http://you-read-it-here-first.com/viewtopic.php?t=856& ...

It also seems to say that we can reach a stasis where our job becomes the farmer, or rancher, that manages the resources. Again, it doesn't mean that Man can pollute at will to satisfy his needs, but it also doesn't mean that he need not wear fur. And as far as human births, we were fruitful, we did multiply and, I say, we've replenished the Earth. Now it's time to take a break, and clean up the rough edges and make the place nicer.

If you've travelled as much as I have, and realise how little wiggle-room is left in how many places, you'll be very afraid by an extra 50% living like the average modern Taiwanese (never mind the disaster that'll ensue if we all try to be 'Mericans). (Travel around in e.g. India for a while and tell me how many unexploited ecosystem fragments are left. Then add even 20% to the human population, ramp up living standards, and figure the consequences.)

We'll possibly be able to feed them, and maybe be able to house them in something better than tin and plastic, but there'll be sweet bugger-all left of wild places or many wild species.

Don't be so blase about that number, David.

Whiskerfish

The bottom line is: Although living standards are improving for certain urban middle-ish classes in many 'developing' countries, the underclass of the desperately poor is growing virtually everywhere, owing to the chronic ability of World Bank-influenced govts to embrace the chimera of various forms of 'trickle-down economics'.

Birth rates among the rural desperately poor are still extremely high, and because 'developing country' govts typically neglect rural areas, the public services there are getting more overloaded and worse. There's no turnaround that'll improve female education or anything like that happening in reality (don't believe the brochure from your favourite NGO where they show smiling girls traipsing of to school in the jungle - it's not happening on any sort of large scale).

Birth rates among the urban desperately poor are possibly a bit lower in certain places, but not always by much.

i.e. the rural areas of most 'developing' countries (someone should just be honest for once and call them 'going backward countries') are and endless source of desperately poor, undereducated and under-resourced people who either stick around in those rural areas, degrading resources further, or head off into some ballooning shantytown somewhere on the edge of a megacity where chances are that they'll get some shitty below-min-wage occupation or become criminals.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Gore is right about the population message being seen as aggressive in many places, but the chances of the conditions for 'unforced' population reduction being laid are about 0 for many countries. And we still have quite a few places (like Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran) where population growth is seen as broadly desirable by a large majority of the people.

The closest thing to a turnaround strategy that doesn't invlove coercive sterilisation might be Chavez's, but he's got advantages many 'going backward countries' can't touch like an established middle class and loads o petrobucks.

Whiskerfish

But I give the woman who asked the question credit for broaching the unspeakable.  When the question of growth of any kind comes up you can expect such "reasonable" responses to prevent any divergence from the path that brought us here.

Question growth.  Question what it is about our capitalist system that demands growth for its survival.      

First: the growing separation between urban and rural within countries and regions. Obviously, global markets have erased the need to produce locally, and we now have mile after mile of (say) monoculture sugar cane or palms growing in places that once supported a diverse array of plant and animal life. This has left places very specialized and very vulnerable to ecological perturbations. If diversity is related to resilience (as some have suggested), then simplification of systems is related to collapse. While there has never been some idealized, perfectly harmonious relationship between urban centers and the countryside, at least at one point, there was reciprocity. Now, goods from our backyards are as likely to go thousands of miles away as to our own bellies or in our houses, and what we buy is more likely to say "Made in China" than "Made in the USA."

Second, the rural of developed nations has become a myth. Today, America is a good illustration of the complete breakdown of viable, place-based rural livelihoods (replaced by machines and, in some cases, minimum-wage migrant labor without benefits). Generally, educated young people leave rural America, with some older people returning for the amenity values; but the iconic farmer/rancher/miner/logger of the past doesn't exist - his job has been outsourced, mechanized, or just down-graded. This has left us with a consumptive, rather than productive, rural economic system based on tourism, expensive "extreme" sports, shopping, and desperate, persistent poverty.

Third, developing countries (logically) have become our source for natural resources. This means that places that have few environmental or labor laws are providing us with our timber, food, metals, petroleum, etc.

So half the timber logged in Indonesia is done illegally, as an example. And the legal logging is not something that we would stomach here in our country. Local rural people benefit minimally from our extraction (or intensification, where we have plopped down plantations of various sorts). Some politically powerful urban elites have benefited in these distant places, but the rural poor of these countries have lost access to land and the power to make decisions about what to plant and when and who benefits.

Within this context, I strongly doubt that simply telling the poor Indonesian farmer to "stop having kids" is going to do anything whatsoever. Why in the world would s/he stop having kids? Why would we expect rural poor to base their decisions on our criteria? We have set them up to be losers, and in the few arena that they have self-determination, I strongly doubt that their actions will reflect our views of what is "good." We have excluded them from the benefits of our market system, yet we can't quite bring ourselves, at this point, to take away their kids and force them to stop speaking their own languages. It's colonialism, plain and simple, and until there's a voice for rural poor in developing countries (and, chrissakes, a voice for rural anything in the U.S.), this isn't going to change.