On The Population Bomb

[akilika]

(EDIT: Turns out that every point I was making was made much better by Thomas L. Macdonald on the Patheos Website: Paul Ehrlich: Still Wrong After All These Years. Apparently he's still shooting off his mouth, and saying everything he's been talking about is right. Amazing. I apparently picked up his book at a fairly good time

Comments

[mosinging1986]

I am so used to living in the now, that I forget that these ideas have been around for a long, long time.

I haven't read this book, so I can't comment on it directly. But this caught my attention:

This book makes the basic argument that, seeing as we're failing to even feed our current global population, we must use population control measures to reduce the population of the earth drastically--say, to half a billion--in order to be able to sustain the human race for generations to come at an acceptable standard of living.

Did the author offer any ideas about why we are failing to feed the population? One doesn't need to be an economist or any other sort of expert to realize that the problem is not lack of food/resources. It's not even natural disasters and drought

[litlover12]

That's something I've noticed about leftists in general. They have a remarkable ability to stand up and say things and have tons of people believe them even when they don't back them up, or have no proof, or behave demonstrably differently from their own teachings, or are flat-out lying. I can't understand it, but I've seen it over and over and over again. It's INCREDIBLY frustrating.

[fabricdragon]

given "the right to have grandchildren" the fact that he and most of his co horts also advocate sterilizing a lot of the population, and aborting most of the children... is inherantly contradictory.

sort of like how China's "one child" policy keeps getting pushed at us as a great idea, when its actually leading to all sorts of social problems even now....

[fabricdragon]

i will point out that an argument that the "diet for a small planet" author put forward a LONG time ago was that we are producing so much food that we have to DUMP it by feeding human food (corn) to cattle, instead of letting them eat grass, which is not food for people.

basically we put several POUNDS of human edible food into each pound of meat, when that SAME pound of meat can be had for no, NO, loss of human grade food (by letting cattle eat grass, chickens eat weed seeds, and bugs, etc)

now most of her fellows then use that to advocate for a vegan diet. not going to talk about that... its off topic, but the basic fact is that enough food is produced that we can deliberately reduce it by something like 4 to one....
and STILL export food to the rest of the world

most of the inability to feed places comes from waste, civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, bad transportation, etc...

[ladyofavalon77]

Thanks for the review. No need to pick up this book :) Hope you do find one that helps out in the future ;)