I have a question. If overpopulation is taboo, unmentionable, so inflammably risqué, then why can you not open a newspaper, switch on the box or listen to any one of millions of green activists without hearing someone say: ‘There are too many people’? Overpopulation is in fact the Great Mentionable, the Continually Mentioned, the Mentioned So Frequently It Almost Makes Me Want Me To Do My Own Bit For Population Reduction And Top Myself. Both the mainstreaming of Malthusian thought, and the simultaneous insistence that it is a non-mainstream, out-there, super-brave point of view, reveal much about the pessimism and defensiveness of contemporary eco-thinking.
He gives some hilarious examples of "evidence" that overpopulation is affecting every corner of everywhere, and how this is simply assumed, without actual evidence. Much of what one thinks about this subject depends on one's view of the human race and its place in the natural order, one's view of carbon output vis-a-vis climate change, and one's general attitude about the state of the world. For me, that depends on where I am with regard to depression, very often. In my clear-thinking moments, I think much of this is overblown anti-human demagoguery, flying in the face of the purported belief in a woman's "right to choose." Guess that "right" only applies to women in the West? (It certainly means that the right to exist doesn't exist for either gender, which of course renders all other rights easily ignored and abrogated as the need arises.)
As the Stephens (Levitt and Dubner) point out in their conventional wisdom-toppling new book, Superfreakonomics, most of our problems do in fact have solutions rooted in human ingenuity of one sort or another. I think most of us agree that we need to be more considerate of environmental impact in everything we do, and most of us have done just that. But we also need to understand that the ecosphere is not made of fine china. Much, much worse things have happened to life on this planet in the past, and both the planet and life on it have survived. That's obviously not an excuse to do what thou wilt with the earth's resources, but it is a helpful reminder that we are more than a) the sum of our genes and b) the inverse of our carbon output.
If human activity is the exclusive, or even primary, forcing on the general warming trend (that hasn't been active since 1998—temperatures are stable or cooling since then—which suggests that other factors may have a role, too, but let's not get too far removed from the human blame-a-thon for now), there's a lot of explaining yet to do. In addition to the question raised by the previous parenthetical, how is it that the planet cooled post-World War II, as industrialization went into overdrive? Shouldn't the opposite have happened, if indeed we are the primary climate force? And even if there's a delay in result, shouldn't any cooling trend have been impossible, since human industrial activity—and greenhouse gas output—has been ratcheting ever upward since the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the automobile? I have so many questions, and I am not impressed by the patronizing answers offered by the climate-disaster magisterium any more than I am soothed about the scandalous "science" practiced by some in that movement.
As always, this comes down to "cui bono"—who benefits? The Al Gores of this world are poised to cash in on government-forced climate-change concessions. They'll do so as the poor struggle to shoulder the additional costs of Western sanctimony.
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