Saving the Envirionment Through Feminism

[Tom Palven]

When I was in junior high school the world population was 2 billion people, and that had been enough to have produced Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and The Beatles. In the year 2000 the world population hit 6 billion people, and it is now approaching 7 billion.
More people consume more steel for cars, wood for homes, etc, and more energy to produce all of these things. Hundreds of short term Bureaucratic Sledgehammer Economic schemes like Cash for Clunkers are not going to turn this sitiuation around. .
What can help the situation most is a reduction of religious fundamentalism. It is religous fundamentalists- Baptists, Catholics, and Muslims, worldwide- who tend to have huge families and follow the Biblical exortation to "be fruitful and multiply." Thanks to the miracles of modern science, children are largely preventable, and birth rates have dropped dramatically in many Western countries, but where misogynistic Orthodox Judeo-Christi-Islamic fundamentalism exists, and women are second-class citizens, populations are still rising rapidly.
In the 1960's it was illegal to sell birth control devices or pills in largely Catholic Massachusetts, and US Protestant missionaries continue to fight against abortion and contraception in South America and Africa.
The best way to save the world is probably to work for for women's rights and against religious fundamentalist state power, and not to blame either free markets or science for the world's problems. Free Women! Smash the State!

[John A Roark]

Well.
Hmmm.
A race or culture that expands will displace those that do not.
Boumedienne, the Algerian, said that one day, millions of men will burst forth from the southern hemisphere to the northern; this would not be a migration of peace, but of conquest. "They will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come from the wombs" of their women. While enlightened Westerners limit the population growth (and Europe is already in the death knells, unable to breed their way out of cultural extinction), the pre-scientific neanderthal Islamic machine is on its way to ascendancy through superior numbers.

'Children are largely preventable'? That kind of thinking worries me.

Fine, smash the State. Anarchy can't be any worse than the nine billion forms of government forced upon us over the history of mankind. But the population growth curve is past the point of no return. 11 billion is actually the crisis number (so says the science)--and we better have a viable plan for OUT THERE before that . . . because the future is, indeed, OUT THERE.

The planet we have is the planet we have, and no reasonable human is going to sacrifice his notion of his own best interests in order to satisfy an overall scheme of environmental salvation. Your idea may well be the best idea--but it cannot possibly be implemented.
Saving the environment is a bit of smoke and mirrors, anyway--there's been no measurable global temperature increase in the past decade. Even if 'global warming' is real, the notion that technology and the concordant increase in emissions is the primary culprit takes a bigger leap than I am willing to take. In keeping with the spirit of these forums, I must question the whole direction of any 'salvation schemes,' enactable as they are only through force and the oppression of the individual. Let each man follow his conscience and let the chips fall where they may.

[Tom Palven]

I'm not proposing any big "salvation schemes", but I think that small efforts, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preaching womens's rights in Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, for instance, might be more constructive that her telling the Pakistanis to increase the size of their military so that they can completely neglect and destroy their infrastructure and become an economic basket case like Iraq and Afghanistan.