One day, you complain about the world being overpopulated, the next day you complain about scientists wasting time on other things rather than saving lives.
The harsh truth is that in order for the world population to go down or for growth to slow, people have to die.
So saving more lives seems like speeding up the inevitability of complete overpopulation.
Suffice it to say, I find this more than a little offensive. When I advocated population control on March 5th, I advocated responsible family size as an effective means to reach a sustainable population equilibrium. I never advocated genocide and starvation as effective global population control tools. Slobodan Milosevic advocated those techniques, and he was an evil, evil man.
What I am advocating is that every human deserves a fair chance to live a good, free life, and things like clean water and vaccines do a lot more to further that aim than chimpanzee imagination research. I am advocating that humans, given an increased awareness of their place in the Earth's ecosystem, will willingly choose to reduce the average family size to 2.0 children, and the population will equilibrate. Yes, people will die, but from old age, or from diseases that could not be easily conquered, like cancer. They won't die because they couldn't defend themselves from oppressive regimes or from cholera or because they were denied basic food and water access.
What this commenter is poignantly illustrating is that many Americans have developed a keen sense of NIMBY. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is a blanket philosophy that refers to many things, like Americans overwhelming support for clean, nuclear power...just not anywhere near large populations. Or the idea that even though some parts of Africa have a 40% HIV positive population, an AIDS vaccine is a waste of research dollars because few Americans die from AIDS nowadays. Or that it's okay that a million people die of starvation every 40 days, because most of them are faceless entities separated by an ocean and two income brackets.
Starvation and disease-related deaths are simply the unfortunate ends to unfortunate people, says the NIMBY philosophy. These are the "harsh truths" of the world, as the commenter puts it.
But they don't have to be. Starvation, cholera, malaria, and many other diseases that kill millions of people every year are easily treatable, easily fixable problems that could make the world a lot less harsh place.
It just bothers me that so many of us here, in the land of plenty, seem to think its okay for the world population to be slowed by starvation and disease...as long as it is other people who are doing the dying.
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