"It's time to give babies a chance," oozes Maja Miljanic Brinkworth (June 22) in an opinion piece which makes me envy the dead and dying. In a world of seven billion people struggling with each other for open space, employment, habitation, running water and internet privileges, here is the harrowing sight of a woman agitating for "replacement of the population" and "family expansion".
How on earth can somebody lecturing at the University of Malta (on demography, no less) become so utterly insulated from reality?
I've got news for Miss Congeniality: The population isn't merely replacing itself. It's ballooning out of control and conservative estimates predict a grand total of 10 billion consumers (sorry, "human beings") by the year 2050. As James Lovelock pointed out in the deeply unpopular but stubbornly relevant Earth Feedback Hypothesis, that is nine billion more than are needed for a sustainable and comfortable coexistence with the biosphere. I call them like I see them and I fail to understand how could one cast an eye over this overpopulated rats' nest we call home and declare the numbers insufficient.
A population hike of 80 million people a year, or 9,000 people dumped onto this planet's surface per hour, is no reason to pop champagne corks, much less an occasion to pontificate about younger populations being "by nature creative, inquisitive and imaginative, the right prerequisite for a modern economy". You forgot materialistic, eternally suggestible, and rabidly selfish, the major motive force for the branded nightmare of the "modern economy" being a commodity adolescents have in spades: ignorance of self and a desire to conform.
If Europe has a zero or negative population growth rate, then good! It is a positive development that our population is aging and in the process becoming saner, smarter and more self-aware. Instead of fixing what is not broken, we should be holding seminars, writing books that celebrate our demographic decline and handing out DIY leaflets that speak our wisdom to the world: "How to curb the scourge of overpopulation in 12 easy steps! Sudoku puzzles and crème brûlée recipe inside!"
I think we can all agree that if people were careful thinkers it would be difficult to sell anything. From this it follows that, in order for our economy to continue in its present form, people must learn to be fuzzy-minded and impulsive, for if they were clear-headed and deliberate they would rarely put their hands in their pockets, or, if they did, they would leave them there. If we were all intelligent, the economy could not survive and herein lies a terrifying paradox, for in order to exist economically, as Dr Miljanic Brinkworth demands, we must try by might and main to remain stupid.
The picture of steady, continuous growth that froufrou sociologists like her are trying to engineer is a myth, a fairy tale spread around like herpes by North America and other developed countries, whose economies depend upon the continued exploitation of the world's natural resources. The Japanese, for instance, are so accustomed to growth that economists in Tokyo usually speak of recession when the growth rate dips below three per cent per year. It is buffoonery to expect this in aeternum and even more laughable to try prodding it on by swelling the ranks of what Ruskin termed the "heaps of agonising human maggots, struggling with each other for scraps of food".
Dr Miljanic Brinkworth would do well to remember the first law of sustainability, that population growth and/or growth in the rate of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. This is not an opinion. Opinions are debatable. This is fact.
Feel the power.