The notion that overpopulation is either not a problem (the "it's how people live, not how many there are", song and dance), or a global problem that cannot be addressed nationally or locally is a commonplace myth and a convenient cop-out employed by soft-greens. In fact you can still keep to that formula of thinking and acting both globally and locally. Try this: (Tim Murray, VP Biodiversity First)
1. Put bumper stickers on your vehicle to raise awareness of overpopulation.
2. Make your own custom T-shirts with slogans like "More people = More pollution"
3. Write "Letters to The Editor" on how biodiversity is declining due to overpopula tion, which forces down our quality of life and how no environmental problem can be solved when human numbers are rising.
4. Contact TV and radio show producers and tell them that you want to see more discussion on our overpopulation problem. This topic is far more important than any other. Until the problem is solved by reducing our population to a sustainable level (about 5% of the current population), there has not been enough media coverage of the problem.
5. If you live on a highway, put up an overpopulation awareness sign.
6. If you're a millionaire, run some TV ads on overpopulation encouraging a population reduction plan for Canada that involves stopping overimmigration (which is our present practice of more immigrants than emigrants). THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE BUILDING A GIANT FENCE ON OUR BORDER, but will involve heavy fines for employers hiring illegals.
7. Encourage yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, etc to spend their time and money ON helping to solve this local, national and global problem (namely overpopulation), not ON having additional children.
8. Start your own Internet blog (which is free if you have Internet access) and document the media's incompetent coverage of environmental issues resulting from their convenient avoidance of overpopulation.
9. Attend your town council meetings and tell them that you are fed up with growth and how it lowers quality of life in your community. Tell your politicians that you don't want economic growth and the population growth that comes with it, because in the short term it makes our lives worse and in the long term it threatens our very survival. Do not accept their rhetoric that growth is inevitable or that you can't stop "progress". Those are just cop-out excuses for repeating the same mistakes.
10. Write letters to your po liticians demanding a population reduction policy and post their replies on the Internet. (your website, a blog, a friend's blog)
11. Talk about why you think overpopulation is the most important problem with everyone you know. Tell them that we need to redefine what "progress" is, because more human expansion is no longer in our best interests. Tell them how only extremely rich people at the top of the pyramid scheme (from central bankers to Royal Bank of Canada's CEO) profit from population growth, and the rest of us just suffer the environmental degradation that invariably results.
12. Complain to the environmental organizations that ignore the need to stop population growth in their home country. (David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy of Canada, The Sierra Club of Canada, etc) Immigration is easy to reduce through a simple policy change and doing so could eliminate the majority of the population growth for Canada, USA, Austra lia, Britain, France, Spain, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, etc.
13. Complain to humanitarian aid organizations and our government that supports them for not making foreign aid conditional on reduced fertility rates.
14. Educate others that high immigration does worsen global overpopulation by removing barriers to human expansion into new territory, thereby allowing humans to convert biodiverse ecosystems into more and bigger human settlements. Also tell them how immigration drives down labour standards and wages in the destination country. Be prepared for their primative reactions. Explain to them that A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY WOULD BE HUMANE AND DOES NOT INVOLVE RACISM OR KILLING PEOPLE! A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IS IN OUR BEST INTERESTS. WE SHOULD ALL WANT A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IF WE DON'T WANT INCREASED WAR, STARVATION, DISEASE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS.
15. Tell the government to pay people to not have children and fine people that do until our population is at 5% of present levels. Then tell government to maintain a steady-state population.
16. Sign the Biodiversity First petition. http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/petition.htm
17. Donate money or volunteer your efforts to an organization that is committed towards helping establish public will for population reduction such as Negative Population Growth (www.NPG.org) or Population Institute of Canada (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca) or Population Media Center (www.populationmedia.org) or The Rewilding Institute (www.rewilding.org).
18. Tell others that technology and conservation are not the answer to this unsustainable nightmare of 7 billion people by 2012.
The answer to our unsustainable nightmare is:
A) PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT THE LEGISLATION REQUIRED TO REDUCE THE POPULATION TO A SUSTAINABLE LEVEL IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE PUT IN PLACE
B) THE LEGISLATION: It is easy to reduce our population humanely with the legislation once it is in place.
Exclusively telling individuals to consume less is failing to reduce total consumption because the number of consumers is increasing, and each person must consume a substantial amount of resources just in order to survive and an even bigger amount just to have a decent life. The average person on earth doesn't consume enough resources to have a decent life, so redistributing wealth equally is not a solution. Expropriating more resources from other species is also not a solution. Reducing the human population to a sustainable level is the only sen sible choice, and a complete solution.
Brishen Hoff,President,Biodiversity First
June 22, 2008
http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm
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3 comments:
These are all excellent suggestions. I'm doing my part by producing a documentary to highlight how self-destructive it is for communities and nations to base their prosperity on economic growth and population growth. These are linked and they are both in conflict with true sustainability.
The more we all discuss overpopulation and educate ourselves and our communities, the sooner we will begin to address this challenge.
Dave Gardner
Producer/Director
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
www.growthbusters.com
Our "isolationist view" will have an effect once we get past idiots like Lalonde. There are many "deserving" people who already live in Canada, in poverty, true and functional illiteracy, homelessness, addiction, and generally discarded by a society which only cares that they continue on as good little consumers, and ignores them if they can't. Many of these people could be trained and educated to do the plumbing and other jobs Lalonde mentions. And I'd like to see the data supporting the claim that we have, on a sustainable basis, lots of food, water, and so on, given what we have done with our arable land. I think I'll go out for a nice dinner of Atlantic cod and polar bear.
Rick
S. David Lalonde is saying many contradictory things. He says Canadians are already doing our part because we have a low fertility, but yet our population is still growing. Then he says we need immigrants because we need them to cut down trees, etc as though Canadians are incapable of doing their own work, or as though the Canadian environment needs increased human activity -- I couldn't disagree more. Then he says that the people in the articles he links to who killed themselves must be our converts. This is already a well documented cliche used by the real misanthropes -- the growthists:
""If you want to save the Earth, why not start by killing yourself?" This ugly cliché is often used by growth-addicts when they're backed into an evidentiary corner. It's an oxymoronic Freudian slip because it admits that there is a population problem yet it seeks to eliminate the very people concerned about said problem! Such evil remarks show that many in the anti-ecology crowd are just punks."
http://enough_already.tripod.com/cliches.htm
Then he replies to Rick's comment about stopping at two children, but in the wrong thread, which takes things out of context and gets confusing.
Then he says: "We are not anywhere near being in danger of no having enough food, water, shelter or natural resources to sustain our population." which ignores the needs of other species and assumes that we have the right to continue displacing them, or that it is in our best interest to do so. His statement is also demonstrably false as there are many Canadian communities with inadequate water quality and quantity and food such as fish which are too polluted to eat, forcing energy intensive imports which will soon be no longer possible without cheap and abundant fossil fuels.
Then he says the old "you are an immigrant so you don't have the right to suggest a limit to the number of immigrants" line, which is about as stupid as saying "You once used a life preserver doughnut, so therefore you have no right to suggest that there is a limit to the number of people who can simultaneously use the same life preserver doughnut without making everyone drown."
Then he calls our vision for Canada as isolationist, even though it involves world leadership by setting a good example. Then he says our vision of stopping Canada's population growth by immigration would have "no effect whatsoever". That is like saying that stopping all new construction of subdivisions would have no effect whatsoever -- what a joke!
Brishen Hoff
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