Just as Central Asia gave Europe the Bubonic Plague, and Central Africa gave us AIDS and the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the state ideology of multiculturalism. As it is our incubus, then it is fitting that it should be defined by us. So according to the dictionary of Immigration Watch Canada: http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=8&MMN_position=123:123
“MULTICULTURALISM: A term used to refer to the phenomenon, in Canada, of promoting, among immigrants, the retention of their own cultural practices. It also refers not only to the different ethnic backgrounds of many people in Canada, but to the growing number of those backgrounds.
Multiculturalism has been widely criticized. Some critics have said that multiculturalism requires a continuous inflow of immigrants in order to survive. If multiculturalism is to continue, immigration (particularly high and unnecessary immigration) must continue. As some critics have said, Canada's multiculturalist policies are a prescription of what Canada will become, not a description of what we are.
Multiculturalism has positive connotations for some, but for many Canadians, it is a euphemism and a disguise for a continuation of Canada's present unprecedented, unremitting high immigration levels. In fact, one critic has said that continued, high immigration levels are the oxygen for multiculturalism. Without continued high immigration, multiculturalism would die the death it richly deserves.
To others, the words "multiculturalism" and "diversity" are the positive-sounding "artillery" used against an unsuspecting Canadian public to get them to accept unjustified immigration. In other words, these terms are more examples of the deceit used to perpetuate high immigration levels.”
So while high immigration levels breathe life into multiculturalism, multiculturalism, or the quest for “cultural diversity”, justifies high immigration levels. Mass immigration is, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “Canada’s great project”. A project of cultural balkanization and colonization of urban Canada and the attendant loss of farmland and wildlife to the population growth that results from it. Cultural diversity comes at the cost of biological diversity. To corporate Canada its apostles are what Stalin said of Western fellow travelers: “useful idiots”--- who give developers and cheap labour employers a smokescreen to pursue naked greed.
Tim Murray
August 21/ 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
THE "FREE SURFACE EFFECT" OF MASS IMMIGRATION
HOW THE "TRIVIAL" MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLE BETWEEN COUNTRIES CAN MIMIC THE "SLOSH DYNAMICS" OF MARITIME DISASTERS
"...to say that immigration is the problem is really to put the emphasis on something that is, when you really look at the various factors,it's basically trivial. I mean, only 3% of the world's population dies in a country other than that in which they were born..." Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May on CBC Radio, May 17/06
So Elizabeth May says that immigration, at 3% of the world’s population, is “trivial”. Trivial to whom? To the workers whose jobs are displaced and whose wages are depressed? (Rubenstein, Briggs, Borgias). Trivial to the taxpayers who must pay for the social services of immigrants? (Robert Rector study, Heritage Foundation 2006, Grubel study, Fraser Institute 2006). Trivial to those who fight traffic gridlock, suffer pollution, housing shortages and inflated prices and loss of farmland?. Is it trivial to the Israelis, the Spanish, and the Indians who have also resorted to building expensive walls to keep migrants out? Is it trivial to South Africa which has been deluged with so many Zimbabweans that civil unrest followed? Will the prospect of 300 million global environmental refugees be trivial?
The Green Party of Canada’s International Affairs Critic, Eric Walton, has attacked the metaphor of Canada as a “sinking lifeboat” that is in danger of capsizing from allowing too many foreign-born passengers on board. He accuses those involved in organizations like “Biodiversity First”, “Immigration Watch Canada” and the “Population Institute of Canada” of being merely anti-immigration activists who cloak their agenda in environmentalism. The flaw in our position, he contends, is our failure to recognize that Canada is not the lifeboat, but rather , it is the world itself---of which we are a passenger, like it or not. The only solution to environmental problems, which Greens seem to believe are all global in nature, is to seek the cooperation of other international “passengers”. Closing our borders is very likely to alienate them rather than entice them into that needed cooperation. In other words, to win the goodwill of our neighbours, let’s throw our gate open and leave our front door unlocked. Moreover, as a trading nation, our ecological impact is not merely a function of our population, or indeed of our consumption, but the consumption of our resources by other nations. Our focus on immigration is therefore rather simplistic. (One then is given to ask, as analyst Rich Shea did, "After years of saying that we have to lower our consumption, are Greens now saying that our domestic consumption is not an issue any more, and that we need to be more worried about the consumption of other countries? Have they abandoned their principles and adopted a quasi-xenophobic platform instead? If this were a dance, I'd call it the "consumption two-step") In Walton's words:
" In the end I think this debate (over immigration) boils down to a 'Small Lifeboat vs a Big Lifeboat' approach to the population/environment dynamic.
The Small Lifeboat group think we can and must save ourselves/environment within a gated Canada independent of the rest of the world while the Big Lifeboat group ( to which I belong) maintain that on the issue of population it truly is "Global or Bust" and that we must fully engage internationally in a spirit of good will and continuing to demonstrate generosity and thus become part of the global solution rather than following the 'each to his own survival' approach.
For the public record, the 'Small Lifeboat' approach is not a GPC position nor is it one that as International Affairs Critic that I would support." (March 6/2008).
With all due respect to Mr. Walton, we don’t believe that it is necessary to invite the neighbourhood into our home to raid the refrigerator or ravish the garden in order to enlist their cooperation or help the cause of neighbourhood security. We believe that by being good stewards of our own land , protecting our food security from the housing developments needed to accommodate immigrants, and therefore being able to dispense our surplus to neighbours in need will suffice as sufficient testimony to our good will. Japan could serve as one of Walton’s detestable “gated communities”, and it is not an international pariah for doing that. We also believe that the Green Party obsession with thwarting climate change, which they unduly prioritize as the top threat to the environment, is not served by promoting migration. The study released by the Centre For Immigration Studies in August of 2008 clearly established that mass migration to the United States quadruples the GHG emissions of each migrant upon his arrival to America and therefore accelerates the timetable of our collective global demise. Sealing our borders or at least firming them up is a service to the global community. And remittances are not, as Walton believes, of net benefit to recipient countries, according the analysis of Dr. William Rees.
Walton’s answer is a classic Green one. Rather than close the doors, let’s reduce our per capita consumption levels. Why not do both? Why not first do that, why not first establish good land use policies to save farmland and wetlands from sprawl, why not first establish a conserver society, then have a conversation about how much more Mr. Walton wants to grow our population? It seems that the Greens always put the cart before the horse. Nature does not care about Canadians per capita consumption rates, or our “green living” habits like vegetarianism, recycling, screwing in CFL lights, driving hybrid cars or building ‘green’. It only cares about our TOTAL consumption. That is the NUMBER of consumers times their per capita consumption. Get it?
Greens simply won’t understand that stopping more people from getting here either though the airport or the maternity ward is a critical variable in not only our own sustainability but the world’s. Why is that so hard to accept? Whatever happened to “I=PAT”?
Choose your metaphor. If you are not comfortable in our Canadian lifeboat, then let’s for a minute board the virtual reality of Mr. Walton’s global lifeboat, or ship if you like. How can any ship brave the rough waters of climate change, biodiversity loss and Peak Oil, Water and Soil by allowing its passengers to migrate to one side of the vessel? What Mr. Walton and his leader, Elizabeth May, need, is not so much an education in the “population-environment dynamic”, but a course in physics—specializing in the “slosh dynamics” of the “free surface effect”.
" The Free Surface Effect is a phenomenon whereby a small amount of water inside the vessel starts slopping from side to side, making the ship rock. As the water moves it gathers momentum, causing the rocking to become more pronounced. The shifting water quickly makes the ship unstable, and can shift cargo and capsize the ship quickly." (Wikipedia) Five to eight centimeters can suffice to do the trick. Even if this "trivial" amount of water enters through the doors of a ferry (its "borders")like that of the doomed "The Heritage of Free Enterprise" or "al-Salam Boccaccio Disaster of 1998", as it moves it gather momentum, causing the rocking to be more pronounced.
This clearly a metaphor for overshoot. A nation can become “top heavy” with overpopulation. But the focus on global overpopulation, like the focus by disaster investigators on the “overpopulation” or “overload” of capsized ships, fails to acknowledge that the migration or shift of people or water on those ships was more decisive a factor in their sinking than the number of people or the volume of water in the ships. A ship can be overloaded in a storm but if the contents of the ship---its passengers, its cars or the water on deck----is impeded from movement to one side by secure bulkheads or lashings, the ship’s centre of gravity will remain the same. And its chances of survival then remain very much better. Global overpopulation stresses the global environment. But a smaller global population with open borders is far more dangerous to the environment than a more populated planet with secure borders and impeded migration. Containing the multiplier effect of migrants moving to less populated and more resource rich regions to consume more is a more important key to sustainability than a less politically courageous resolution to simply resist population growth globally.
Our ship---national or global---will founder and capsize if migration is permitted to continue relatively unfettered. Follow the autopsies of major ferry disasters and one can then understand the threat we are facing. While overloading often accounts for high casualties in ship sinkings in such places as the Phillipines, it is the shifting of passengers to one side of the ship that they run to in response to swaying that is typically the straw that breaks the camel's back. And it was not the volume of incoming water--just over an inch covered the car deck--- that sank "The Heritage of Free Enterprise" but its unimpeded movement to one side of the vessel, which posthumously should perhaps be re-christened the HMCS Canada.
Tim Murray
August 19/09
"...to say that immigration is the problem is really to put the emphasis on something that is, when you really look at the various factors,it's basically trivial. I mean, only 3% of the world's population dies in a country other than that in which they were born..." Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May on CBC Radio, May 17/06
So Elizabeth May says that immigration, at 3% of the world’s population, is “trivial”. Trivial to whom? To the workers whose jobs are displaced and whose wages are depressed? (Rubenstein, Briggs, Borgias). Trivial to the taxpayers who must pay for the social services of immigrants? (Robert Rector study, Heritage Foundation 2006, Grubel study, Fraser Institute 2006). Trivial to those who fight traffic gridlock, suffer pollution, housing shortages and inflated prices and loss of farmland?. Is it trivial to the Israelis, the Spanish, and the Indians who have also resorted to building expensive walls to keep migrants out? Is it trivial to South Africa which has been deluged with so many Zimbabweans that civil unrest followed? Will the prospect of 300 million global environmental refugees be trivial?
The Green Party of Canada’s International Affairs Critic, Eric Walton, has attacked the metaphor of Canada as a “sinking lifeboat” that is in danger of capsizing from allowing too many foreign-born passengers on board. He accuses those involved in organizations like “Biodiversity First”, “Immigration Watch Canada” and the “Population Institute of Canada” of being merely anti-immigration activists who cloak their agenda in environmentalism. The flaw in our position, he contends, is our failure to recognize that Canada is not the lifeboat, but rather , it is the world itself---of which we are a passenger, like it or not. The only solution to environmental problems, which Greens seem to believe are all global in nature, is to seek the cooperation of other international “passengers”. Closing our borders is very likely to alienate them rather than entice them into that needed cooperation. In other words, to win the goodwill of our neighbours, let’s throw our gate open and leave our front door unlocked. Moreover, as a trading nation, our ecological impact is not merely a function of our population, or indeed of our consumption, but the consumption of our resources by other nations. Our focus on immigration is therefore rather simplistic. (One then is given to ask, as analyst Rich Shea did, "After years of saying that we have to lower our consumption, are Greens now saying that our domestic consumption is not an issue any more, and that we need to be more worried about the consumption of other countries? Have they abandoned their principles and adopted a quasi-xenophobic platform instead? If this were a dance, I'd call it the "consumption two-step") In Walton's words:
" In the end I think this debate (over immigration) boils down to a 'Small Lifeboat vs a Big Lifeboat' approach to the population/environment dynamic.
The Small Lifeboat group think we can and must save ourselves/environment within a gated Canada independent of the rest of the world while the Big Lifeboat group ( to which I belong) maintain that on the issue of population it truly is "Global or Bust" and that we must fully engage internationally in a spirit of good will and continuing to demonstrate generosity and thus become part of the global solution rather than following the 'each to his own survival' approach.
For the public record, the 'Small Lifeboat' approach is not a GPC position nor is it one that as International Affairs Critic that I would support." (March 6/2008).
With all due respect to Mr. Walton, we don’t believe that it is necessary to invite the neighbourhood into our home to raid the refrigerator or ravish the garden in order to enlist their cooperation or help the cause of neighbourhood security. We believe that by being good stewards of our own land , protecting our food security from the housing developments needed to accommodate immigrants, and therefore being able to dispense our surplus to neighbours in need will suffice as sufficient testimony to our good will. Japan could serve as one of Walton’s detestable “gated communities”, and it is not an international pariah for doing that. We also believe that the Green Party obsession with thwarting climate change, which they unduly prioritize as the top threat to the environment, is not served by promoting migration. The study released by the Centre For Immigration Studies in August of 2008 clearly established that mass migration to the United States quadruples the GHG emissions of each migrant upon his arrival to America and therefore accelerates the timetable of our collective global demise. Sealing our borders or at least firming them up is a service to the global community. And remittances are not, as Walton believes, of net benefit to recipient countries, according the analysis of Dr. William Rees.
Walton’s answer is a classic Green one. Rather than close the doors, let’s reduce our per capita consumption levels. Why not do both? Why not first do that, why not first establish good land use policies to save farmland and wetlands from sprawl, why not first establish a conserver society, then have a conversation about how much more Mr. Walton wants to grow our population? It seems that the Greens always put the cart before the horse. Nature does not care about Canadians per capita consumption rates, or our “green living” habits like vegetarianism, recycling, screwing in CFL lights, driving hybrid cars or building ‘green’. It only cares about our TOTAL consumption. That is the NUMBER of consumers times their per capita consumption. Get it?
Greens simply won’t understand that stopping more people from getting here either though the airport or the maternity ward is a critical variable in not only our own sustainability but the world’s. Why is that so hard to accept? Whatever happened to “I=PAT”?
Choose your metaphor. If you are not comfortable in our Canadian lifeboat, then let’s for a minute board the virtual reality of Mr. Walton’s global lifeboat, or ship if you like. How can any ship brave the rough waters of climate change, biodiversity loss and Peak Oil, Water and Soil by allowing its passengers to migrate to one side of the vessel? What Mr. Walton and his leader, Elizabeth May, need, is not so much an education in the “population-environment dynamic”, but a course in physics—specializing in the “slosh dynamics” of the “free surface effect”.
" The Free Surface Effect is a phenomenon whereby a small amount of water inside the vessel starts slopping from side to side, making the ship rock. As the water moves it gathers momentum, causing the rocking to become more pronounced. The shifting water quickly makes the ship unstable, and can shift cargo and capsize the ship quickly." (Wikipedia) Five to eight centimeters can suffice to do the trick. Even if this "trivial" amount of water enters through the doors of a ferry (its "borders")like that of the doomed "The Heritage of Free Enterprise" or "al-Salam Boccaccio Disaster of 1998", as it moves it gather momentum, causing the rocking to be more pronounced.
This clearly a metaphor for overshoot. A nation can become “top heavy” with overpopulation. But the focus on global overpopulation, like the focus by disaster investigators on the “overpopulation” or “overload” of capsized ships, fails to acknowledge that the migration or shift of people or water on those ships was more decisive a factor in their sinking than the number of people or the volume of water in the ships. A ship can be overloaded in a storm but if the contents of the ship---its passengers, its cars or the water on deck----is impeded from movement to one side by secure bulkheads or lashings, the ship’s centre of gravity will remain the same. And its chances of survival then remain very much better. Global overpopulation stresses the global environment. But a smaller global population with open borders is far more dangerous to the environment than a more populated planet with secure borders and impeded migration. Containing the multiplier effect of migrants moving to less populated and more resource rich regions to consume more is a more important key to sustainability than a less politically courageous resolution to simply resist population growth globally.
Our ship---national or global---will founder and capsize if migration is permitted to continue relatively unfettered. Follow the autopsies of major ferry disasters and one can then understand the threat we are facing. While overloading often accounts for high casualties in ship sinkings in such places as the Phillipines, it is the shifting of passengers to one side of the ship that they run to in response to swaying that is typically the straw that breaks the camel's back. And it was not the volume of incoming water--just over an inch covered the car deck--- that sank "The Heritage of Free Enterprise" but its unimpeded movement to one side of the vessel, which posthumously should perhaps be re-christened the HMCS Canada.
Tim Murray
August 19/09
DID THE SIERRA CLUB BUILD THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI?
I am beginning to think that David Lean’s masterpiece of a war movie, “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957), was actually a film about today’s environmental movement. If the screenplay was modified to fit our current ecological predicament, the Oscar-winning performance by Sir Alec Guinness, who played the part of the obstinate, ramrod Colonel Nicholson, could be duplicated by Carl Pope or Stephen Hazell, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada. Ranged against Hazell would be Nicholson’s equally stubborn antagonist, Japanese POW camp commandant Colonel Saito, played by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper---who in the remake would be dedicated to building a bridge to economic recovery. So as in the original plot, the new one would have the two putative opponents collaborating to form a partnership in the manic pursuit of economic growth.
Just as Colonel Saito argued that he must meet an imminent deadline to complete construction of a bridge to move supplies and troops from Bangkok to Rangoon, Harper’s Saito would face an electoral imperative to deliver the goods on time---that is, resurrect the growth economy with “quantitative easing”. Stephen Hazell and the environmental movement, of course, offer no fundamental opposition to this goal. Only that the same destination can be reached by more efficient means, with less collateral cost to people and resources. We can have something called “Green Growth”, a growing economy with low “throughput” and negligible ecological consequences. In other words, our society can go on binging on 6,000 calories a day if we shift to 6,000 calories of Diet Coke. Unfortunately no society can subsist on soda pop, and a nation of potters, painters, poets, musicians and yoga teachers cannot long support the superstructure of social services upon which we depend. Someone, somewhere, must do the dirty work in mines and factories, if not at home, then abroad. This reliance upon a distant population for primary production is what Dr. William Rees called “appropriated capacity”. To call an economy that feeds off this dark underbelly of wealth “sustainable” is like a nun claiming chastity while working part time in house of ill repute. To grasp the surrealism of environmentalist concern for an economy in retraction, imagine if Jews on a cattle car to Auschwitz fretted about finding a renewable energy source for the train if it stalled for want of coal. Size matters, and the economy needs to shrink so the environment can grow.
But here is where modern environmentalism and Colonel Nicholson’s logic converge. Nicholson ignored the fact that in sharing Saito’s objective, he was actually collaborating with the Japanese war effort by working to construct a route to the doorstep of British India. His focus was not on the war, but on his men’s morale, which he hoped to boost by making them take pride in their work. By re-building the bridge properly he could re-build his battalion. Bridge construction was just a tool in this more fundamental mission.
In a re-make of the film, Sierra Club Executive Director Hazell would recruit his green army to help re-build “the bridge to growth” so that they may feel good about themselves, and to be, in Saito’s words, “happy in (their) work”. After all, resigning one’s self to the inevitability of growth is the only rational attitude for any Canadian to take. Canada is just like Saito’s Camp 16 or any other gulag in the archipelago of Burmese POW camps. “Escape is impossible---you would die”, Saito warned. “Grow or die” would commandant Harper’s injunction. “It is not whether we grow, but how we grow” would be Hazell’s qualification. Growth, in any case, is inevitable.
Best then to “manage” it rather than dream the impossible dream of jumping off the runaway train. In fact, if it slows down, Hazell advises, let’s accelerate it with a “Green Stimulus Package”. Let’s give CPR to Frankenstein to get him up off the ground and running again. Of course, we’ll clean him up with green wash and dye his hair green, and maybe then we’ll forget about that he is still a voracious consumer. Unfortunately, as the remake would show, you can employ people to retrofit houses, build smart cars in ‘green’ factories, and build green homes and buildings with solar panels---but these projects still consume materials, and deplete resources that are often imported. The greenest structures use nails, cement , bricks, pipes and plastics, and the energy used for their production and transportation is formidable. In fact, the energy needed to produce the high quality silicon for photovoltaic solar panels is three times greater than the electricity it will produce. And the workers employed in all of this ‘green’ production will be paid wages, wages that purchase not-so-green products and services. “Green growth” is still growth. The Bridge on the River Kwai will still help the enemy conduct the war--- the war on the environment, the one they are winning.
The collusion between Harper and Hazell in their mad rush to disaster is not without critics, however. In the original movie, American Colonel Shears, played by William Holden, and British medical officer Clipton, were dissenting voices. Shears acknowledged that the chances of escape very exceedingly slim, but added that death would be certain if escape was not attempted. A slave happy in his work would still meet an unhappy fate. And when Colonel Nicholson unveiled his “green stimulus package’ and sold it to the Japanese, Major Clipton asked him, as Hazell and the Sierra Club should be asked, “The fact is, what we are doing could be construed as---forgive me sir---collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps as treasonable activity. Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?”
The Russians in 1941 answered with a definitive “nyet”. In abandoning their farms before advancing Nazi troops they did not feel it their moral obligation to be “good stewards” so that they could leave a lasting legacy to those who succeeded them. On the contrary, they burned their crops, slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their equipment. They destroyed their environment rather than accommodate to a force that would wreak even greater havoc if it was allowed to inherit their resources intact. By the same token, I feel compelled to blow up the bridge to growth as the British sabotage team eventually blew up the bridge over the river Kwai. Nature doesn’t care if I feel good about myself. Only that growth be stopped. The feel-good boy scout efforts of environmentalists to “go green”, to reduce, conserve, recycle, drive hybrid cars, build green, use land more efficiently or abstain from meat only postpones the day of reckoning for a growth economy that each day extinguishes 200 species.
Our goal should be smashing bridges, not building them. Until the war against growth is won, we must withhold our cooperation in its management. We are not here to make growth work or make it “smart”, but to hasten its death. Hand me the verbal dynamite.
Colonel Saito said it best:
“This is war. This is not a game of cricket.” And Nicholson, (Hazell) he confided, is “mad, quite mad.”
Tim Murray
August 16/09
Just as Colonel Saito argued that he must meet an imminent deadline to complete construction of a bridge to move supplies and troops from Bangkok to Rangoon, Harper’s Saito would face an electoral imperative to deliver the goods on time---that is, resurrect the growth economy with “quantitative easing”. Stephen Hazell and the environmental movement, of course, offer no fundamental opposition to this goal. Only that the same destination can be reached by more efficient means, with less collateral cost to people and resources. We can have something called “Green Growth”, a growing economy with low “throughput” and negligible ecological consequences. In other words, our society can go on binging on 6,000 calories a day if we shift to 6,000 calories of Diet Coke. Unfortunately no society can subsist on soda pop, and a nation of potters, painters, poets, musicians and yoga teachers cannot long support the superstructure of social services upon which we depend. Someone, somewhere, must do the dirty work in mines and factories, if not at home, then abroad. This reliance upon a distant population for primary production is what Dr. William Rees called “appropriated capacity”. To call an economy that feeds off this dark underbelly of wealth “sustainable” is like a nun claiming chastity while working part time in house of ill repute. To grasp the surrealism of environmentalist concern for an economy in retraction, imagine if Jews on a cattle car to Auschwitz fretted about finding a renewable energy source for the train if it stalled for want of coal. Size matters, and the economy needs to shrink so the environment can grow.
But here is where modern environmentalism and Colonel Nicholson’s logic converge. Nicholson ignored the fact that in sharing Saito’s objective, he was actually collaborating with the Japanese war effort by working to construct a route to the doorstep of British India. His focus was not on the war, but on his men’s morale, which he hoped to boost by making them take pride in their work. By re-building the bridge properly he could re-build his battalion. Bridge construction was just a tool in this more fundamental mission.
In a re-make of the film, Sierra Club Executive Director Hazell would recruit his green army to help re-build “the bridge to growth” so that they may feel good about themselves, and to be, in Saito’s words, “happy in (their) work”. After all, resigning one’s self to the inevitability of growth is the only rational attitude for any Canadian to take. Canada is just like Saito’s Camp 16 or any other gulag in the archipelago of Burmese POW camps. “Escape is impossible---you would die”, Saito warned. “Grow or die” would commandant Harper’s injunction. “It is not whether we grow, but how we grow” would be Hazell’s qualification. Growth, in any case, is inevitable.
Best then to “manage” it rather than dream the impossible dream of jumping off the runaway train. In fact, if it slows down, Hazell advises, let’s accelerate it with a “Green Stimulus Package”. Let’s give CPR to Frankenstein to get him up off the ground and running again. Of course, we’ll clean him up with green wash and dye his hair green, and maybe then we’ll forget about that he is still a voracious consumer. Unfortunately, as the remake would show, you can employ people to retrofit houses, build smart cars in ‘green’ factories, and build green homes and buildings with solar panels---but these projects still consume materials, and deplete resources that are often imported. The greenest structures use nails, cement , bricks, pipes and plastics, and the energy used for their production and transportation is formidable. In fact, the energy needed to produce the high quality silicon for photovoltaic solar panels is three times greater than the electricity it will produce. And the workers employed in all of this ‘green’ production will be paid wages, wages that purchase not-so-green products and services. “Green growth” is still growth. The Bridge on the River Kwai will still help the enemy conduct the war--- the war on the environment, the one they are winning.
The collusion between Harper and Hazell in their mad rush to disaster is not without critics, however. In the original movie, American Colonel Shears, played by William Holden, and British medical officer Clipton, were dissenting voices. Shears acknowledged that the chances of escape very exceedingly slim, but added that death would be certain if escape was not attempted. A slave happy in his work would still meet an unhappy fate. And when Colonel Nicholson unveiled his “green stimulus package’ and sold it to the Japanese, Major Clipton asked him, as Hazell and the Sierra Club should be asked, “The fact is, what we are doing could be construed as---forgive me sir---collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps as treasonable activity. Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?”
The Russians in 1941 answered with a definitive “nyet”. In abandoning their farms before advancing Nazi troops they did not feel it their moral obligation to be “good stewards” so that they could leave a lasting legacy to those who succeeded them. On the contrary, they burned their crops, slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their equipment. They destroyed their environment rather than accommodate to a force that would wreak even greater havoc if it was allowed to inherit their resources intact. By the same token, I feel compelled to blow up the bridge to growth as the British sabotage team eventually blew up the bridge over the river Kwai. Nature doesn’t care if I feel good about myself. Only that growth be stopped. The feel-good boy scout efforts of environmentalists to “go green”, to reduce, conserve, recycle, drive hybrid cars, build green, use land more efficiently or abstain from meat only postpones the day of reckoning for a growth economy that each day extinguishes 200 species.
Our goal should be smashing bridges, not building them. Until the war against growth is won, we must withhold our cooperation in its management. We are not here to make growth work or make it “smart”, but to hasten its death. Hand me the verbal dynamite.
Colonel Saito said it best:
“This is war. This is not a game of cricket.” And Nicholson, (Hazell) he confided, is “mad, quite mad.”
Tim Murray
August 16/09
THE AMISH ARE NOT GREEN ROLE MODELS
TOO MANY FRUGAL CONSUMERS DO NOT ADD UP TO SUSTAINABILITY
It is typically asserted by self-loathing Western environmentalists that our global ecological predicament is not one of overpopulation but over-consumption by the affluent fraction of humanity, mainly in Europe and North America. The recipe for sustainability therefore lies in a cultural revolution that would cure ‘affluenza’ by moral suasion and the injunction to live “simply” in order that others may simply live. This project, I would submit, is largely delusional. Nature does not care about personal consumption. It cares about total consumption----which is a function of per capita consumption and the population level. It does not award prizes for Spartan living or self-sacrifice, or award greenie points for applicants to sainthood. It couldn’t care less about personal virtue. It only cares about the impact of all people. Whether Canada is populated by 33 million hyper-consumers of median income or whether it is exclusively populated by 1 million profligate millionaires is a matter of complete indifference to it. It is the total impact of all of us collectively that matters. Live like Ghandi or live like Gates, our total footprint is what is germane.
The question then is, can we merrily continue to ignore population growth in this country or elsewhere as long as each of us behaves as responsible “green” consumers? Can we move over and make room for more and more people by consuming less and less? Are their limits to green masochism? Is there a point where, even if we all lived in caves and wore loin clothes, reductions in personal consumption would not balance off the number of extra consumers, whatever their port of entry? The Amish, who have become the poster child of simplicity and the object of romance and nostalgia, offer a case in point.
A diverse religious sect of about two dozen settlements scattered across 22 American states and the province of Ontario, they present a baffling blend of modernity and traditional living. http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogeler/w188/utopian/amish-communities-technology.jpg As Donald Kraybill explained,
“Telephones, taboo in homes, stand at the end of farm lanes. Powerful tractors used at Amish barns rarely venture into fields. Horses pull modern hay balers and corn pickers on Amish farms. State of the art calculators are permissible, but not computers. Forbidden to own or operate motor vehicles, the Amish freely hire cars and vans for transportation. Electricity from public power lines is off limits, but 12-volt current from batteries is widely used. Clothing, styled in traditional patterns, is made from synthetic materials.” http://www.goodbks.com/excerptpage.asp?ISBN=1561480010
Nevertheless, it can be argued that various patchwork concessions to modern technology are not substantial enough to void the observation that the Amish have a lower ecological footprint that the average North American. Their superior physical and mental health, as evidenced by much lower rates of obesity, longer lifespans and a very low suicide rate, allied with a manifestly frugal lifestyle, seems to many to offer mainstream society a template for sustainable living that we must soon adopt. The Amish offer us an assurance that it is possible to live simply and be happy doing so.
One problem. Amish women between 15 and 49 typically have 7 children each. Their fertility rate of 6.8 compares with the Canadian average of 1.57 or the American average of 2.1. As a result, the Amish population doubles every 16 years. Imagine if North America’s population doubled during that same period. Presently ecologists, but not the somnolent environmentalists, are morbidly apprehensive of a United States that will see over 440 million people by the year 2050, with all of the attendant consequences of drained aquifers, lost farmland, vanishing species, traffic gridlock and pollution, to name but a few problems. Population growth of this magnitude erases reductions in per capita consumption. To illustrate this point, let’s examine the compromises that the allegedly self-reliant and self-sacrificing Amish make. Remember, their mothers have three to four times as many children as do other mothers in North America. Or more precisely, 3.23 times as many children in the United States as do other Americans. For every 1000 people in America, 14 children are born, but Amish women have about 45 children for each thousand of their congregations. So what does that kind of fertility and birth rate mean for the Amish footprint? It means that although a smaller percentage of Amish employ fossil fuel driven technology, they inflict a proportionately higher amount of ecological damage than does the rest of the less aesthetic American population
A survey of some 19 Amish communities was made to determine how many of them used various technologies. While the percentages of use were lower than corresponding use among other Americans, that use must be multiplied by 3.23 to measure the use that the general population of the United States would make if their families were of equivalent size.
So rather than 97%, Amish washing machine use translates into 313%. And 70% for flush toilets, bathtubs with running water, tractors for belt power and pneumatic tools would translate into 226%. The 75% of Amish who use chain saws translates into 240%. The 30% who use propane if pro-rated for the average American family would mean that more than 90% consume propane gas. Get the point? It means that although a smaller percentage of Amish employ fossil fuel driven machinery, their mere numbers offset the gains of productivity. Even more alarming is the realization that, allowing for a defection rate of 15% of youth to mainstream society, most of the 5-7 children born to an Amish couple will themselves spawn 5-7 children, given the resilience of the culture to change. A four percent annual growth rate would see the 230,000 Amish double every approximate 17 years to reach 1,840,000 in fifty years. As analyst Rick Shea noted, “So, even if the Amish footprint is only 25 percent of the average North American, within 50 years their footprint will be 8 times what it is now, or the equivalent of 200 percent of the average North American. Yep, all we need to do is reduce our consumption. Sure....” If other Americans kept to the Amish pace, there would be over 2.4 billion people in the United States by that time. The Amish are hardly green role models, are they?
http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogeler/w188/utopian/amish-communities-technology.jpg
Too many frugal consumers do not add up to sustainability. Folks must not only control their consumption, but their sexuality. In writer Brishen Hoff’s words, “Not even the most quaint, humble, fossil-fuel-free lifestyle is environmentally sustainable when reproduction results in a population doubling every 16 years!” It is people who consume, not ghosts. Our predicament is not all down to over-consumption. It is also about the number of people consuming. We must focus on the number of “capitas” rather than the holier-than-thou quest for per capita consumption reductions. And the ones who live in North America warrant a disproportionate level of concern. Population reduction here is more imperative than anywhere else on the globe.
Tim Murray
August16/09
It is typically asserted by self-loathing Western environmentalists that our global ecological predicament is not one of overpopulation but over-consumption by the affluent fraction of humanity, mainly in Europe and North America. The recipe for sustainability therefore lies in a cultural revolution that would cure ‘affluenza’ by moral suasion and the injunction to live “simply” in order that others may simply live. This project, I would submit, is largely delusional. Nature does not care about personal consumption. It cares about total consumption----which is a function of per capita consumption and the population level. It does not award prizes for Spartan living or self-sacrifice, or award greenie points for applicants to sainthood. It couldn’t care less about personal virtue. It only cares about the impact of all people. Whether Canada is populated by 33 million hyper-consumers of median income or whether it is exclusively populated by 1 million profligate millionaires is a matter of complete indifference to it. It is the total impact of all of us collectively that matters. Live like Ghandi or live like Gates, our total footprint is what is germane.
The question then is, can we merrily continue to ignore population growth in this country or elsewhere as long as each of us behaves as responsible “green” consumers? Can we move over and make room for more and more people by consuming less and less? Are their limits to green masochism? Is there a point where, even if we all lived in caves and wore loin clothes, reductions in personal consumption would not balance off the number of extra consumers, whatever their port of entry? The Amish, who have become the poster child of simplicity and the object of romance and nostalgia, offer a case in point.
A diverse religious sect of about two dozen settlements scattered across 22 American states and the province of Ontario, they present a baffling blend of modernity and traditional living. http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogeler/w188/utopian/amish-communities-technology.jpg As Donald Kraybill explained,
“Telephones, taboo in homes, stand at the end of farm lanes. Powerful tractors used at Amish barns rarely venture into fields. Horses pull modern hay balers and corn pickers on Amish farms. State of the art calculators are permissible, but not computers. Forbidden to own or operate motor vehicles, the Amish freely hire cars and vans for transportation. Electricity from public power lines is off limits, but 12-volt current from batteries is widely used. Clothing, styled in traditional patterns, is made from synthetic materials.” http://www.goodbks.com/excerptpage.asp?ISBN=1561480010
Nevertheless, it can be argued that various patchwork concessions to modern technology are not substantial enough to void the observation that the Amish have a lower ecological footprint that the average North American. Their superior physical and mental health, as evidenced by much lower rates of obesity, longer lifespans and a very low suicide rate, allied with a manifestly frugal lifestyle, seems to many to offer mainstream society a template for sustainable living that we must soon adopt. The Amish offer us an assurance that it is possible to live simply and be happy doing so.
One problem. Amish women between 15 and 49 typically have 7 children each. Their fertility rate of 6.8 compares with the Canadian average of 1.57 or the American average of 2.1. As a result, the Amish population doubles every 16 years. Imagine if North America’s population doubled during that same period. Presently ecologists, but not the somnolent environmentalists, are morbidly apprehensive of a United States that will see over 440 million people by the year 2050, with all of the attendant consequences of drained aquifers, lost farmland, vanishing species, traffic gridlock and pollution, to name but a few problems. Population growth of this magnitude erases reductions in per capita consumption. To illustrate this point, let’s examine the compromises that the allegedly self-reliant and self-sacrificing Amish make. Remember, their mothers have three to four times as many children as do other mothers in North America. Or more precisely, 3.23 times as many children in the United States as do other Americans. For every 1000 people in America, 14 children are born, but Amish women have about 45 children for each thousand of their congregations. So what does that kind of fertility and birth rate mean for the Amish footprint? It means that although a smaller percentage of Amish employ fossil fuel driven technology, they inflict a proportionately higher amount of ecological damage than does the rest of the less aesthetic American population
A survey of some 19 Amish communities was made to determine how many of them used various technologies. While the percentages of use were lower than corresponding use among other Americans, that use must be multiplied by 3.23 to measure the use that the general population of the United States would make if their families were of equivalent size.
So rather than 97%, Amish washing machine use translates into 313%. And 70% for flush toilets, bathtubs with running water, tractors for belt power and pneumatic tools would translate into 226%. The 75% of Amish who use chain saws translates into 240%. The 30% who use propane if pro-rated for the average American family would mean that more than 90% consume propane gas. Get the point? It means that although a smaller percentage of Amish employ fossil fuel driven machinery, their mere numbers offset the gains of productivity. Even more alarming is the realization that, allowing for a defection rate of 15% of youth to mainstream society, most of the 5-7 children born to an Amish couple will themselves spawn 5-7 children, given the resilience of the culture to change. A four percent annual growth rate would see the 230,000 Amish double every approximate 17 years to reach 1,840,000 in fifty years. As analyst Rick Shea noted, “So, even if the Amish footprint is only 25 percent of the average North American, within 50 years their footprint will be 8 times what it is now, or the equivalent of 200 percent of the average North American. Yep, all we need to do is reduce our consumption. Sure....” If other Americans kept to the Amish pace, there would be over 2.4 billion people in the United States by that time. The Amish are hardly green role models, are they?
http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogeler/w188/utopian/amish-communities-technology.jpg
Too many frugal consumers do not add up to sustainability. Folks must not only control their consumption, but their sexuality. In writer Brishen Hoff’s words, “Not even the most quaint, humble, fossil-fuel-free lifestyle is environmentally sustainable when reproduction results in a population doubling every 16 years!” It is people who consume, not ghosts. Our predicament is not all down to over-consumption. It is also about the number of people consuming. We must focus on the number of “capitas” rather than the holier-than-thou quest for per capita consumption reductions. And the ones who live in North America warrant a disproportionate level of concern. Population reduction here is more imperative than anywhere else on the globe.
Tim Murray
August16/09
FOUR STAGES IN THE LIFE OF A MALTHUSIAN IN THE 21st CENTURY
1. Ideas ridiculed, misrepresented, shunned and dismissed.
2. Ideas meet a crescendo of desperate denial and opposition.
3. Ideas recognized as self-evident truth
4. Finally, the After-Life, that is, Hell--- when one realizes that self-evident Malthusian truth was seen too late.
Tim Murray
August 11/09
2. Ideas meet a crescendo of desperate denial and opposition.
3. Ideas recognized as self-evident truth
4. Finally, the After-Life, that is, Hell--- when one realizes that self-evident Malthusian truth was seen too late.
Tim Murray
August 11/09
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF LEFT WING LUNACY
Feed more people who breed more people who need to be fed so that etc etc.
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn’s claim that British farmers would need to grow GM food to meet the demands of a market that will face higher food prices and global food shortages is the classic trademark of New Lie-bour and its ideological clones in Canada. His remarks followed a government report that global food production would have to increase by 70% to satisfy the needs of another 2 billion people by 2050. But trying to relieve starvation by growing more food for a growing population is like buying pants with a bigger waist line to lose weight---with our appetite we will only grow into them. The question is, shall we manage the environment to accommodate population growth or reduce population to accommodate the environment? Obviously the green-left favours the former course.
They have engineered a staggering population increase in Britain while presiding over the steep declines in food production. Net imports of food exceed exports by over 15 billion pounds. Aside for the usual cast of politically correct villains, like the 6 billion dollars worth of food thrown out by British consumers each year, or the 610 lbs. wasted per family with children per year, and the failure to redevelop brownfield land, largely immigrant-driven population growth must be assigned some blame. As one Jeremy Clarkson once put it, “If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?” (Sunday Times, 21 October 2007)
Similar sentiments were expressed in response to Benn’s remarks:
“The answer is not US/ Multinational backed GM crops - but family planning in the Third World and reduced immigration into Britain and Europe. This government has failed to appreciate that this country is becoming more and more overcrowded, with housing being built over agricultural land to exasperate matters further. I don't know whether our politicians are mad, totally incompetent or a bit of both.”
“The root cause of the problems associated with the supply of food is the burgeoning world population. Sooner or later food producing countries will need their own food for their own people. The UK has a sustainable population of less than 30 million, why is this subject never mentioned by any of the political parties.
Not only is population growth of concern to sustainable food supply but it is the prime mover in many of the other problems afflicting humanity. For instance CO2 in the atmosphere has grown in direct proportion to world population almost back to when records began. What part of this do the politicians fail to understand, perhaps if we had a House of Lords which was a House of Expertise, there might be a chance of a proper debate.
Meanwhile we hear talk of expanding the UK population to over 70 million when we should be setting out a sustainable plan for the future. Lets hope the worst scenario never happens as anarchy and two for one offers are not compatible.”
- John, Lymm, Cheshire, 11/8/2009 4:08
“Hilary Benn and his ilk never mention the solution to the food shortage problem; controlling population. Third Worldcountries need to be educated on contraception and this country needs to stop further immigration and stop child benefit after the second child. The public will never accept GM food, so why do these politicians keep bringing the subject up.”
- Sue M, Watford, Hertfordshire, England., 10/8/2009 10:33
“If we want to be self-sufficient, why are we not looking to reduce the population and stop immigration?”
- Greytide, Staffordshire UK, 10/8/2009 9:53
“There wouldn't be a food shortage problem if the human race could be bothered to control its population levels. Even forcing unnatural foods like GM crops on us will no longer be sufficient at some point in the future because it will just encourage continued over population.”
- John, Hemel Hempstead, 10/8/2009 14:14
Canada’s “New” Democratic Party shows a similar disregard for the nation’s food security. It promises even more generous child benefits (aka birth incentives) than are currently provided by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and an immigration intake that is 25% higher than the incumbent government. This when 60,000 acres of prime farmland in Ontario alone is lost to development to house 130,000 more migrants each year. Not surprising. Leader Jack Layton, like NDP Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and former NDP Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert, all believe in something called “sustainable growth”. That’s a universal social democratic affliction though, isn’t it? Remember Tony Blair? “Unless we grow sustainably, at some point we face catastrophe” ( Tony Blair, speech in Maputo, Mozambique, September 2002). Grow Britain’s population sustainably? Grow GM crops sustainably? Grow housing developments sustainably? Grow the limits? Like hell.
Tim Murray, August 11/09
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn’s claim that British farmers would need to grow GM food to meet the demands of a market that will face higher food prices and global food shortages is the classic trademark of New Lie-bour and its ideological clones in Canada. His remarks followed a government report that global food production would have to increase by 70% to satisfy the needs of another 2 billion people by 2050. But trying to relieve starvation by growing more food for a growing population is like buying pants with a bigger waist line to lose weight---with our appetite we will only grow into them. The question is, shall we manage the environment to accommodate population growth or reduce population to accommodate the environment? Obviously the green-left favours the former course.
They have engineered a staggering population increase in Britain while presiding over the steep declines in food production. Net imports of food exceed exports by over 15 billion pounds. Aside for the usual cast of politically correct villains, like the 6 billion dollars worth of food thrown out by British consumers each year, or the 610 lbs. wasted per family with children per year, and the failure to redevelop brownfield land, largely immigrant-driven population growth must be assigned some blame. As one Jeremy Clarkson once put it, “If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?” (Sunday Times, 21 October 2007)
Similar sentiments were expressed in response to Benn’s remarks:
“The answer is not US/ Multinational backed GM crops - but family planning in the Third World and reduced immigration into Britain and Europe. This government has failed to appreciate that this country is becoming more and more overcrowded, with housing being built over agricultural land to exasperate matters further. I don't know whether our politicians are mad, totally incompetent or a bit of both.”
“The root cause of the problems associated with the supply of food is the burgeoning world population. Sooner or later food producing countries will need their own food for their own people. The UK has a sustainable population of less than 30 million, why is this subject never mentioned by any of the political parties.
Not only is population growth of concern to sustainable food supply but it is the prime mover in many of the other problems afflicting humanity. For instance CO2 in the atmosphere has grown in direct proportion to world population almost back to when records began. What part of this do the politicians fail to understand, perhaps if we had a House of Lords which was a House of Expertise, there might be a chance of a proper debate.
Meanwhile we hear talk of expanding the UK population to over 70 million when we should be setting out a sustainable plan for the future. Lets hope the worst scenario never happens as anarchy and two for one offers are not compatible.”
- John, Lymm, Cheshire, 11/8/2009 4:08
“Hilary Benn and his ilk never mention the solution to the food shortage problem; controlling population. Third Worldcountries need to be educated on contraception and this country needs to stop further immigration and stop child benefit after the second child. The public will never accept GM food, so why do these politicians keep bringing the subject up.”
- Sue M, Watford, Hertfordshire, England., 10/8/2009 10:33
“If we want to be self-sufficient, why are we not looking to reduce the population and stop immigration?”
- Greytide, Staffordshire UK, 10/8/2009 9:53
“There wouldn't be a food shortage problem if the human race could be bothered to control its population levels. Even forcing unnatural foods like GM crops on us will no longer be sufficient at some point in the future because it will just encourage continued over population.”
- John, Hemel Hempstead, 10/8/2009 14:14
Canada’s “New” Democratic Party shows a similar disregard for the nation’s food security. It promises even more generous child benefits (aka birth incentives) than are currently provided by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and an immigration intake that is 25% higher than the incumbent government. This when 60,000 acres of prime farmland in Ontario alone is lost to development to house 130,000 more migrants each year. Not surprising. Leader Jack Layton, like NDP Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and former NDP Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert, all believe in something called “sustainable growth”. That’s a universal social democratic affliction though, isn’t it? Remember Tony Blair? “Unless we grow sustainably, at some point we face catastrophe” ( Tony Blair, speech in Maputo, Mozambique, September 2002). Grow Britain’s population sustainably? Grow GM crops sustainably? Grow housing developments sustainably? Grow the limits? Like hell.
Tim Murray, August 11/09
IMMIGRATION, POPULATION GROWTH AND ENVIRONMENTALIST HYPOCRISY ON THE BORDER FENCE by Leon Kolankiewicz
The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental groups have condemned the fence under construction along the U.S.-Mexican border. They claim it will disturb the habitat and movements of sensitive wildlife like pygmy owls and jaguars. And they allege it may only drive illegal immigrants into still remoter, more ecologically fragile terrain.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope even contends that the fence could lead to the “destruction of the borderlands region.” Funny, I thought the border was already under assault from massive narcotics trafficking and the recent outburst of barbaric, deadly drug-linked crime, hundreds of tons of litter and trash dropped by illegal immigrants, polluting maquiladora plants, the mysterious and tragic deaths of female maquiladora workers (near Ciudad Juarez), and expanding habitat loss from the explosive growth of border settlements.
The border fence is indeed likely to disrupt certain wildlife populations, particularly mammals, reptiles and amphibians. The barriers may well block the movements, migration, and gene flow of ground-dwelling species. In addition, there will be a linear loss of habitat in a narrow band stretching alongside the fence.
These impacts could potentially approach those of a restricted-access Interstate highway with fencing to prevent collisions between wildlife and vehicles. Since environmentalists get riled up about building freeways across natural habitat, they are being consistent in getting riled up about the border fence.
But they are being woefully inconsistent – even hypocritical – in not getting riled up about the ecological damage caused by rampant, unsustainable American population growth that illegal immigration exacerbates. The wildlife habitat eliminated to accommodate an additional 3 million people annually is on a scale far vaster and more widespread than the border fence. And it mounts year after year with no end in sight, as long as our population continues to soar.
The U.S. population grew by 33 million in the 1990s, more than any single decade in our history. This decade is on track to surpass that record. About 75% of this growth is due directly or indirectly to immigration, and more than half of 2000-2007 immigration was illegal. At 306 million today, according to the Census Bureau, the U.S. is on a trajectory to reach 440 million in 2050 and between 500 million and a billion by 2100. This will have ruinous environmental consequences.
In overpopulated California, our numbers surged by nearly 50 percent from 1970 to 1990. They grew another 14 percent in the 1990s. Already at 38-39 million, Californian’s population is projected to balloon to 60 million by 2050. Unless immigration is substantially lowered, it won’t crest even there.
Not surprisingly, California has more wildlife in jeopardy than any other state. More than 800 species are now in peril – including half of all mammals and one-third of all birds. Of these 800 species, 134 are threatened or endangered, facing imminent extinction without urgent action.
The 2007 report California Wildlife: Conservation Challenges concluded that the state’s biodiversity is already under tremendous pressure from today’s enormous human population. Further population growth can only worsen the pressure. “Increasing needs for housing, services, transportation, and other infrastructure place ever-greater demands on the state's land, water, and other natural resources," noted the report.
In the USA as a whole, 371 terrestrial ecological communities are listed as globally rare. An exhaustive survey by the Nature Conservancy reported that almost one-third of all plants and animals are at risk. If our country keeps adding 30 million or more new residents a decade – equal to 8 times the City of Los Angeles – pressures on these precarious living resources can only increase.
Yet these troubling statistics generate nary a peep from the environmental establishment, because they are held hostage by their fear of being demonized as low-brow nativists by their political bedfellows – Democrats, liberals, and beneficiaries of mass immigration. And at least one prospective donor threatened the Sierra Club that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar.” They didn’t, and he came through with two donations totaling over $100 million, “dwarfing all previous individual contributions to the club,” according to a 2004 L.A. Times exposé.
Until mainstream environmental groups prove they’d rather be environmentally correct rather than politically correct and expedient, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the border fence can be dismissed as mimicry. Like their fellow mimics in the animal kingdom, these imposters are mimicking those who are genuinely committed to saving wildlife and wilderness.
Leon Kolankiewicz is a wildlife biologist and senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and can be reached at info@capsweb.org.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope even contends that the fence could lead to the “destruction of the borderlands region.” Funny, I thought the border was already under assault from massive narcotics trafficking and the recent outburst of barbaric, deadly drug-linked crime, hundreds of tons of litter and trash dropped by illegal immigrants, polluting maquiladora plants, the mysterious and tragic deaths of female maquiladora workers (near Ciudad Juarez), and expanding habitat loss from the explosive growth of border settlements.
The border fence is indeed likely to disrupt certain wildlife populations, particularly mammals, reptiles and amphibians. The barriers may well block the movements, migration, and gene flow of ground-dwelling species. In addition, there will be a linear loss of habitat in a narrow band stretching alongside the fence.
These impacts could potentially approach those of a restricted-access Interstate highway with fencing to prevent collisions between wildlife and vehicles. Since environmentalists get riled up about building freeways across natural habitat, they are being consistent in getting riled up about the border fence.
But they are being woefully inconsistent – even hypocritical – in not getting riled up about the ecological damage caused by rampant, unsustainable American population growth that illegal immigration exacerbates. The wildlife habitat eliminated to accommodate an additional 3 million people annually is on a scale far vaster and more widespread than the border fence. And it mounts year after year with no end in sight, as long as our population continues to soar.
The U.S. population grew by 33 million in the 1990s, more than any single decade in our history. This decade is on track to surpass that record. About 75% of this growth is due directly or indirectly to immigration, and more than half of 2000-2007 immigration was illegal. At 306 million today, according to the Census Bureau, the U.S. is on a trajectory to reach 440 million in 2050 and between 500 million and a billion by 2100. This will have ruinous environmental consequences.
In overpopulated California, our numbers surged by nearly 50 percent from 1970 to 1990. They grew another 14 percent in the 1990s. Already at 38-39 million, Californian’s population is projected to balloon to 60 million by 2050. Unless immigration is substantially lowered, it won’t crest even there.
Not surprisingly, California has more wildlife in jeopardy than any other state. More than 800 species are now in peril – including half of all mammals and one-third of all birds. Of these 800 species, 134 are threatened or endangered, facing imminent extinction without urgent action.
The 2007 report California Wildlife: Conservation Challenges concluded that the state’s biodiversity is already under tremendous pressure from today’s enormous human population. Further population growth can only worsen the pressure. “Increasing needs for housing, services, transportation, and other infrastructure place ever-greater demands on the state's land, water, and other natural resources," noted the report.
In the USA as a whole, 371 terrestrial ecological communities are listed as globally rare. An exhaustive survey by the Nature Conservancy reported that almost one-third of all plants and animals are at risk. If our country keeps adding 30 million or more new residents a decade – equal to 8 times the City of Los Angeles – pressures on these precarious living resources can only increase.
Yet these troubling statistics generate nary a peep from the environmental establishment, because they are held hostage by their fear of being demonized as low-brow nativists by their political bedfellows – Democrats, liberals, and beneficiaries of mass immigration. And at least one prospective donor threatened the Sierra Club that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar.” They didn’t, and he came through with two donations totaling over $100 million, “dwarfing all previous individual contributions to the club,” according to a 2004 L.A. Times exposé.
Until mainstream environmental groups prove they’d rather be environmentally correct rather than politically correct and expedient, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the border fence can be dismissed as mimicry. Like their fellow mimics in the animal kingdom, these imposters are mimicking those who are genuinely committed to saving wildlife and wilderness.
Leon Kolankiewicz is a wildlife biologist and senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and can be reached at info@capsweb.org.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
GOTTA LOVE THOSE GREEN CONTRADICTIONS
Subject: Green Party critic downplays immigration as an environmental factor
This once from the International Affairs Critic of the Green Party of Canada, Eric Walton:
Tim,
“In terms of your other point that we are inserting low consumption people into a high consumption North American lifestyle I afraid that we are exporting that lifestyle with far greater impact than any immigration consumption multiplier effect. The other problem is that as a big trading nation our ecological footprint can continue to expand even with a stable population (because we a serving the U.S) unless we address the consumption/development/population issue comprehensively and globally.”
Your reactions?
It sounds like gibberish to me. Madeline
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Madeline,
This is one of Elizabeth May’s debating points with us. She told Paul Watson, and Dan on Cross Country Checkup, that the immigrants that we have to worry about are folks like Dutch Shell and Exxon for their involvement in the Tar Sands. By exporting oil, we are fostering climate change. Our footprint is largely a product of our exporting business. Does she think that by growing our population to 40 or 50 million will lessen the pressure to export? A larger population will demand more trade, will it not? Tim
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"Exporting that lifestyle" is a b.s. phrase. Are we to be held accountable for what undeveloped nations do? I think not. Typical liberal condescending mentality - these nations are perfectly capable of screwing up their share of the world on their own.
What ever happened to think globally but act locally? I guess this old liberal saw only applies selectively. Al
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So exactly who is addressing this issue globally in a successful manner? Answer: no one. So this provides even more reason for us to set an example at home for the rest of the world. Rick
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In thinking about this again, it appears as though we are trying to pin Green Jello to the wall here. After years of saying that we have to lower our own consumption, are the Greens now saying that our domestic consumption is not an issue any more, and that we need to be more worried about the consumption of other countries? Have they abandoned their principles and adopted a quasi-xenophobic platform instead?
If this were a dance, I'd call it the "consumption two-step." Rick
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Rick, brilliant point. We can nail them for contradictions like this. So far I have them for a few. For example, they tell us that building a wall around our country will not keep people out. Yet their smart growth nostrums assume that walls can be built around cities, Greenfield acreages, parks and nature reserves to keep the teeming millions of immigrants that they want to import away from these sacrosanct areas. They also say that we need to concentrate people into urban feedlots to lessen our per capita ecological impact. But at the same time Elizabeth May says that we can relieve the pressure that New Canadians will place upon these same urban centres by dispersing them to rural and northern regions that are “crying out” for more people. In other words, Greens want density and dispersal at the same time. I wonder how the New Canadians in a rejuvenated Cold Lake, Alberta or northern Saskatchewan will practice Suzuki’s 100 mile diet? “Dear, could you please pass that hard green tomato over here so that I can add it to my pine needle salad? You know, the one that came from the energy-intensive greenhouse down the road?”
And oh yes, they do want cultural diversity uber alles too. Diversity in the form of 40 million consumers with different skin colours, mother tongues and dietary habits, but all congregating on Sunday at the Church of Sears and Home Depot and mouthing the same multicultural-growthist cant. Biological diversity, buried by bulldozers and sprawling vynal mega homes to accommodate this human diversity, is not so important though. As Dr. Rees said, it is more important to save the relatively “bio-rich” Central American jungles from human overpopulation by siphoning people from there to here than it is to worry about our miserable examples of wildlife. We can do this at the same time as the Sierra Club is milking more donations for their Save the Great Spirit Bear or Rocky Mountain Cariboo or spotted owl or Marmot of the Month campaign. Our wildlife is precious after all---but then again---it isn’t so precious is it? Human Rights is what is paramount. That is why they call themselves the “Green” Party. Green for Green-back? Oh sorry, that is American currency isn’t it? Elizabeth grew up on that, and white guilt.
PS Alan is right. As Madeline has pointed out, the bottom billion of the world’s economic scale has done as much environmental damage as the reviled top billion. They invade national parks to poach protected wildlife, they denude the forests of the Himilayas and Africa for firewood, they mow down the Amazonian rainforests for short term farming, they sire children with the restraint of rabbits, they ape our consumption habits the moment it is possible-----in short, the poor of the third world are not paragons of green virtue. They are as flawed as we are. White mea culpas will not solve our problems. In fact, they will continue to exacerbate them. I am sick to death of Green moral posturing and hypocrisy. The only authentic environmentalist that I have ever heard of in Canada, aside from Paul Watson, was Dr. Henry Morgenthaler. That’s how you reduce consumption. You reduce the number of consumers.
Must go now and water my garden before the Green Police notice. After a two week drought, my region is imposing draconian penalties for water usage that is unprecedented. It is a Green-NDP bastion after all, and the simple expedient of ceasing to issue building permits is something that is never considered. We need more cultural diversity here too, apparently, so more and more must do with less and less. As Hardin would have asked, are we suffering from a water shortage or a people “longage”? We never had issues like this twenty years ago. Tim
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We are expecting ideologues to connect blindingly obvious dots that undermine their ideology. We should know better! Madeline
This once from the International Affairs Critic of the Green Party of Canada, Eric Walton:
Tim,
“In terms of your other point that we are inserting low consumption people into a high consumption North American lifestyle I afraid that we are exporting that lifestyle with far greater impact than any immigration consumption multiplier effect. The other problem is that as a big trading nation our ecological footprint can continue to expand even with a stable population (because we a serving the U.S) unless we address the consumption/development/population issue comprehensively and globally.”
Your reactions?
It sounds like gibberish to me. Madeline
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Madeline,
This is one of Elizabeth May’s debating points with us. She told Paul Watson, and Dan on Cross Country Checkup, that the immigrants that we have to worry about are folks like Dutch Shell and Exxon for their involvement in the Tar Sands. By exporting oil, we are fostering climate change. Our footprint is largely a product of our exporting business. Does she think that by growing our population to 40 or 50 million will lessen the pressure to export? A larger population will demand more trade, will it not? Tim
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"Exporting that lifestyle" is a b.s. phrase. Are we to be held accountable for what undeveloped nations do? I think not. Typical liberal condescending mentality - these nations are perfectly capable of screwing up their share of the world on their own.
What ever happened to think globally but act locally? I guess this old liberal saw only applies selectively. Al
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So exactly who is addressing this issue globally in a successful manner? Answer: no one. So this provides even more reason for us to set an example at home for the rest of the world. Rick
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In thinking about this again, it appears as though we are trying to pin Green Jello to the wall here. After years of saying that we have to lower our own consumption, are the Greens now saying that our domestic consumption is not an issue any more, and that we need to be more worried about the consumption of other countries? Have they abandoned their principles and adopted a quasi-xenophobic platform instead?
If this were a dance, I'd call it the "consumption two-step." Rick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick, brilliant point. We can nail them for contradictions like this. So far I have them for a few. For example, they tell us that building a wall around our country will not keep people out. Yet their smart growth nostrums assume that walls can be built around cities, Greenfield acreages, parks and nature reserves to keep the teeming millions of immigrants that they want to import away from these sacrosanct areas. They also say that we need to concentrate people into urban feedlots to lessen our per capita ecological impact. But at the same time Elizabeth May says that we can relieve the pressure that New Canadians will place upon these same urban centres by dispersing them to rural and northern regions that are “crying out” for more people. In other words, Greens want density and dispersal at the same time. I wonder how the New Canadians in a rejuvenated Cold Lake, Alberta or northern Saskatchewan will practice Suzuki’s 100 mile diet? “Dear, could you please pass that hard green tomato over here so that I can add it to my pine needle salad? You know, the one that came from the energy-intensive greenhouse down the road?”
And oh yes, they do want cultural diversity uber alles too. Diversity in the form of 40 million consumers with different skin colours, mother tongues and dietary habits, but all congregating on Sunday at the Church of Sears and Home Depot and mouthing the same multicultural-growthist cant. Biological diversity, buried by bulldozers and sprawling vynal mega homes to accommodate this human diversity, is not so important though. As Dr. Rees said, it is more important to save the relatively “bio-rich” Central American jungles from human overpopulation by siphoning people from there to here than it is to worry about our miserable examples of wildlife. We can do this at the same time as the Sierra Club is milking more donations for their Save the Great Spirit Bear or Rocky Mountain Cariboo or spotted owl or Marmot of the Month campaign. Our wildlife is precious after all---but then again---it isn’t so precious is it? Human Rights is what is paramount. That is why they call themselves the “Green” Party. Green for Green-back? Oh sorry, that is American currency isn’t it? Elizabeth grew up on that, and white guilt.
PS Alan is right. As Madeline has pointed out, the bottom billion of the world’s economic scale has done as much environmental damage as the reviled top billion. They invade national parks to poach protected wildlife, they denude the forests of the Himilayas and Africa for firewood, they mow down the Amazonian rainforests for short term farming, they sire children with the restraint of rabbits, they ape our consumption habits the moment it is possible-----in short, the poor of the third world are not paragons of green virtue. They are as flawed as we are. White mea culpas will not solve our problems. In fact, they will continue to exacerbate them. I am sick to death of Green moral posturing and hypocrisy. The only authentic environmentalist that I have ever heard of in Canada, aside from Paul Watson, was Dr. Henry Morgenthaler. That’s how you reduce consumption. You reduce the number of consumers.
Must go now and water my garden before the Green Police notice. After a two week drought, my region is imposing draconian penalties for water usage that is unprecedented. It is a Green-NDP bastion after all, and the simple expedient of ceasing to issue building permits is something that is never considered. We need more cultural diversity here too, apparently, so more and more must do with less and less. As Hardin would have asked, are we suffering from a water shortage or a people “longage”? We never had issues like this twenty years ago. Tim
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are expecting ideologues to connect blindingly obvious dots that undermine their ideology. We should know better! Madeline
THE 2009 GLOBAL CONFERENCE OF DENIERS---A SUMMARY
It was my honour and pleasure to host and convene the first annual Global Conference of Deniers this July of 2009. Assembled were a full spectrum of solipsists who had a fundamental issue with reality. There were those who denied the Holocaust, those who denied anthropogenic climate change, those who denied the theory of natural selection, those who denied the efficacy of vaccines, those who denied that there had been a moon landing---and even, can you believe this---those who denied that population growth played a role in environmental degradation. I think they called themselves environmentalists. It takes all kinds, doesn’t it?
In fact the only interlude of realism at the conference came when the pizza delivery guy arrived. He was a Jehovah’s Witness and the only one there who knew that the world was coming to an end. No wonder local Greens slam the door in his face. To be honest, I think the pizza delivery routine was just a ruse for him to insinuate his message in a more subtle manner. I wondered why so many Watchtowers were stuffed in the carton with the Pineapple-Hawaiian. Less subtle are the Hell’s Angels who have been converted to the JW faith. They come to your door and tell you to piss off.
I began proceedings by denying the credentials of delegates, who in turn questioned mine. One of them, Michael Shermer, claimed to be the head of the American Skeptic’s Society whose head office was in Pennsylvania. I doubted his claim and determined that the proof for the existence of Pennsylvania was purely anecdotal---as far I as know---but how can I “know” anything? Shermer may have just been a projection of my imagination. Nevertheless he demanded to be received as a legitimate entity until a double-blind study proved otherwise, and when I complied he demanded verification of my decision.
Delegates found the conference congenial because the facts were not permitted to penetrate anyone’s intellectual comfort zone, principally because it was resolved that “facts” don’t exist. It was determined that reality can be anything you perceive it to be, confirming the belief established by the counter-culture in the 1960s, when as undergrads, we learned that “Hey, if its true for you then, that’s cool, it’s true for you.” I own my truth, born of my unique perspective, and who is the referee who can arbitrate competing truths? Some folks in Germany once made the same point, I believe. Only they said that it was the victor was the referee. One delegate who bore a resemblance to Dr. Strangelove argued that the crematorium at Auschwitz was just a tourist attraction constructed by the Russians after the war---assuming that there was indeed a war. It was probably staged like the moon landing was.
Of particular interest was a speech given by Mr. Moses Abraham, President and CEO of the Great West Life, and director of its home insurance bureau, about the insurance claim filed by the infamous Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel after his Toronto house was fire-bombed by an arsonist. Abraham denied Zundel’s claim on the basis that the fire, witnessed by neighbours and attended to by the local fire department, never happened. His contention was that the Russians simulated it. It was all a Gentile conspiracy.
After much rancor and mutual disbelief, and repeated failure to win each other over to their own peculiar banner of epistemological anarchy, delegates nevertheless were able to reach some kind of consensus that at the very least, UFOs were real but the air force doesn’t exist---a consensus quickly repudiated by the IPCC on the grounds that a wide consensus does not add up to the truth. Shocked and disturbed at having arrived at a conclusion that others shared, delegates then split off to subject the conference resolution to their own maverick interpretations, eventually declaring that no such agreement was ever reached. It was all the product of a Zionist cabal in coalition with the fledgling renewable energy industry eager to grow fat with government contracts to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, namely, man-made global warming. It became a heated discussion.
Most disappointing was the absence of Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who was scheduled to make her case that overpopulation is not a national problem, but only one that afflicts other nations off some distant shore, and anyway, it has no connection to environmental issues. Traffic congestion delayed her arrival and she found all the hotels, motels and B and Bs fully booked when she finally got here, and then she had to quickly leave because poor air quality brought out her asthma. It had nothing to do with population growth of course. She apologized for missing her lecture, citing obsolete technology and irresponsible living habits as the cause. If only we all lived like Ghandi things would have worked out smoothly. Pity, because according to Elizabeth, the more people in attendance here, there and everywhere, the more enriched we would have become---especially if we were “diverse”. Perhaps next year an outreach program can recruit delegates so diverse that we can guarantee discord and disbelief simply on the basis that no one in attendance will share a common language. We can draw from the Canadian experience for that.
Tim Ball, the world-famous debunker of anthropogenic climate change, was also delayed, this time by a freak ice storm that knocked out transmission lines in Victoria, BC, his home town, known for its rose gardens and palm trees. It was the second such storm this summer, obviously due to a solar cycle with historical precedents 10,000 years ago but which just popped up in recent months. Ball cited the storm as proof that the planet was not warming as Al Gore had claimed. Hopefully he’ll visit us this coming winter when the heat wave arrives---again due solely to solar activity.
Hopefully next year’s event will build on the failure of this one, fracturing a formerly unified understanding of reality on an even broader front. Applications from across the globe for attendance are welcome, except of course those who back their air-tight arguments with scholarly references from peer-reviewed journals and deliver their message in a calm, reasonable and dispassionate voice. Only those who hold their views fervently will command our interest and respect because passionate “commitment”, in our culture at least, is more impressive than credible argument. For those not yet schooled in sophistry, we intend to offer workshops in quote mining, cherry-picking, logical fallacies, red herrings, false dichotomies, over-simplifications, stereotyping, false assumptions, and the equation of correlations with causes.
I believe that along with runaway economic and population growth, there is a growing market for this kind of thinking. I am confident that the next conference will be an undeniably successful event. Believe it or not.
Tim Murray,
President, Hoax-Busters,
Quadra Island, BC
July 30/09
In fact the only interlude of realism at the conference came when the pizza delivery guy arrived. He was a Jehovah’s Witness and the only one there who knew that the world was coming to an end. No wonder local Greens slam the door in his face. To be honest, I think the pizza delivery routine was just a ruse for him to insinuate his message in a more subtle manner. I wondered why so many Watchtowers were stuffed in the carton with the Pineapple-Hawaiian. Less subtle are the Hell’s Angels who have been converted to the JW faith. They come to your door and tell you to piss off.
I began proceedings by denying the credentials of delegates, who in turn questioned mine. One of them, Michael Shermer, claimed to be the head of the American Skeptic’s Society whose head office was in Pennsylvania. I doubted his claim and determined that the proof for the existence of Pennsylvania was purely anecdotal---as far I as know---but how can I “know” anything? Shermer may have just been a projection of my imagination. Nevertheless he demanded to be received as a legitimate entity until a double-blind study proved otherwise, and when I complied he demanded verification of my decision.
Delegates found the conference congenial because the facts were not permitted to penetrate anyone’s intellectual comfort zone, principally because it was resolved that “facts” don’t exist. It was determined that reality can be anything you perceive it to be, confirming the belief established by the counter-culture in the 1960s, when as undergrads, we learned that “Hey, if its true for you then, that’s cool, it’s true for you.” I own my truth, born of my unique perspective, and who is the referee who can arbitrate competing truths? Some folks in Germany once made the same point, I believe. Only they said that it was the victor was the referee. One delegate who bore a resemblance to Dr. Strangelove argued that the crematorium at Auschwitz was just a tourist attraction constructed by the Russians after the war---assuming that there was indeed a war. It was probably staged like the moon landing was.
Of particular interest was a speech given by Mr. Moses Abraham, President and CEO of the Great West Life, and director of its home insurance bureau, about the insurance claim filed by the infamous Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel after his Toronto house was fire-bombed by an arsonist. Abraham denied Zundel’s claim on the basis that the fire, witnessed by neighbours and attended to by the local fire department, never happened. His contention was that the Russians simulated it. It was all a Gentile conspiracy.
After much rancor and mutual disbelief, and repeated failure to win each other over to their own peculiar banner of epistemological anarchy, delegates nevertheless were able to reach some kind of consensus that at the very least, UFOs were real but the air force doesn’t exist---a consensus quickly repudiated by the IPCC on the grounds that a wide consensus does not add up to the truth. Shocked and disturbed at having arrived at a conclusion that others shared, delegates then split off to subject the conference resolution to their own maverick interpretations, eventually declaring that no such agreement was ever reached. It was all the product of a Zionist cabal in coalition with the fledgling renewable energy industry eager to grow fat with government contracts to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, namely, man-made global warming. It became a heated discussion.
Most disappointing was the absence of Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who was scheduled to make her case that overpopulation is not a national problem, but only one that afflicts other nations off some distant shore, and anyway, it has no connection to environmental issues. Traffic congestion delayed her arrival and she found all the hotels, motels and B and Bs fully booked when she finally got here, and then she had to quickly leave because poor air quality brought out her asthma. It had nothing to do with population growth of course. She apologized for missing her lecture, citing obsolete technology and irresponsible living habits as the cause. If only we all lived like Ghandi things would have worked out smoothly. Pity, because according to Elizabeth, the more people in attendance here, there and everywhere, the more enriched we would have become---especially if we were “diverse”. Perhaps next year an outreach program can recruit delegates so diverse that we can guarantee discord and disbelief simply on the basis that no one in attendance will share a common language. We can draw from the Canadian experience for that.
Tim Ball, the world-famous debunker of anthropogenic climate change, was also delayed, this time by a freak ice storm that knocked out transmission lines in Victoria, BC, his home town, known for its rose gardens and palm trees. It was the second such storm this summer, obviously due to a solar cycle with historical precedents 10,000 years ago but which just popped up in recent months. Ball cited the storm as proof that the planet was not warming as Al Gore had claimed. Hopefully he’ll visit us this coming winter when the heat wave arrives---again due solely to solar activity.
Hopefully next year’s event will build on the failure of this one, fracturing a formerly unified understanding of reality on an even broader front. Applications from across the globe for attendance are welcome, except of course those who back their air-tight arguments with scholarly references from peer-reviewed journals and deliver their message in a calm, reasonable and dispassionate voice. Only those who hold their views fervently will command our interest and respect because passionate “commitment”, in our culture at least, is more impressive than credible argument. For those not yet schooled in sophistry, we intend to offer workshops in quote mining, cherry-picking, logical fallacies, red herrings, false dichotomies, over-simplifications, stereotyping, false assumptions, and the equation of correlations with causes.
I believe that along with runaway economic and population growth, there is a growing market for this kind of thinking. I am confident that the next conference will be an undeniably successful event. Believe it or not.
Tim Murray,
President, Hoax-Busters,
Quadra Island, BC
July 30/09
FIRST CANADIANS SAY CANADIANS FIRST: Assembly of First Nations Speaks the Truth
The announcement on August 5th of 2009 by Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney following the conclusion of an agreement to attract skilled immigrants to the North West Territories was a masterpiece of bad timing and perverse priorities.
Once again, foreign labour is being courted to fill labour shortages that have never been duly inventoried in an environment where a vast pool of untapped local homegrown Canadian talent begs for opportunities and educational funding for skills development. Kenny’s announcement echoed the infamous proposal by the “Canadian” Dehau International Mine Group to import 400 full-time Chinese workers to develop an underground coal mine near Chetwynd, BC, in the orbit of three native reserves. But at least the Dehau plan was contrived in the context of a boom economy where local unemployment was but 20% of its present level and competition for available labour was fierce.
Kenny’s program to entice migrant labour, on the other hand, is being introduced in the teeth of a severe recession and the prospect of rising oil prices that could smother a recovery. More importantly, though, it is a traditional development strategy that comes on the heels of the leadership contest to elect the new Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and which flagrantly ignores the advice of the leading contenders. Both leading candidates expressed understandable frustration and outrage at Ottawa’s fixation on immigration as the magical solution to our economic woes and its favouritism toward foreign labour sources at the expense of native employment opportunities.
The newly elected Chief of the AFN, Shawn Atleo, explained that 54% of aboriginal citizens were born after 1984 and that Canada needs to embrace this tsunami of youth by supporting them with education and training and creating jobs for them in their own communities. Aboriginal youth are in dire need of hope and opportunity, a sentiment seconded by his rivals, who mentioned that 60% of natives lived as “urban Indians” because too many reserves offer “no jobs, no housing and no clean water.” While federal politicians fall over themselves on the campaign trail complaining that immigrants with foreign credentials can’t find work in their field, some 10,000 First Nations youth eager to be trained for jobs that are in demand can’t get them for lack of educational funding. Meanwhile provinces like New Brunswick and Newfoundland endow immigrant “welcoming centres” with lavish grants.
Atleo said that young human potential already exists in Canada, so “we don’t need to go elsewhere.” His opponent, Perry Bellegarde who narrowly lost the contest, made the same point. “We don’t need to bring in further immigrants to Canada”, but rather, we need to invest in the human capital pool “that is already there”. “If First Nations wins”, he declared, “all of Canada wins.” But the reality is, thanks in large part to immigration, both are losing. Unemployment rates for all Aboriginal peoples, including those in the North West Territories, continue to be at least double the rate of the non-aboriginal population, with so-called “Registered Indians” suffering an unemployment rate of 27%.
No wonder then, that in the “Community Well-Being Index” of 4685 Canadian communities, half of the First Nations communities fell into the lower range of the index as compared with 3% of non-native communities. In fact, 92 of the bottom 100 communities were First Nations. Thus, according to an Indian and Northern Affairs Canada study, the quality of life of First Nations peoples in Canada ranked 63rd in the Human Development Index developed by the UN. Candidates agreed that key to eliminating poverty amongst natives was education and the hope that comes with economic opportunity. Without a preference for native hiring, however, neither education nor hope would suffice. A “Canadians First” hiring policy would obviously be in order.
One could be forgiven for thinking then, that self-appointed “human rights” advocates would concur with Chief Atleo’s statement that “First Nations poverty should be the number one social justice issue in Canada.” Yet federal politicians and labour groups seem to pay more attention to the human rights of refugees to Canada than to the refugees who jump from the fire of hopelessness on native reserves to the frying pan of alienation and despair in Canada’s major cities. Most puzzling is the emphasis that the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) places on “regularizing undocumented workers….whose skills are in need and are contributing to the economy.” Instead of denouncing “the inexcusable lack of humanity” and “zealotry” of the Canadian Border Security Agency in pursuing the deportation of job-stealing illegal immigrants, it might have been more morally cost-effective and righteous for CLC Secretary Treasurer Hassan Yussuf to deploy his energies to redressing ‘the inexcusable lack of humanity’ shown to First Nations people by the government’s immigration policy. For direction, Yusuf might confer with Jim Sinclair, who as President of the BC Federation of Labour in May of 2007, at least protested Dehau’s hiring proposal to bypass local Canadian labour.
The CLC continues to be unimpressed with a Statistics Canada study released at that time which showed that immigration was implicated in a 7% drop in real wages of educated workers from 1980 to 2000. Rather than suggest a tightening of immigration, which by growing the labour pool by 13% since 1990 has weakened labour’s bargaining power, they merely demand that immigrants be informed of their workplace rights. Like the union establishments of the United States and the UK, the CLC has chosen to chase the union dues of potential immigrant recruits at the cost of resident workers who they exclude from primary consideration. The parliamentary arm of the CLC, the NDP, meanwhile, mimics and amplifies the CLC stance. NDP Immigration critic Olivia Chow, reading from the same script as her putative opponents in the Liberal and Conservative caucuses, declared that “We need more immigrants because of our ageing population….We need productivity and growth…”
It cannot be said that First Nations citizens lack the same ambition to find work as other Canadians. In fact, a 2004 study done by the Caledon Institute for Social Policy found that they have similar labour force participation rates. “Put simply”, the study stated, “people of Aboriginal identity are trying to get jobs at almost the same rate as the total population, despite Aboriginals’ high rates of unemployment….this finding implies that the main labour market challenge to the Aboriginal community is not lack of will to work: Rather the challenge is finding jobs.”
In a discussion paper for the Council of the Federation of the AFN entitled “First Nations Role in Canada’s Economy”, the difficulties inherent in the standard obsession with immigration as a solution to the country’s labour force requirements were enumerated. Rather than ‘take their love to town’, governments would do better to love the potential that First Nations Canadians offered right here at home. As the paper pointed out, “First Nations workers are here in Canada already and do not require any immigration process. This is a decreased cost. First Nations citizens generally speak at least one of the official working languages (English or French) fluently; possess Canadian work experience; and possess their credentials from Canadian schools, thus eliminating many of the limitations that face immigrant workers. Most importantly, First Nations citizens have a right to expect that the Government of Canada would favour their employment over the citizens of a foreign country.”
Amen to that! Or translated into a lexicon familiar to those of a Euro-Canadian cultural heritage: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1st Timothy 5:8
Tim Murray
August 8/09
Once again, foreign labour is being courted to fill labour shortages that have never been duly inventoried in an environment where a vast pool of untapped local homegrown Canadian talent begs for opportunities and educational funding for skills development. Kenny’s announcement echoed the infamous proposal by the “Canadian” Dehau International Mine Group to import 400 full-time Chinese workers to develop an underground coal mine near Chetwynd, BC, in the orbit of three native reserves. But at least the Dehau plan was contrived in the context of a boom economy where local unemployment was but 20% of its present level and competition for available labour was fierce.
Kenny’s program to entice migrant labour, on the other hand, is being introduced in the teeth of a severe recession and the prospect of rising oil prices that could smother a recovery. More importantly, though, it is a traditional development strategy that comes on the heels of the leadership contest to elect the new Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and which flagrantly ignores the advice of the leading contenders. Both leading candidates expressed understandable frustration and outrage at Ottawa’s fixation on immigration as the magical solution to our economic woes and its favouritism toward foreign labour sources at the expense of native employment opportunities.
The newly elected Chief of the AFN, Shawn Atleo, explained that 54% of aboriginal citizens were born after 1984 and that Canada needs to embrace this tsunami of youth by supporting them with education and training and creating jobs for them in their own communities. Aboriginal youth are in dire need of hope and opportunity, a sentiment seconded by his rivals, who mentioned that 60% of natives lived as “urban Indians” because too many reserves offer “no jobs, no housing and no clean water.” While federal politicians fall over themselves on the campaign trail complaining that immigrants with foreign credentials can’t find work in their field, some 10,000 First Nations youth eager to be trained for jobs that are in demand can’t get them for lack of educational funding. Meanwhile provinces like New Brunswick and Newfoundland endow immigrant “welcoming centres” with lavish grants.
Atleo said that young human potential already exists in Canada, so “we don’t need to go elsewhere.” His opponent, Perry Bellegarde who narrowly lost the contest, made the same point. “We don’t need to bring in further immigrants to Canada”, but rather, we need to invest in the human capital pool “that is already there”. “If First Nations wins”, he declared, “all of Canada wins.” But the reality is, thanks in large part to immigration, both are losing. Unemployment rates for all Aboriginal peoples, including those in the North West Territories, continue to be at least double the rate of the non-aboriginal population, with so-called “Registered Indians” suffering an unemployment rate of 27%.
No wonder then, that in the “Community Well-Being Index” of 4685 Canadian communities, half of the First Nations communities fell into the lower range of the index as compared with 3% of non-native communities. In fact, 92 of the bottom 100 communities were First Nations. Thus, according to an Indian and Northern Affairs Canada study, the quality of life of First Nations peoples in Canada ranked 63rd in the Human Development Index developed by the UN. Candidates agreed that key to eliminating poverty amongst natives was education and the hope that comes with economic opportunity. Without a preference for native hiring, however, neither education nor hope would suffice. A “Canadians First” hiring policy would obviously be in order.
One could be forgiven for thinking then, that self-appointed “human rights” advocates would concur with Chief Atleo’s statement that “First Nations poverty should be the number one social justice issue in Canada.” Yet federal politicians and labour groups seem to pay more attention to the human rights of refugees to Canada than to the refugees who jump from the fire of hopelessness on native reserves to the frying pan of alienation and despair in Canada’s major cities. Most puzzling is the emphasis that the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) places on “regularizing undocumented workers….whose skills are in need and are contributing to the economy.” Instead of denouncing “the inexcusable lack of humanity” and “zealotry” of the Canadian Border Security Agency in pursuing the deportation of job-stealing illegal immigrants, it might have been more morally cost-effective and righteous for CLC Secretary Treasurer Hassan Yussuf to deploy his energies to redressing ‘the inexcusable lack of humanity’ shown to First Nations people by the government’s immigration policy. For direction, Yusuf might confer with Jim Sinclair, who as President of the BC Federation of Labour in May of 2007, at least protested Dehau’s hiring proposal to bypass local Canadian labour.
The CLC continues to be unimpressed with a Statistics Canada study released at that time which showed that immigration was implicated in a 7% drop in real wages of educated workers from 1980 to 2000. Rather than suggest a tightening of immigration, which by growing the labour pool by 13% since 1990 has weakened labour’s bargaining power, they merely demand that immigrants be informed of their workplace rights. Like the union establishments of the United States and the UK, the CLC has chosen to chase the union dues of potential immigrant recruits at the cost of resident workers who they exclude from primary consideration. The parliamentary arm of the CLC, the NDP, meanwhile, mimics and amplifies the CLC stance. NDP Immigration critic Olivia Chow, reading from the same script as her putative opponents in the Liberal and Conservative caucuses, declared that “We need more immigrants because of our ageing population….We need productivity and growth…”
It cannot be said that First Nations citizens lack the same ambition to find work as other Canadians. In fact, a 2004 study done by the Caledon Institute for Social Policy found that they have similar labour force participation rates. “Put simply”, the study stated, “people of Aboriginal identity are trying to get jobs at almost the same rate as the total population, despite Aboriginals’ high rates of unemployment….this finding implies that the main labour market challenge to the Aboriginal community is not lack of will to work: Rather the challenge is finding jobs.”
In a discussion paper for the Council of the Federation of the AFN entitled “First Nations Role in Canada’s Economy”, the difficulties inherent in the standard obsession with immigration as a solution to the country’s labour force requirements were enumerated. Rather than ‘take their love to town’, governments would do better to love the potential that First Nations Canadians offered right here at home. As the paper pointed out, “First Nations workers are here in Canada already and do not require any immigration process. This is a decreased cost. First Nations citizens generally speak at least one of the official working languages (English or French) fluently; possess Canadian work experience; and possess their credentials from Canadian schools, thus eliminating many of the limitations that face immigrant workers. Most importantly, First Nations citizens have a right to expect that the Government of Canada would favour their employment over the citizens of a foreign country.”
Amen to that! Or translated into a lexicon familiar to those of a Euro-Canadian cultural heritage: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1st Timothy 5:8
Tim Murray
August 8/09
INTRODUCING GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC PEOPLE-STACKING ANALYSIS (GAPS)
THE SKY IS THE LIMIT ON QUADRA
A Proposal for the next OCP Process (Official Community Plan)
The development boosters on Quadra Island always insist that “growth will occur”, and given that self-fulfilling prophecy it is imperative that we “plan” for it. That is what “planning” is to the Growth Management Industry after all. Not a decision to establish an optimal population level and take pro-active measures to achieve it, but rather pander to projected trends, which line so many pockets while picking everyone else’s.
I would therefore like to explore the maximum possible population size on Quadra, given these perennial calls for more growth.
The surface area of Quadra Island is apparently approximately 310 square kilometres, or approximately 120 square miles.
Using a rough approximation that every person is six feet tall by two feet wide, this means that each person takes up approximately 12 square feet when lying down (which is certainly what most of our politicians do when developers call). Thus, the simple calculation 120 times 5280 times 5280 divided by 12 says that the area of Quadra Island can accommodate approximately 278,784,000 people. Naturally the forest cover would have to mowed down, but only misanthropes would prefer trees to more human beings, Ronald Reagan was right about that.
Clearly, we have room for many more people on Quadra if we follow the logic of smart growth ideology and carry density to its natural conclusion.
But why stop there?
Given that the air is breathable up to approximately 16,000 feet, and that Quadra is quite close to sea level, this gives a column of, say, 15,000 feet in which to stack people. Most of us are in a fog anyway, so the transition to this lifestyle would not be so shocking, and shoving more and more people into dense urban feedlots and stacking them up in towers lowers their hoof-print, according to green gospel. With 200,000 people born each day and 80 million each year, it is clear that we must keep moving over into tighter and tighter space. The alternative would be to stop growing and that is unthinkable.
Using the idea that each person is approximately one-foot thick (although smart growth advocates and some politicians seem to be thicker than most), we can multiply the earlier figure by 15,000 to reach the conclusion that Quadra can accommodate approximately 4,181,760,000,000 people – more if we drain the lakes and firm up the empty cavities with cement and rebar. To appease aesthetic sensibilities, we can then coat the pavement with green paint, as do governments and corporations with their policy pronouncements. Our project manager, the former Governor of Alaska, could redecorate our clear-cuts with the necessary woman’s touch, and I know she would take out the displaced wildlife.
Now someone with insight and imagination, not plugged into Sierra Group Think, might object that land area does not define carrying capacity. Food and water supplies could be imported and waste products disposed of to service these trillions of new residents. No problem. Oil-based transportation will last forever and besides, meat consumers and vegans can become “breatharians” and imbibe all essential nutrients by inhaling them from the atmosphere without anything coming out the other end.
And while there are indeed many socially maladjusted islanders who would find this kind of density claustrophobic, they can be rendered catatonic by the constant mantric repetition of growthist buzzwords through loudspeakers. “We are diverse, vibrant, and inclusive”, “We are diverse, vibrant and inclusive”, on and on. Ever see “Night of the Living Dead”? Or was it another sci-fi horror flick? No matter, you get the picture. We have potential. In fact the island already abounds with Borg Units acting on the command of CBC Toronto Brain Dead Central (CBC BDC). For many it is too terrifying to be left alone to think for themselves, the company of trillions of think-a-likes would seem so comforting.
I think it would be wise to purchase air on spec right now, if not for you, then for your children----before the masses realize that this is a once-in-a-life time buying opportunity, and Albertan and Californian speculators swarm over us. Quick, give me a real estate license.
I have tried to be conservative in this estimate in order to keep it at least as credible as the daily claims from growth advocates that what we are doing is sustainable and desirable, and has no negative painful consequences.
The last thing I wish to do is to promulgate the idea that growth smarts.
Postscript:
Garrett Hardin said that overpopulation, like potholes, is a local problem. And global population is really the sum total of two million local problems. But if the preceding proposal was enacted, there is no problem. If it can be solved at the level of my community, it can be solved everywhere else. We can grow the limits. The Sky is the Limit. Let’s apply this principle to the state of Victoria. Since Canada and Australia are both metric, a form of thinking still shocking to my aged brain structure, I enlisted mathematician Rick Shea of Salmon Arm, BC, to do the calculations. Here goes:
http://www.anra.gov.au/topics/land/landuse/vic/index.html
Land Use Description Total Extent ('000 ha) Total Extent (%)
No Data 28.4 .1
Nature conservation 3446.7 15.2
Other protected areas 108.4 .5
Minimal use 896.7 3.9
Livestock grazing 6629.3 29.2
Forestry 3849.5 16.9
Dryland agriculture 6616.9 29.1
Irrigated agriculture 619 2.7
Built environment 449.3 2
Waterbodies 81.5 .4
Tim:
It is clear that the only important criterion is the number of people we can accommodate. Consequently, the lakes and natural areas are unnecessary, and we should optimize the available land area. If we completely level the land (using it to fill in part of the ocean would of course provide more room for more people) and take it down to sea level, here are the calculations:
Assume conservatively that each person is roughly 1.8 metres tall by .7 metres wide, giving an area of approximately 1.26 square metres, or approximately .00000126 square kilometers. Using 220,000 square kilometers as the approximate area of Victoria, and assuming that people are lying down side-by-side and end-to-end, this gives space for a layer of approximately 174,603,174,603 people. Even in a single layer, we can accommodate almost 25 times the present population of the entire planet. But the sky IS the limit. If we stack people up to the limits of the breathable atmosphere (say about 5.200 kilometres), and if we assume that each person is approximately 30 centimeters thick while lying down (or approximately .0003 kilometres) then we have space for approximately 17,333 layers. Multiply 17,333 by 174,603,174,603 and VOILA! Victoria can support approximately 3,026,396,825,393,799 people! That's well over three quadrillion. More if you accept the implications of the "Squish Theorem."
So much for the whining Chicken Littles who say we're overpopulated.
Rick.
--------------------------------------------
So there you have it. You ain’t seen nothing yet Victoria! I believe that GAPS analysis (Global Atmospheric People-Stacking Analysis) will soon supersede the Global Footprinting Analysis. It is an analytical tool expedient to those of us who believe in “progress”.
Willy B. Rees-nable and Matt I.S. Wackernuttal
Global Atmospheric People-Stacking Network (GAPS Network)
Press Officer: Tim Murray
A Proposal for the next OCP Process (Official Community Plan)
The development boosters on Quadra Island always insist that “growth will occur”, and given that self-fulfilling prophecy it is imperative that we “plan” for it. That is what “planning” is to the Growth Management Industry after all. Not a decision to establish an optimal population level and take pro-active measures to achieve it, but rather pander to projected trends, which line so many pockets while picking everyone else’s.
I would therefore like to explore the maximum possible population size on Quadra, given these perennial calls for more growth.
The surface area of Quadra Island is apparently approximately 310 square kilometres, or approximately 120 square miles.
Using a rough approximation that every person is six feet tall by two feet wide, this means that each person takes up approximately 12 square feet when lying down (which is certainly what most of our politicians do when developers call). Thus, the simple calculation 120 times 5280 times 5280 divided by 12 says that the area of Quadra Island can accommodate approximately 278,784,000 people. Naturally the forest cover would have to mowed down, but only misanthropes would prefer trees to more human beings, Ronald Reagan was right about that.
Clearly, we have room for many more people on Quadra if we follow the logic of smart growth ideology and carry density to its natural conclusion.
But why stop there?
Given that the air is breathable up to approximately 16,000 feet, and that Quadra is quite close to sea level, this gives a column of, say, 15,000 feet in which to stack people. Most of us are in a fog anyway, so the transition to this lifestyle would not be so shocking, and shoving more and more people into dense urban feedlots and stacking them up in towers lowers their hoof-print, according to green gospel. With 200,000 people born each day and 80 million each year, it is clear that we must keep moving over into tighter and tighter space. The alternative would be to stop growing and that is unthinkable.
Using the idea that each person is approximately one-foot thick (although smart growth advocates and some politicians seem to be thicker than most), we can multiply the earlier figure by 15,000 to reach the conclusion that Quadra can accommodate approximately 4,181,760,000,000 people – more if we drain the lakes and firm up the empty cavities with cement and rebar. To appease aesthetic sensibilities, we can then coat the pavement with green paint, as do governments and corporations with their policy pronouncements. Our project manager, the former Governor of Alaska, could redecorate our clear-cuts with the necessary woman’s touch, and I know she would take out the displaced wildlife.
Now someone with insight and imagination, not plugged into Sierra Group Think, might object that land area does not define carrying capacity. Food and water supplies could be imported and waste products disposed of to service these trillions of new residents. No problem. Oil-based transportation will last forever and besides, meat consumers and vegans can become “breatharians” and imbibe all essential nutrients by inhaling them from the atmosphere without anything coming out the other end.
And while there are indeed many socially maladjusted islanders who would find this kind of density claustrophobic, they can be rendered catatonic by the constant mantric repetition of growthist buzzwords through loudspeakers. “We are diverse, vibrant, and inclusive”, “We are diverse, vibrant and inclusive”, on and on. Ever see “Night of the Living Dead”? Or was it another sci-fi horror flick? No matter, you get the picture. We have potential. In fact the island already abounds with Borg Units acting on the command of CBC Toronto Brain Dead Central (CBC BDC). For many it is too terrifying to be left alone to think for themselves, the company of trillions of think-a-likes would seem so comforting.
I think it would be wise to purchase air on spec right now, if not for you, then for your children----before the masses realize that this is a once-in-a-life time buying opportunity, and Albertan and Californian speculators swarm over us. Quick, give me a real estate license.
I have tried to be conservative in this estimate in order to keep it at least as credible as the daily claims from growth advocates that what we are doing is sustainable and desirable, and has no negative painful consequences.
The last thing I wish to do is to promulgate the idea that growth smarts.
Postscript:
Garrett Hardin said that overpopulation, like potholes, is a local problem. And global population is really the sum total of two million local problems. But if the preceding proposal was enacted, there is no problem. If it can be solved at the level of my community, it can be solved everywhere else. We can grow the limits. The Sky is the Limit. Let’s apply this principle to the state of Victoria. Since Canada and Australia are both metric, a form of thinking still shocking to my aged brain structure, I enlisted mathematician Rick Shea of Salmon Arm, BC, to do the calculations. Here goes:
http://www.anra.gov.au/topics/land/landuse/vic/index.html
Land Use Description Total Extent ('000 ha) Total Extent (%)
No Data 28.4 .1
Nature conservation 3446.7 15.2
Other protected areas 108.4 .5
Minimal use 896.7 3.9
Livestock grazing 6629.3 29.2
Forestry 3849.5 16.9
Dryland agriculture 6616.9 29.1
Irrigated agriculture 619 2.7
Built environment 449.3 2
Waterbodies 81.5 .4
Tim:
It is clear that the only important criterion is the number of people we can accommodate. Consequently, the lakes and natural areas are unnecessary, and we should optimize the available land area. If we completely level the land (using it to fill in part of the ocean would of course provide more room for more people) and take it down to sea level, here are the calculations:
Assume conservatively that each person is roughly 1.8 metres tall by .7 metres wide, giving an area of approximately 1.26 square metres, or approximately .00000126 square kilometers. Using 220,000 square kilometers as the approximate area of Victoria, and assuming that people are lying down side-by-side and end-to-end, this gives space for a layer of approximately 174,603,174,603 people. Even in a single layer, we can accommodate almost 25 times the present population of the entire planet. But the sky IS the limit. If we stack people up to the limits of the breathable atmosphere (say about 5.200 kilometres), and if we assume that each person is approximately 30 centimeters thick while lying down (or approximately .0003 kilometres) then we have space for approximately 17,333 layers. Multiply 17,333 by 174,603,174,603 and VOILA! Victoria can support approximately 3,026,396,825,393,799 people! That's well over three quadrillion. More if you accept the implications of the "Squish Theorem."
So much for the whining Chicken Littles who say we're overpopulated.
Rick.
--------------------------------------------
So there you have it. You ain’t seen nothing yet Victoria! I believe that GAPS analysis (Global Atmospheric People-Stacking Analysis) will soon supersede the Global Footprinting Analysis. It is an analytical tool expedient to those of us who believe in “progress”.
Willy B. Rees-nable and Matt I.S. Wackernuttal
Global Atmospheric People-Stacking Network (GAPS Network)
Press Officer: Tim Murray
MORGENTHALER NOT SO MUCH OF A HERO?
I formerly revered Dr. Henry Morgenthaler. By making legal abortions so much more accessible to pregnant women he in effect, restrained human population growth in Canada from what is now a still unsustainable pace. Each Canadian newborn is an earth-trampling shit machine who will grow up to emit 23 metric tonnes of CO2 gasses annually, consume 3 million tons of fuel, minerals and metal in his life and generate about 65 pounds of waste each day. A new Canadian from any port of entry is something the planet definitely doesn’t need. Morgenthaler did his best to limit the damage. The human “rights” of women to procreate or not procreate are immaterial to the right of existing humans to retain a share of resources that diminishes with each additional human. Not to mention the right of non-human species to retain their habitat which each day is being shrunk by the bulldozer---the iron glove and ugly face of population growth.
Yet, for all his heroic efforts, waged for less consequential reasons but for the correct result, Morgenthaler actually did the cause of sustainability a disservice. Why? He only made legal abortions more possible and therefore safe. If there had been no recourse to safe, legal abortions, a great many pregnant women would have sought out back-street butchers who would have botched the procedure. The result---these women would likely never be able to have children in the future.
Presently, some 25% of all pregnancies are terminated by abortions in British Columbia. The first reaction to this statistic is to believe that without that option, there would be 25% more births in the province and thousands more consumers in the years to come. But we know from historical experience that making abortions illegal does not prevent desperate women from obtaining them. The demand for this procedure is constant. Therefore, the only question is, shall abortions be made safe?
In the short run, it is obviously more humane to offer safe abortions. But in the long term it is very inhumane, for nothing is more inhumane than allowing women who have had abortions to go on replicating at some future date. Pro-life is pro-death. More births in the future will compromise the quality and longevity of life for even more people.
The morality of this largely secular culture is still distorted by Christian “ethics” which place so much emphasis on motives rather than results, on the continuance and proliferation of life than its quality or long term viability. If a compassionate man attempts to save my life at a roadside accident but by incompetence ends it, the law mitigates his actions by focusing upon his motives. His good intentions were that of the “Good Samaritan”. But I would much prefer to be saved by the swift, competent actions of a cold-hearted bastard. I don’t care if my surgeon is a nice guy, I just want him to act with icy precision.
The back-street abortionist was typically a mercenary of criminal ineptitude, while Dr. Morgenthaler was a decent man of professional competence. He performed abortions, and in so doing he took some pressure off the environment. He deserves much credit for that. But if he had sterilized his patients, he would have done us an even greater service.
Many feminists are outraged at the concept of population control. They argue that we can’t advocate “reproductive freedom” on the one hand, when a woman wishes not to have a child, but then turn around and deny it when she wants to have a child. This logic is nonsensical. I can argue that women have the right to drive cars. But granting that right surely does not mean that they should be allowed to drive cars beyond the speed limit. We can grant women the privilege of birthing one child, but deny them the privilege of having more than one child. In a world of critical overshoot, there can be no procreative “right”. No one has the right to deny me my right or the right of existing children to a fuller share of existing resources or deny other species the right to exist at all.
Some parents attempt to disguise their selfishness by heroic acts of “green living”. They believe that they can expiate their eco-vandalism in burdening the environment with children by raising them to follow their example of becoming “green” consumers, of making the “right” eco-friendly choices in the market place and by religiously “re-using, re-cycling and conserving.” This is the self-serving delusional rationale of a classic Green yuppie hypocrite. The only “right” consumer choice is not to consume at all. And the only “Green” consumer is the one not born. At best, “responsible”, “green” living habits can only attempt to minimize the major damage already done by the mere existence of these wonderfully green and responsible people.
In this contemporary era, a “Green” parent is akin to a virgin whore.
Tim Murray
August 6/09
Yet, for all his heroic efforts, waged for less consequential reasons but for the correct result, Morgenthaler actually did the cause of sustainability a disservice. Why? He only made legal abortions more possible and therefore safe. If there had been no recourse to safe, legal abortions, a great many pregnant women would have sought out back-street butchers who would have botched the procedure. The result---these women would likely never be able to have children in the future.
Presently, some 25% of all pregnancies are terminated by abortions in British Columbia. The first reaction to this statistic is to believe that without that option, there would be 25% more births in the province and thousands more consumers in the years to come. But we know from historical experience that making abortions illegal does not prevent desperate women from obtaining them. The demand for this procedure is constant. Therefore, the only question is, shall abortions be made safe?
In the short run, it is obviously more humane to offer safe abortions. But in the long term it is very inhumane, for nothing is more inhumane than allowing women who have had abortions to go on replicating at some future date. Pro-life is pro-death. More births in the future will compromise the quality and longevity of life for even more people.
The morality of this largely secular culture is still distorted by Christian “ethics” which place so much emphasis on motives rather than results, on the continuance and proliferation of life than its quality or long term viability. If a compassionate man attempts to save my life at a roadside accident but by incompetence ends it, the law mitigates his actions by focusing upon his motives. His good intentions were that of the “Good Samaritan”. But I would much prefer to be saved by the swift, competent actions of a cold-hearted bastard. I don’t care if my surgeon is a nice guy, I just want him to act with icy precision.
The back-street abortionist was typically a mercenary of criminal ineptitude, while Dr. Morgenthaler was a decent man of professional competence. He performed abortions, and in so doing he took some pressure off the environment. He deserves much credit for that. But if he had sterilized his patients, he would have done us an even greater service.
Many feminists are outraged at the concept of population control. They argue that we can’t advocate “reproductive freedom” on the one hand, when a woman wishes not to have a child, but then turn around and deny it when she wants to have a child. This logic is nonsensical. I can argue that women have the right to drive cars. But granting that right surely does not mean that they should be allowed to drive cars beyond the speed limit. We can grant women the privilege of birthing one child, but deny them the privilege of having more than one child. In a world of critical overshoot, there can be no procreative “right”. No one has the right to deny me my right or the right of existing children to a fuller share of existing resources or deny other species the right to exist at all.
Some parents attempt to disguise their selfishness by heroic acts of “green living”. They believe that they can expiate their eco-vandalism in burdening the environment with children by raising them to follow their example of becoming “green” consumers, of making the “right” eco-friendly choices in the market place and by religiously “re-using, re-cycling and conserving.” This is the self-serving delusional rationale of a classic Green yuppie hypocrite. The only “right” consumer choice is not to consume at all. And the only “Green” consumer is the one not born. At best, “responsible”, “green” living habits can only attempt to minimize the major damage already done by the mere existence of these wonderfully green and responsible people.
In this contemporary era, a “Green” parent is akin to a virgin whore.
Tim Murray
August 6/09
CHILDREN AS WEEDS
This morning I noticed that a particularly beautiful flower erupted in unison across the bank on my land facing the ocean. Its brilliant white blossom reflected the piercing morning sun which confronted it from the east. And yet this resplendent flower, and the plant it issues from, is not treated with the dignity or praise that its beauty might warrant. In fact, it is not even regarded as a flower, but a pernicious and troublesome “weed” whose appetite for lebensraum apparently knows no limit. It advances like a blitzkrieg, enveloping all foliage in its path, and before you know it, it crosses the boundary of designated wild growth into the pampered territory of tended plants and flowers, wrapping its invidious stems around them like a python, choking them to death. Soon its numbers overwhelm the garden, and other flowers of no greater splendor are mourned as victims.
What criteria determines its categorization as a “weed” while those it displaces are labeled as “flowers”? It is the simple fact that they threaten to be ubiquitous at the expense of plants who are in danger of extinction in the teeth of their relentless onslaught. Weeds are weeds because there are too many to be valued. Flowers are flowers because their fragility requires consistent attendance, while weeds enjoy a flourishing presence despite neglect and a competitive advantage.
If there were a billion roses and but a dozen weeds of the kind I mentioned, it would be more likely that the rose would be designated as the weed rather than the plant with the brilliant white flowers.
There are currently 2.2 billion children in the world, and there numbers grow like yeast in a vat. According to ecologist Richard Cincotta, “There are more human babies born each day ---about 350,000---than there are individuals left in all the great ape species combined, including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobo and orangatuns like this one.” 350,000 or 200,000 per day---the exact figure is not material. What is relevant is that some 78-80 million rogue primates----homo sapiens---are added annually to a human population already close to 7 billion in number. And it is that growing number which is killing off some 200 non-human species a day, upon which even these arrogant and intelligent apes ultimately depend upon for their survival.
It has been argued that we are a species that is so very different than the rest. Spiritual beings whose children are of such divine vintage that each and every one of them is God’s Precious Gift. After all, what other species could paint the Mona Lisa, write Hamlet, build the Taj Mahal or design an MIR machine? And among the billions there could be another Einstein or Picasso. True. But we are also a species that built Hydrogen bombs and chemical weapons, laid waste to rain forests and killed coral reefs. And for every Einstein or Picasso there are thousands who deploy their genius to exploitation and ruin. We are programmed to exploit a habitat beyond repair, then expand and move on to despoil more that have not yet been ravaged, rarely content to live within limits.
I would therefore submit that we are the weeds, and our children are like the white “Morning Glory” blossoms that invade my garden. Beautiful---but greedy, voracious and epidemic. Their collective value is inversely proportional to their number. “The more people there are, the less one person matters.” (Bill Moyers). I have no regard for their “right” to exist in the context of the threat they now pose to other life forms and therefore to humanity itself. Nature does not exist for humankind. Man is not, as Democritus believed, “the measure of all things”. We are game wardens who blew our assignment. Too incompetent and ignorant to manage complex systems that defy our understanding. And too reckless and avaricious to live within the limits of our environment and with little ability to acknowledge those boundaries. Children have our “bad seed”. They are congenitally flawed by the same predispositions that we were born with. The fault lies not with the stars, or with a given political or economic arrangement. It lies within our brains. Like the dinosaurs, we have design limits. Too much armour, not enough intelligence. We are rigged for denial and like a supertanker with a myopic captain, we need to take evasive actions to avoid dangers that loom far ahead before we are upon them, but we are unable to see them.
I am not vested with the maternal instinct. But I do not hate children anymore than I would contrive to hate tropical fish or penguins. I merely have the cold reptilian attitude of a surgeon whose patient has an infected leg that must be amputated to prevent gangrene from overtaking his body and killing him. The leg must be removed forthwith by any means necessary, in the least inhumane of effective measures. The most authentically misanthropic approach would be to celebrate human life to the extent of allowing it to continue unchecked to displace all other vital life forms. “Pro-life”then is actually “pro-death”. And Dr. Henry Morgenthaler, the pioneer abortionist, in this light, remains the greatest Canadian environmentalist to ever live. For if the truth be known, we are the gangrene. The weed that is genetically fated to spread without inhibition. If we do not perform emergency surgery soon, nature will most assuredly do so---and without anesthetic. The results will not necessarily be optimal.
Tim Murray,
July 29/09
What criteria determines its categorization as a “weed” while those it displaces are labeled as “flowers”? It is the simple fact that they threaten to be ubiquitous at the expense of plants who are in danger of extinction in the teeth of their relentless onslaught. Weeds are weeds because there are too many to be valued. Flowers are flowers because their fragility requires consistent attendance, while weeds enjoy a flourishing presence despite neglect and a competitive advantage.
If there were a billion roses and but a dozen weeds of the kind I mentioned, it would be more likely that the rose would be designated as the weed rather than the plant with the brilliant white flowers.
There are currently 2.2 billion children in the world, and there numbers grow like yeast in a vat. According to ecologist Richard Cincotta, “There are more human babies born each day ---about 350,000---than there are individuals left in all the great ape species combined, including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobo and orangatuns like this one.” 350,000 or 200,000 per day---the exact figure is not material. What is relevant is that some 78-80 million rogue primates----homo sapiens---are added annually to a human population already close to 7 billion in number. And it is that growing number which is killing off some 200 non-human species a day, upon which even these arrogant and intelligent apes ultimately depend upon for their survival.
It has been argued that we are a species that is so very different than the rest. Spiritual beings whose children are of such divine vintage that each and every one of them is God’s Precious Gift. After all, what other species could paint the Mona Lisa, write Hamlet, build the Taj Mahal or design an MIR machine? And among the billions there could be another Einstein or Picasso. True. But we are also a species that built Hydrogen bombs and chemical weapons, laid waste to rain forests and killed coral reefs. And for every Einstein or Picasso there are thousands who deploy their genius to exploitation and ruin. We are programmed to exploit a habitat beyond repair, then expand and move on to despoil more that have not yet been ravaged, rarely content to live within limits.
I would therefore submit that we are the weeds, and our children are like the white “Morning Glory” blossoms that invade my garden. Beautiful---but greedy, voracious and epidemic. Their collective value is inversely proportional to their number. “The more people there are, the less one person matters.” (Bill Moyers). I have no regard for their “right” to exist in the context of the threat they now pose to other life forms and therefore to humanity itself. Nature does not exist for humankind. Man is not, as Democritus believed, “the measure of all things”. We are game wardens who blew our assignment. Too incompetent and ignorant to manage complex systems that defy our understanding. And too reckless and avaricious to live within the limits of our environment and with little ability to acknowledge those boundaries. Children have our “bad seed”. They are congenitally flawed by the same predispositions that we were born with. The fault lies not with the stars, or with a given political or economic arrangement. It lies within our brains. Like the dinosaurs, we have design limits. Too much armour, not enough intelligence. We are rigged for denial and like a supertanker with a myopic captain, we need to take evasive actions to avoid dangers that loom far ahead before we are upon them, but we are unable to see them.
I am not vested with the maternal instinct. But I do not hate children anymore than I would contrive to hate tropical fish or penguins. I merely have the cold reptilian attitude of a surgeon whose patient has an infected leg that must be amputated to prevent gangrene from overtaking his body and killing him. The leg must be removed forthwith by any means necessary, in the least inhumane of effective measures. The most authentically misanthropic approach would be to celebrate human life to the extent of allowing it to continue unchecked to displace all other vital life forms. “Pro-life”then is actually “pro-death”. And Dr. Henry Morgenthaler, the pioneer abortionist, in this light, remains the greatest Canadian environmentalist to ever live. For if the truth be known, we are the gangrene. The weed that is genetically fated to spread without inhibition. If we do not perform emergency surgery soon, nature will most assuredly do so---and without anesthetic. The results will not necessarily be optimal.
Tim Murray,
July 29/09
FOLLOWING UP ON THE WALL STREET MONEY TRAIL
Last year I wrote two articles detailing how Big Corporate Money favoured “the party of the working class and the poor”---the Democrats---- and that for every two dollars Wall Street firms gave to the Obama campaign, three dollars went to McCain.
Wall Street, far from being a stronghold of "rich Republicans" and "laissez-faire capitalists," is actually dominated by liberal Democrats.
Consider the following facts and statistics:
• According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2008 Obama campaign received $12.6 million from Wall Street "Securities and Investment" firms versus McCain's $7.9 million
• The top three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan
• Employees of Lehman Brothers alone gave Obama $370,000, compared to about $117,000 to McCain. (No wonder Bush let them go under.)
• Since 1998, the financial sector has given a total of $37.6 million to Obama, compared to $32.1 million to McCain. But Obama ran for his first national office only in 2004. So McCain got less from the financial industry in a decade that included two runs for president than Obama did in four years.
At what point are people going to wake up and release that the Republicans and Democrats are tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber? At what point are they going to stop thinking in terms of stale old dichotomies between Republican plutocrats and Democratic lunch-bunkets? Rhetoric means zilch. The best friend of the working class is a tight labour market---not a President from the “Chicago” school. Fasten your selt belts and get ready for escalating growth from mass immigration and amnesty for illegals on a grand scale. Tim
Wall Street, far from being a stronghold of "rich Republicans" and "laissez-faire capitalists," is actually dominated by liberal Democrats.
Consider the following facts and statistics:
• According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2008 Obama campaign received $12.6 million from Wall Street "Securities and Investment" firms versus McCain's $7.9 million
• The top three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan
• Employees of Lehman Brothers alone gave Obama $370,000, compared to about $117,000 to McCain. (No wonder Bush let them go under.)
• Since 1998, the financial sector has given a total of $37.6 million to Obama, compared to $32.1 million to McCain. But Obama ran for his first national office only in 2004. So McCain got less from the financial industry in a decade that included two runs for president than Obama did in four years.
At what point are people going to wake up and release that the Republicans and Democrats are tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber? At what point are they going to stop thinking in terms of stale old dichotomies between Republican plutocrats and Democratic lunch-bunkets? Rhetoric means zilch. The best friend of the working class is a tight labour market---not a President from the “Chicago” school. Fasten your selt belts and get ready for escalating growth from mass immigration and amnesty for illegals on a grand scale. Tim
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH OF ALBERT BARTLETT NEEDS REPEATING
A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
If any fraction of the observed global warming
can be attributed to the actions of humans,
then this, by itself, constitutes clear and compelling evidence
that the human population, living as we do,
has exceeded the Carrying Capacity of the Earth>
This situation is clearly not sustainable.
As a consequence it is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
that all proposals or efforts
at the local, national or global levels
to solve the problems of global warming
will have little lasting effect
if they fail to advocate that we address
the fundamental cause of global warming
namely overpopulation.
This is not "rocket science." This is just a modern interpretation of Malthus, and it's not difficult to understand. It is difficult to put into practice because it is politically incorrect to try to do so. We don't have to wait for technologically elite experts to tell us this. It is self-evident.
We also know, as has been pointed out repeatedly, that if we don't act to reduce populations to sustainable levels in humane ways, nature will ultimately do it in her own inhumane ways.
If any fraction of the observed global warming
can be attributed to the actions of humans,
then this, by itself, constitutes clear and compelling evidence
that the human population, living as we do,
has exceeded the Carrying Capacity of the Earth>
This situation is clearly not sustainable.
As a consequence it is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
that all proposals or efforts
at the local, national or global levels
to solve the problems of global warming
will have little lasting effect
if they fail to advocate that we address
the fundamental cause of global warming
namely overpopulation.
This is not "rocket science." This is just a modern interpretation of Malthus, and it's not difficult to understand. It is difficult to put into practice because it is politically incorrect to try to do so. We don't have to wait for technologically elite experts to tell us this. It is self-evident.
We also know, as has been pointed out repeatedly, that if we don't act to reduce populations to sustainable levels in humane ways, nature will ultimately do it in her own inhumane ways.
THE USELESS TITS OF THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
Can there be a more damning indictment of the US Environmental Movement Than This:
“In 2006, the United States passed the 300 million mark in population that’s 95 million more people than were here for the first Earth Day in 1970 with little comment from environmentalists. In 2007, as Congress debated the first major overhaul of immigration policy in nearly 20 years, leaders from the principal environmental organizations remained silent about proposals that could have added hundreds of millions more Americans during the 21st century.
Like immigration policy for the past 50 years, immigration policy for the next 50 looks likely to be set with no regard for its environmental consequences.”
Phil Calfaro and Winston Staples III http://cis.org/EnvironmentalArgument
How many hundreds of millions of dollars have these counterfeit greens harvested from credulous dupes who assume that their conscience money is well spent in the hands of whistle blowers who make noise about symptoms but not root causes? What do they have to show for their efforts after 40 years? 95 million more people! And what of their efforts to save farmland? 2 million acres is lost to development every year. Nature reserves and park dedications? Studies show that as more land has been designated as a sanctuary for wildlife, development has become more intensive in areas outside of protected zones, where most wildlife resides. Climate change? Green house gas emissions have increased with population growth. The population of the United States increased by 43% between 1970 and 2004. And guess what, GHG emissions increased by 43% over the same period. Duh. If environmental organizations won’t grapple with that, they complete the hat trick. That is, they are worthless on three counts. Food security, wild life protection and in the battle which commands nearly all in their proselytizing: climate change.
And what of the economic costs of mass immigration to the United States? After all, it is economics which leads governments to resort to the quick fix of mass immigration to lower labour costs and drive consumer spending. As a result, American is about 55 million people heavier than it would otherwise have been, and besides the environment, the biggest casuality for open borders has been low skilled native born workers who have had to compete with them. As Bonnie Erbe said recently,
Recent immigrants and their children are swelling the ranks of job-seekers so that the number of applicants per job is many times what it would have been coming out of earlier recessions. USA Today reported three years ago: "The biggest driver of (population) growth is immigration -- legal and illegal. About 53 percent of the 100 million extra Americans (since 1967) are recent immigrants or their descendants, according to Jeffrey Passel, demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Without them, the USA would have about 250 million people today." Since only some 20 percent of immigrants have high school diplomas, job competition is most fierce among entry-level or low-skilled workers.
Aw yes, job security. Some thing that mass immigration advocates seldom have to worry about. More immigrants, more “welcoming centres”, more government sponsored immigrant services, more ESL teachers, more immigration sheisters, more refugee board adjudicators, more court staff, more facilitators for “Diversity Awareness” seminars, etc etc. A whole parasitical bureaucracy built to serve not Canada’s needs but those wanting to come here, and those who make money from their dreams. And what would environmental NGO’s do without the environmental damage caused by mass immigration? They would be like the Maytag repairman----nothing to do. How could paid functionaries justify their jobs then?
Tim Murray
July 23/09
“In 2006, the United States passed the 300 million mark in population that’s 95 million more people than were here for the first Earth Day in 1970 with little comment from environmentalists. In 2007, as Congress debated the first major overhaul of immigration policy in nearly 20 years, leaders from the principal environmental organizations remained silent about proposals that could have added hundreds of millions more Americans during the 21st century.
Like immigration policy for the past 50 years, immigration policy for the next 50 looks likely to be set with no regard for its environmental consequences.”
Phil Calfaro and Winston Staples III http://cis.org/EnvironmentalArgument
How many hundreds of millions of dollars have these counterfeit greens harvested from credulous dupes who assume that their conscience money is well spent in the hands of whistle blowers who make noise about symptoms but not root causes? What do they have to show for their efforts after 40 years? 95 million more people! And what of their efforts to save farmland? 2 million acres is lost to development every year. Nature reserves and park dedications? Studies show that as more land has been designated as a sanctuary for wildlife, development has become more intensive in areas outside of protected zones, where most wildlife resides. Climate change? Green house gas emissions have increased with population growth. The population of the United States increased by 43% between 1970 and 2004. And guess what, GHG emissions increased by 43% over the same period. Duh. If environmental organizations won’t grapple with that, they complete the hat trick. That is, they are worthless on three counts. Food security, wild life protection and in the battle which commands nearly all in their proselytizing: climate change.
And what of the economic costs of mass immigration to the United States? After all, it is economics which leads governments to resort to the quick fix of mass immigration to lower labour costs and drive consumer spending. As a result, American is about 55 million people heavier than it would otherwise have been, and besides the environment, the biggest casuality for open borders has been low skilled native born workers who have had to compete with them. As Bonnie Erbe said recently,
Recent immigrants and their children are swelling the ranks of job-seekers so that the number of applicants per job is many times what it would have been coming out of earlier recessions. USA Today reported three years ago: "The biggest driver of (population) growth is immigration -- legal and illegal. About 53 percent of the 100 million extra Americans (since 1967) are recent immigrants or their descendants, according to Jeffrey Passel, demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Without them, the USA would have about 250 million people today." Since only some 20 percent of immigrants have high school diplomas, job competition is most fierce among entry-level or low-skilled workers.
Aw yes, job security. Some thing that mass immigration advocates seldom have to worry about. More immigrants, more “welcoming centres”, more government sponsored immigrant services, more ESL teachers, more immigration sheisters, more refugee board adjudicators, more court staff, more facilitators for “Diversity Awareness” seminars, etc etc. A whole parasitical bureaucracy built to serve not Canada’s needs but those wanting to come here, and those who make money from their dreams. And what would environmental NGO’s do without the environmental damage caused by mass immigration? They would be like the Maytag repairman----nothing to do. How could paid functionaries justify their jobs then?
Tim Murray
July 23/09
WANTED: ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES OF THE WRONG (UNASSIMILATABLE) KIND
In a lecture given last June, Gwynne Dyer remarked that the exhaustion of aquifers in the Colorado River system would drive 30 million urbanites in the American southwest from their homes. He argued that such an emergency would force the United States to expropriate Canadian water whether we liked it or not----so best to sell it to them now under a commercial agreement that at least would yield some benefits for Canada.
But what of the refugees? It would be interesting to see how the Green-Left would react to the prospect of a vast exodus north to Canada. After all, these refugees would pose a threat to everything they hold dear. That is, they would be mostly white, speak English, adapt to our laws and customs with ease and make an instant contribution to our society. Moreover, their application for refugee status would be so obviously legitimate that expensive hearings with the Immigration and Refugee Board would be waved----thus depriving a thriving bureaucracy of more job security. Our main job as a country, according to Green Party leader Elizabeth May, is to embark on a “great multicultural project”. We must weave a tapestry of cultures whose core values are in fundamental opposition, a United Nations in microcosm, to prove to the world that we have found the magic formula for world harmony. Diversity Uber Alles.
Elizabeth May has defined the very essence of mass immigration. In a nutshell, it is the displacement of indigenous species, be they human or non-human. What is ironic about the Green approach is that the “diversity” they champion is actually the growth of a human monoculture at the expense of the diversity in nature. The volume of megafauna may indeed be as large today as it ever was, as was the contention of Green Party luminary Erich Jacoby-Hawkins, but the proportion of humans in the mix is much higher than it ever was, and insatiable in its appetite to grow even more, pushing all other species off the plate. And since, according to Green gospel, human population growth has no necessary connection to environmental degradation, we can continue to accommodate it. After all, Korea, he pointed out, has a population of 178 million people jammed into the area of Southern Ontario, so there is no reason why we can’t do that here too. It is all just a matter of sensible planning. Besides, only by cramming millions more human cattle into our cities can we make mass transit economically feasible. So by dumping 170 million people into Ontario we can actually improve the environment. More humans, but hey, fewer cars, so we all come out ahead. Impeccable logic that. The fate of the 500 endangered species in Ontario would be of no account----it is not about biodiversity anyway, but green house gas emissions. After all, what did biodiversity ever do for us ? There is lots of it in the “bio-rich” tropical zones of the world so who gives a fig for the species in Canada? They are useful only for campaigns to raise money. “This magnificient animal is in danger of extinction if we don’t rally to save it NOW----so please send your generous donations to “Save—The (poster child of the month) Fund”, care of the Sierra Club (or Nature Conservancy or the Campaign to Elect Elizabeth May). Our Board of Directors must make a living too.
However, it is imperative that these extra millions of refugees be of a kind as to make their adjustment to Canadian society difficult. The Ethno-Cultural Industry must have a raison d’etre. Lavish multicultural grants and endowments for “Welcoming Centres”, Diversity Sensitivity Workshops, Human Rights Tribunal adjudicators, Harassment Officers, Quota hiring overseers, ESL teachers, Human Rights Commissioners, Immigration lawyers etc etc are the very backbone of our economy. No immigrant flow, no industry. Our economic recovery would flop. In any case, this industry serves a vital purpose----to reconcile us to newcomers. After all, it is up to us to adjust to them. We must become sensitive to their needs, not ours, their customs, not ours. So watch what you say! In fact, free speech must be curbed in order that they feel welcome. Liberty of thought and expression is just one of those superfluous features of our bland and worthless Canadian heritage anyway, a hang-up that Dead White European Males had that is an impediment to cultural and ethnic harmony. What is a “Canadian” anyway? There is no hierarchy of citizenship here, no seniority for the native born (except “First” Nations). And that goes for non-human species native to our land as well.
So remember the Green Motto: “Reduce your individual footprint ad infinitum
to make room for more and more incoming feet---MOVE OVER!”
Tim Murray
July 27/09
Droughts 'may lay waste' to parts of US
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 26 February 2009
Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/26/drought-us-climate-change
The world's pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.
In an update on the latest science on climate change, the US Congress was told that melting snow pack could lead to severe droughtfrom California to Oklahoma. In the midwest, diminishing rains and shrinking rivers were lowering water levels in the Great Lakes, even to the extent where it could affect shipping.
"With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle," said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science. He went on to warn of scorching temperatures in an array of cities. Sacramento in California, for example, could face heatwaves for up to 100 days a year.
"We are close to a threshold in a very large number of American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable," Field told the Senate's environment and public works committee.
The warnings were the first time Congress had been directly confronted with the growing evidence that the impact of climate change will be far more severe than revealed even in the UN's most recent report, in 2007.
The hearing was also the first time senators had been permitted to hear testimony about the dangers to human health from climate change. In 2007, the Bush administration censored testimony from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the rise in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, as well as the increasing occurrence of "tropical" parasites.
"The CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," said Howard Frumkin, the director of the centre for environmental health at the CDC.
Yesterday's gathering of climate scientists, led by the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RK Pachauri, was designed to give momentum to efforts by the Democratic leadership to press ahead on energy reform.
"If we don't do it people are going to die. They are going to get sick and they are going to die," said Barbara Boxer, who as chair of the Senate environment and public works committee is key to securing the passage of climate change legislation. But even with the new administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress now united on the urgency of acting on climate change, there were still signs of battles ahead.
The hearing saw a steady stream of bickering between Boxer and her Republican counterpart, James Inhofe, renowned as a climate change sceptic.
Republicans argued that Barack Obama's proposed carbon cap legislation would be costly. "I will certainly oppose raising energy costs on suffering families and workers during an economic crisis when the science says our actions [to combat climate change] will be futile," said Kit Bond, a Republican senator from Missouri.
The Republican minority on the committee also invited testimony from Professor William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University, who is a well-known climate change sceptic. "It's still not as warm as it was when the Vikings settled England," said Happer.
But what of the refugees? It would be interesting to see how the Green-Left would react to the prospect of a vast exodus north to Canada. After all, these refugees would pose a threat to everything they hold dear. That is, they would be mostly white, speak English, adapt to our laws and customs with ease and make an instant contribution to our society. Moreover, their application for refugee status would be so obviously legitimate that expensive hearings with the Immigration and Refugee Board would be waved----thus depriving a thriving bureaucracy of more job security. Our main job as a country, according to Green Party leader Elizabeth May, is to embark on a “great multicultural project”. We must weave a tapestry of cultures whose core values are in fundamental opposition, a United Nations in microcosm, to prove to the world that we have found the magic formula for world harmony. Diversity Uber Alles.
Elizabeth May has defined the very essence of mass immigration. In a nutshell, it is the displacement of indigenous species, be they human or non-human. What is ironic about the Green approach is that the “diversity” they champion is actually the growth of a human monoculture at the expense of the diversity in nature. The volume of megafauna may indeed be as large today as it ever was, as was the contention of Green Party luminary Erich Jacoby-Hawkins, but the proportion of humans in the mix is much higher than it ever was, and insatiable in its appetite to grow even more, pushing all other species off the plate. And since, according to Green gospel, human population growth has no necessary connection to environmental degradation, we can continue to accommodate it. After all, Korea, he pointed out, has a population of 178 million people jammed into the area of Southern Ontario, so there is no reason why we can’t do that here too. It is all just a matter of sensible planning. Besides, only by cramming millions more human cattle into our cities can we make mass transit economically feasible. So by dumping 170 million people into Ontario we can actually improve the environment. More humans, but hey, fewer cars, so we all come out ahead. Impeccable logic that. The fate of the 500 endangered species in Ontario would be of no account----it is not about biodiversity anyway, but green house gas emissions. After all, what did biodiversity ever do for us ? There is lots of it in the “bio-rich” tropical zones of the world so who gives a fig for the species in Canada? They are useful only for campaigns to raise money. “This magnificient animal is in danger of extinction if we don’t rally to save it NOW----so please send your generous donations to “Save—The (poster child of the month) Fund”, care of the Sierra Club (or Nature Conservancy or the Campaign to Elect Elizabeth May). Our Board of Directors must make a living too.
However, it is imperative that these extra millions of refugees be of a kind as to make their adjustment to Canadian society difficult. The Ethno-Cultural Industry must have a raison d’etre. Lavish multicultural grants and endowments for “Welcoming Centres”, Diversity Sensitivity Workshops, Human Rights Tribunal adjudicators, Harassment Officers, Quota hiring overseers, ESL teachers, Human Rights Commissioners, Immigration lawyers etc etc are the very backbone of our economy. No immigrant flow, no industry. Our economic recovery would flop. In any case, this industry serves a vital purpose----to reconcile us to newcomers. After all, it is up to us to adjust to them. We must become sensitive to their needs, not ours, their customs, not ours. So watch what you say! In fact, free speech must be curbed in order that they feel welcome. Liberty of thought and expression is just one of those superfluous features of our bland and worthless Canadian heritage anyway, a hang-up that Dead White European Males had that is an impediment to cultural and ethnic harmony. What is a “Canadian” anyway? There is no hierarchy of citizenship here, no seniority for the native born (except “First” Nations). And that goes for non-human species native to our land as well.
So remember the Green Motto: “Reduce your individual footprint ad infinitum
to make room for more and more incoming feet---MOVE OVER!”
Tim Murray
July 27/09
Droughts 'may lay waste' to parts of US
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 26 February 2009
Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/26/drought-us-climate-change
The world's pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.
In an update on the latest science on climate change, the US Congress was told that melting snow pack could lead to severe droughtfrom California to Oklahoma. In the midwest, diminishing rains and shrinking rivers were lowering water levels in the Great Lakes, even to the extent where it could affect shipping.
"With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle," said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science. He went on to warn of scorching temperatures in an array of cities. Sacramento in California, for example, could face heatwaves for up to 100 days a year.
"We are close to a threshold in a very large number of American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable," Field told the Senate's environment and public works committee.
The warnings were the first time Congress had been directly confronted with the growing evidence that the impact of climate change will be far more severe than revealed even in the UN's most recent report, in 2007.
The hearing was also the first time senators had been permitted to hear testimony about the dangers to human health from climate change. In 2007, the Bush administration censored testimony from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the rise in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, as well as the increasing occurrence of "tropical" parasites.
"The CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," said Howard Frumkin, the director of the centre for environmental health at the CDC.
Yesterday's gathering of climate scientists, led by the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RK Pachauri, was designed to give momentum to efforts by the Democratic leadership to press ahead on energy reform.
"If we don't do it people are going to die. They are going to get sick and they are going to die," said Barbara Boxer, who as chair of the Senate environment and public works committee is key to securing the passage of climate change legislation. But even with the new administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress now united on the urgency of acting on climate change, there were still signs of battles ahead.
The hearing saw a steady stream of bickering between Boxer and her Republican counterpart, James Inhofe, renowned as a climate change sceptic.
Republicans argued that Barack Obama's proposed carbon cap legislation would be costly. "I will certainly oppose raising energy costs on suffering families and workers during an economic crisis when the science says our actions [to combat climate change] will be futile," said Kit Bond, a Republican senator from Missouri.
The Republican minority on the committee also invited testimony from Professor William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University, who is a well-known climate change sceptic. "It's still not as warm as it was when the Vikings settled England," said Happer.
CANADA AIN'T SUSTAINABLE
"The average temperature year-round in Canada is minus 5.6 degrees C, making it the coldest country in the world."
February 1994 Harrowsmith Magazine
And This is The Country That Green leader Elizabeth May (among others) wants to fill up. She claims that the hinterland areas of the country are under-populated, and that millions of newcomers could be settled there. Rural Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, the north—you get the picture. Fine. Then you first Elizabeth. Try living at Canada’s central latitude, as represented by the town of Yellowknife on the 60th parallel. See how your back yard garden grows, if you can find a jack-hammer to do the planting, or afford the heating bill for the greenhouse. Think you can persuade your target of 330,000 immigrants per year to join you? Good luck.
After your stint in Yellowknife, I would be most interested if you then continued your tiresome sermons about how the world’s problems have little to do with over-population but everything to do with our wicked “over-consumption”. “If only we lived like Ghandi” etc. etc. ad nauseum. How did you manage to heat your home up there just with solar panels, Elizabeth? Wouldn’t it be a little chilly in Ghandi’s loin cloth on the 60th parallel? Did you get around by dog-teams or were you naughty by stooping to use fossil fuel for your 4 X4, your snowmobile or chain saw? Did you get much “diversity” in your diet by shopping “locally”? How were those home-grown blueberries and kiwi fruits up there? A tad expensive? Or just unavailable? I think your view of our high energy consumption would be a little more charitable once you lived there. It is a lot easier to be a virtuous green in the tropics than it is in the Great White North.
See, aside from the cold, the tundra, the thick taiga, the mountains and the frozen lakes, your dreams of stocking our country with “diversity” in its millions is handicapped by three major Canadian facts.
1. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits all Canadians, newly arrived or long-time residents, to live where they want to. What kind of wages do you think it would take for immigrants to leave the cozy company of their ethnic enclaves in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal to move to the Yukon or northern Manitoba? And if they moved there, how long would they stay? How many trillions of dollars would be required in infrastructure investment to make an economy work in these regions? How would food be imported into these areas when the cost of transportation takes off into the stratosphere with more expensive oil? Ever perused report number 25 of 1976 by the Science Council of Canada? Sobering reading that. It seems that someone at least could see what constraints resource shortages would place on growth. Do you think our prognosis is rosier three decades later?
2. If New Canadians can’t be persuaded to “stay on the farm after they have seen gay Paris (or Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal)”, how do you intend to protect the farmland that you claim can be defended from mass immigration with proper land use policies? Land use planning is under the control of local governments, not the federal government. And who owns local government? Who underwrites the campaigns for office to local governments? Developers. Make them go away Elizabeth. Once you accomplish that, then I might listen to your mad growthist vision.
3. We are losing 60,000 acres of prime farmland to immigrant-driven population growth in Ontario alone. Add another 40,000 for the rest of the country. How can this be arrested in the context of the immigration policies that you and your parliamentary rivals all favour? Even if farmland could be protected by strict zoning, what will the productivity of the soil in our arable areas once the cost of oil-based fertilizers and transportation to markets become prohibitive? Your immigration policy cannot be reconciled to our food security. That is a fact.
Growth “managers” like the Greens and the NDP live in a delusional state, just like the free-marketeers in the two major parties. Their image of Canada as a vast empty warehouse for third world emigrants and refugees is a mirage. They need to get away from their coffee houses and urban townhomes and visit the real Canada. Once there, they can sweep away the blizzard of black flies or snow from their eyes and notice that like Antarctic, Canada may be spacious but for the most part, but it ain’t habitable--- at least not for the numbers of humans they wish to entice here. Hell, the current population level is not even sustainable. Terra-forming Mars would be a more realistic hallucination.
Tim Murray
August 4/09
February 1994 Harrowsmith Magazine
And This is The Country That Green leader Elizabeth May (among others) wants to fill up. She claims that the hinterland areas of the country are under-populated, and that millions of newcomers could be settled there. Rural Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, the north—you get the picture. Fine. Then you first Elizabeth. Try living at Canada’s central latitude, as represented by the town of Yellowknife on the 60th parallel. See how your back yard garden grows, if you can find a jack-hammer to do the planting, or afford the heating bill for the greenhouse. Think you can persuade your target of 330,000 immigrants per year to join you? Good luck.
After your stint in Yellowknife, I would be most interested if you then continued your tiresome sermons about how the world’s problems have little to do with over-population but everything to do with our wicked “over-consumption”. “If only we lived like Ghandi” etc. etc. ad nauseum. How did you manage to heat your home up there just with solar panels, Elizabeth? Wouldn’t it be a little chilly in Ghandi’s loin cloth on the 60th parallel? Did you get around by dog-teams or were you naughty by stooping to use fossil fuel for your 4 X4, your snowmobile or chain saw? Did you get much “diversity” in your diet by shopping “locally”? How were those home-grown blueberries and kiwi fruits up there? A tad expensive? Or just unavailable? I think your view of our high energy consumption would be a little more charitable once you lived there. It is a lot easier to be a virtuous green in the tropics than it is in the Great White North.
See, aside from the cold, the tundra, the thick taiga, the mountains and the frozen lakes, your dreams of stocking our country with “diversity” in its millions is handicapped by three major Canadian facts.
1. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits all Canadians, newly arrived or long-time residents, to live where they want to. What kind of wages do you think it would take for immigrants to leave the cozy company of their ethnic enclaves in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal to move to the Yukon or northern Manitoba? And if they moved there, how long would they stay? How many trillions of dollars would be required in infrastructure investment to make an economy work in these regions? How would food be imported into these areas when the cost of transportation takes off into the stratosphere with more expensive oil? Ever perused report number 25 of 1976 by the Science Council of Canada? Sobering reading that. It seems that someone at least could see what constraints resource shortages would place on growth. Do you think our prognosis is rosier three decades later?
2. If New Canadians can’t be persuaded to “stay on the farm after they have seen gay Paris (or Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal)”, how do you intend to protect the farmland that you claim can be defended from mass immigration with proper land use policies? Land use planning is under the control of local governments, not the federal government. And who owns local government? Who underwrites the campaigns for office to local governments? Developers. Make them go away Elizabeth. Once you accomplish that, then I might listen to your mad growthist vision.
3. We are losing 60,000 acres of prime farmland to immigrant-driven population growth in Ontario alone. Add another 40,000 for the rest of the country. How can this be arrested in the context of the immigration policies that you and your parliamentary rivals all favour? Even if farmland could be protected by strict zoning, what will the productivity of the soil in our arable areas once the cost of oil-based fertilizers and transportation to markets become prohibitive? Your immigration policy cannot be reconciled to our food security. That is a fact.
Growth “managers” like the Greens and the NDP live in a delusional state, just like the free-marketeers in the two major parties. Their image of Canada as a vast empty warehouse for third world emigrants and refugees is a mirage. They need to get away from their coffee houses and urban townhomes and visit the real Canada. Once there, they can sweep away the blizzard of black flies or snow from their eyes and notice that like Antarctic, Canada may be spacious but for the most part, but it ain’t habitable--- at least not for the numbers of humans they wish to entice here. Hell, the current population level is not even sustainable. Terra-forming Mars would be a more realistic hallucination.
Tim Murray
August 4/09
Rees' Verdict: Humans are inherently unsustainable
Genetically Programmed for Growth and Expansion
I reject extremists on all sides and also agree that potential climate change is only one symptom of the overshoot revealed by our eco-footprint work among other places. Unquestionably climate change has received a disproportionate amount of attention from governments and the media.
That said, I think you will agree that nothing governments have done, in Canada in particular, will have much effect on climate if it is changing. In this statement I include such things as the ethanol subsidy programs in the US and Canada that are really designed to satisfy corporate lobbyists in agribusiness and the chemical industries out to stuff their own wallets and which, by most accounts actually add to GHG emissions. This is the real distraction--wasting resources on non-solutions.
Incidentally, I read just this morning that Canadians logged a record number of miles driven in recent months, up over 3% from last year so it doesn't seem from observable behaviour that ordinary citizens are paying much heed to the climate change warnings.
Regrettably, neither they nor most other folks are paying much attention to any of the other symptoms of global overshoot either. As I have long argued, the universe continues to unfold according to genetic programming that creates subconscious urgings in all species, including humans, to expand to fill all accessible habitat to capacity and use up all available resources. H. sapiens is simply better at the game than any other species.
Dr. William Rees
July 23/09
I reject extremists on all sides and also agree that potential climate change is only one symptom of the overshoot revealed by our eco-footprint work among other places. Unquestionably climate change has received a disproportionate amount of attention from governments and the media.
That said, I think you will agree that nothing governments have done, in Canada in particular, will have much effect on climate if it is changing. In this statement I include such things as the ethanol subsidy programs in the US and Canada that are really designed to satisfy corporate lobbyists in agribusiness and the chemical industries out to stuff their own wallets and which, by most accounts actually add to GHG emissions. This is the real distraction--wasting resources on non-solutions.
Incidentally, I read just this morning that Canadians logged a record number of miles driven in recent months, up over 3% from last year so it doesn't seem from observable behaviour that ordinary citizens are paying much heed to the climate change warnings.
Regrettably, neither they nor most other folks are paying much attention to any of the other symptoms of global overshoot either. As I have long argued, the universe continues to unfold according to genetic programming that creates subconscious urgings in all species, including humans, to expand to fill all accessible habitat to capacity and use up all available resources. H. sapiens is simply better at the game than any other species.
Dr. William Rees
July 23/09
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