Overpopulation

Every generation has its doomsday scenario. When my mother was studying for what she quaintly calls her “matriculation” in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. She downed her pen in protest. What was the point of studying, she told her unimpressed immigrant parents, if nuclear war was about to break out?

By the end of that decade, concerns over nuclear bombs were defused by The Population Bomb, the explosive book by Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich which warned of mass starvation and all kinds of chaos due to over-population.

That threat waned too, at least in the public mind. As eventually did the Y2K bug, mad cow, mad bird, mad pig and mad everything else. And now, it seems, climate change is waning as a serious threat in the public estimation.

Continue reading "Climate change won’t happen overnight, but it will happen" »

Wildlife harvesting advocate Professor Mike Archer AM has been geeing up the anti-vegetarian ork armies with an article putting the boot in for ‘hypocrisy’ over mice. The pesky little critters erupt into sizable plagues in grain growing areas every few years and Archer thereby accused vegetarians of having the “worst possible” diet in terms of suffering and sustainability.

What not to do when it comes to a sustainable diet

During the robust online debate following his article, Archer produced the following visionary statement on Australia’s food production future:

“In fact (sorry to sound insensitive), but we should not be consuming Australia unsustainably as we are now to feed 50 million people overseas in addition to the rapidly expanding Australian population. It’s a great short-term strategy to make more money and feel we done [sic] our bit to feed the starving millions overseas, but it makes us contributors to the exacerbating global problem of overpopulation rather than part of the solution. If we could just manage Australia sustainably, that would be the beginning of a rational approach to land-use and set a good example for the rest of the world.”

Continue reading "The ethics of feeding off the fat of the land" »