The World According to Attenborough:Without You

I think we all have been touched by Sir David Attenborough's work. He is a world renown broadcaster and naturalist. His is the respected face and voice of British natural history programs that have graced our TV screens for more than 50 years. Through his BBC specials via PBS we have seen the many wonders of this world. His "Life" series, a trilogy: Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990) examined the world's organisms from the viewpoints of taxonomy, ecology and all the stages of life. But David has a problem...

You (and your children).

Mr. Attenborough thinks the world is over crowded with beasts we fondly know as humans. They are starting to get in the way of his enjoyment of the natural world. You see he and only he has the right to see nature up close and personal. Actually, I am being too hard on him. While he believes the planet is overpopulated he has shied away from advocating harsh and dictatorial presciptions for eradicating the problem. In a NewScientist.com article he declares that his perscription involves persuading people that their lives and the lives of their children would be better if they didn't exceed a certain number of births per family.

The same cannot be said for the numerous self-loathing denizens of Western Civilzation who have some notion that the sweet life is as far away from this modern high-tech world as they can get. Except they don't really want to go anywhere or give up anything - they think you and I should.

First, they want you to give up any notion of having children. Children are the problem you see. There are just too darn many of them. They want to force China's population control program on you. Then it's forced sterilization if you insist on breaking the rules. See for yourself - read a few of the comments from the aforementioned NewScientist.com article...

It sort of makes me laugh when I think about these people spouting off from the basement of their Mum and Pop's house in suburban London on their powerful home computer over their broadband Internet connection. Sitting there in their designer clothes with a belly full of Shepard's Pie they can't see the contradiction in their irrational diatribe against everything that they are. How do they think that computer got there? What about the wonderously powerful Internet. For that matter how was David Attenborough able to produce such fine TV programs? It wasn't Soviet civililzation or sub-Saharan African civilzation that created a world in which these wannabe dictators thrive, it was Western Civilization.

One commenter put his finger on the reason the population has exploded over the last 100 years(and also why there has never been mass global starvation). Oil. The availability and means to have the energy in oil do massive amounts of work for us has transformed our western world from one of endless toil into a pleasant, prosperous existence. A life where we have the time and the luxury to spout off about how awful we truly are to be so presumptuous to actually enjoy this life. I can state with peace of mind that the fact that others in this world suffer is not my direct responsibility. The resources that I use are bought and paid for, which may actually help bring a better life to those who make them available to me. The mistaken notion that the resources of the planet are a fixed pie that dwindles with each birth is an existential problem. The resources are whatever we can make of them. It takes the work of human beings to take raw materials and energy and create useful things like computers and modems and beer and food. Humans are not a liability, but the most precious resource.

We ought not to be apologetic for what we have built for ourselves but mindful that we need to be good stewards of the environment and well behaved global citizens - of course we have work to do...

Why even Attenborough understands this: excerpt For all his love of wild animals and places, Attenborough does not want to be immersed in them full-time. That's why he has chosen to live in London for more than 50 years. "I would go mad if I lived in the rainforest," he laughs. "I like what human beings do, I'm fascinated by them, and if you want to know any of those things, a big city is the place." He would miss libraries, concerts, theatre - and the chance to wander into the British Museum "just to have a look at something". end excerpt

The solution to overpopulation and resource decimation is and always has been prosperity. Prosperity relies on energy - or making energy do work for us. For the time being that energy source is oil, in the future who knows... This flies in the face of what the self-loathing want for us and the rest of the world. Carbon credits or energy taxation will be a disaster. Population control is already a disaster. As practiced today it is racist as well.

For one minute examine the sorry state of Western-funded population control programs throughout the world - the funding that Barack Obama has just restored. Seventy percent of these "family planning" clinics are located in minority neighborhoods in the U.S. Consider also that American foreign aid for so-called "health programs" still target the black, brown, and yellow populations of the world. And why do we continue to disallow dirt cheap malaria control measures by restricting access to them for third world countries? Hundreds of thousands of children die every year due to malaria. Is this not racist population control?

The facts look frightening considering acceleration of human expansion. We can see it very dramatically in the time it took for each milestone of a billion people to be reached. Our first billion, passed around 1804, took perhaps 200,000 years to reach. The second billion took only 123 years and the third, reached in 1960, a mere 33 years. Since then we have been in overdrive, adding a billion every 13 or 14 years. We passed the 6.6 billion mark late in 2007. -source-

Strangely we have not seen mass starvation or any global plague in the nearly 50 years that the population of the Earth has doubled from 3 billion to 6 billion. There have been local incidences of starvation but all of them can be attributed to government abuse and not the lack of resources available to feed them. In fact until the recent economic downturn global poverty and starvation was declining. This should be impossible if we are running out of resources. Well, we're not.

If the global economy rights itself again this trend toward greater prosperity will continue and birth rates will fall naturally without China-like forced abortion policies. At some point population growth will top out and these same ass wipes who want to deprive children of life will wonder who is going to take care of them in their old age. My kids will be there for me.




CW