like fashion, systematically eliminating populations in strategic areas such as Africa, mass sterilization, or wait for the Earth to take care of it, which wouldn't be much prettier.

    Modern science suggests that something needs to be done, but what?

    Europeans have enacted successful progressive policies which have led to population decline in those countries, such as France for example.

    On the more extreme end, China has placed a one-child limit on couples, and hits them with a prohibitive tax if they produce more. Of course the problem is much worse there than it is in Europe.

    But what can we do?

    Give women what they want - reproductive rights. Provide Birth Control to everyone. Keep abortion legal.

    Otherwise we're headed for disaster. The Nazi-like vision outlined above is not far from the reality we would surely experience if the food starts to run out, which it has in places like Sudan.

    Need I say more?
     
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  3. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    I think anything will be too little too late.
    It's going to happen, mass starvation etc..
    It might take a while though.. we are going to utterly demolish nature first.
     
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  5. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    Did you completely ignore the first part of your own post? Ehrlich was so wrong on every count in his previous predictions, I can't see why he has any credibility at all anymore.
     
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  7. clusteringflux Version 1. OH! Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, Please use birth control, abort your children and have gay sex instead reproducing.

    I guess your natural selection works pretty good after all. Who ever would've thought that that morons would actually snuff themselves out?

    /Exaggerating to make a point.
     
  8. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    I don't get your point. It's not about natural selection.
     
  9. clusteringflux Version 1. OH! Valued Senior Member

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    That's because you see people as a cancer that needs to be eradicated.
    But it's not enough, in your misery, to simply choose to extinguish your own seed, is it? No, no, you'd like to make laws to prevent others from reproducing as well. As they say, misery loves company.

    Once a sect of people have become so "smart" that they see not in their best interest to procreate, Well, then, Enmos, they perish. And know that not everyone will follow you off that cliff. So while you fail to have children, others will not. And as your tax based structure relies on "new workers" there will be none. And others will simply take your place in the world.
    Natural Selection at work. Your "intelligence" has failed you. It made you unhappy and then it made non existent.

    You know I love you, though, right?
     
  10. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    I don't want to eradicate humanity..
    You have to agree that something is going wrong though. It would be in the best interest of everyone (in the broad sense) if the human population was not to increase any further, or even decrease.
    You don't have to kill people to get there..

    I hope your post was intentionally a caricature of me.
     
  11. clusteringflux Version 1. OH! Valued Senior Member

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    I believe that in the USA, people should have the right have as many children as they desire unless proven unfit in a court of law.
    If you choose not to have kids,fine.
    As for this "it's best for everyone on earth" crap, I don't buy it. Not for nation building and not for population reduction efforts.

    It wasn't meant to be personal but I did poke fun at you a little, I'm sorry.
    Don't hate me, Enmos.
     
  12. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    Really? Your previous posts don't seem to support that:
    And another quote discussing humanity spreading into the stars to ensure our survival:
    You describe mankind as a cancer and express the desire that it not survive. So.......are you sure you don't want to eradicate mankind?
     
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    The last prediction I read, based on current trends, is that the earth's population is going to peak at around nine or ten billion toward the end of this century, and then start falling.

    Prosperity is the best contraceptive. In wealthy countries, as people become more prosperous they develop other interests than home and family. In poorer countries, as their income rises and stabilizes and they make the transition out of the Neolithic life of subsistence farming into a modern economy, they don't need as many children to work the farm or to support them in old age.

    Europe, Japan, the USA and Canada, throughout the entire "West" the birth rate has already dropped below replacement level. All of our social security Ponzi schemes are dependent on immigrants to keep from collapsing, and our conspicuous-consumption economies are dependent on them for customers. In the old Soviet bloc with its no-need-to-work ethic and its inexplicable lack of attraction for immigrants, their populations started falling decades ago. Many of our countries give fabulous incentives to convince couples to have babies--years of full-pay maternity and paternity leave, discounts on everything. Maybe even free parking, I'm not sure.

    On the fringe of the Third World where economies are advancing slowly, where families once had twelve children they now have eight and where they once had six they now have four.

    The second derivative of population only became exaggeratedly positive in the 20th century, when the spread of modern medicine caused a precipitous drop in infant mortality. Before that it took centuries or even millennia for the earth's population to double, then suddenly it began happening every thirty years. But that second derivative is now negative, which means the first derivative will inevitably reach zero and keep falling. At that point the population itself will start to shrink.

    What happens in the next eighty or ninety years while we're waiting for that to happen, and then over the next couple of centuries while we're waiting for the population to decrease significantly, is another question of course.

    As I've posted several times on SciForums, our biggest problem is going to be energy and the only solution is twofold. In the short run build nuclear plants to save the environment. While we're getting our electricty from then, we spend a hundred years building a ring of high-orbit solar collectors that beam their energy to earth safely via microwave. Eventually we can retire the nuclear reactors before nuclear waste becomes an intractable problem, and we'll get more than enough cheap solar energy to keep going.

    Getting governments--much less the citizenry--to plan and fund a project with a hundred-year payoff is pretty difficult, unfortunately. Especially in a country like mine that is effectively controlled by the energy companies and next-quarter financial planning.
     
  14. Gently Passing Registered Senior Member

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    Fact is, the US is sorely behind the rest of the modern world on pretty much everything...

    Well except obesity, depression, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, illiteracy, high school dropouts and so on.

    Why?

    Because we are currently ruled by what I like to call the Corporatocracy. For fifty years or more the US government was at the mercy of Corporate interests, seldom acting independently of their will. When they did, people got shot.

    Hmm...

    (stops to scan surrounding trees and other possible locations for a potential sniper)
     
  15. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. I am not against humanity, the only problem is it's huge population.
    We should take steps to decrease the population. And that doesn't mean slaughtering people, there are other ways.
     
  16. Cazzo Registered Senior Member

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    Everyone but themselves of course.
     
  17. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Cluster, if the population continues to grow at current rate we will have a problem.
    Where would we live, how will we acquire enough food, what happens with nature ?
    Also, pollution will increase hugely.
    We are going to suck the Earth bone dry, and then depart ourselves.
    It is a real problem and sticking your head in the sand isn't going to help.
    I don't hate anyone

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  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I think you're being a little hyperbolic to blame all of that on the artifact of the corporation. Much of it is a reaction to the unease that comes with a Paradigm Shift. We're transforming from an industrial civilization to an information-based civilization and it's as wrenching a change as the previous paradigm shifts: the transformation from nomadic hunter-gatherers to permanent agricultural villages, then the one to cities where we had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with perfect strangers, then the one to industrialization itself. And this Paradigm Shift is happening much more quickly than the previous ones. It took thousands of years for farming to almost completely cover the earth, and arguably even longer for cities to do the same. Even the Industrial Revolution took several hundred years to make its way into most people's lives. The Information Revolution will probably be complete by 2050; the whole thing could happen within a single person's lifetime. Talk about stress!

    But be that as it may, I have written on this topic at length on SciForums and I believe that the corporation is an artifact that may not have such a prominent role to play in the new economy. It took massive concentrations of capital to launch the projects of the Industrial Era: transcontinental railroads, steel mills, oil pipelines, etc. In contrast, people are starting quite successful software houses with nothing more than their life savings. We'll need a few key infrastructural corporations like Microsoft and FedEx, but the others are already quietly metamorphing from producers to scavengers, buying each other's corpses and not knowing what to do next.

    The corporation was created by government to take the place of the aristocracy when feudalism was being supplanted by democracy. It could not exist without the massive legal system that supports the fiction of the "artificial person" and the lunacy of the stock market.

    Have faith, this too shall pass. What we need to worry about is not the death throes of corporate America, ugly as they are. We need to anticipate what clever trick the government is going to pull--at our expense--to keep itself going in the Information Age.
    The chances of that happening are very small, given current population trends. It's time to worry about the problems we have, not the ones we imagine. We probably have a window of three or four hundred years before the lower birthrate becomes worldwide AND has been in effect long enough for the population drop to change our footprint on this planet. Our assignment is to get the human race through those next three or four hundred years.

    Nuclear power plants in the short run. Gigantic orbital solar collectors in the long run.

    Write to your Congressman today!
     
  19. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575
    sorry but no can do, frag
    we young 'uns prefer to keep blathering about the impending apocalypse.
    besides, we are practically illiterate

    please
    write on our behalf

    here's my sig ......gustav
     
  20. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575
    enmos aint alone
    these doom and gloom tards drift in and out of sci
    they prevail not by reason but by pathology and numbers
    the fear producing outrageous proposals for non-existant problems

    shit, deadweight
    get the fuck off my ship
     
  21. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575
    i'm gonna collect frag's shit, bind em into a book and call it the bible
     
  22. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    The chances of what happening ? Extreme overpopulation ? It's already here.
    The effects on the environment are already unmistakably obvious.
    And I really don't think the population will decrease out of it's own..
     
  23. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    43,184
    Gustav, please join our ranks. You can be our spokesman

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