Population
Population doesn't necessarily increase geometrically, as Ian van Tets (Write on, GLW #75) assumes. The root cause of population growth is in material resources and standard of living. This is clear in the Third World, where 90 per cent of population growth occurs and where the majority of humanity lives in absolute poverty. At the same time production of material needs, such as food, has outstripped total need per head of population for the last 40 years.
Why are human beings "forced to compete with each other and other species for their needs and wants"? It certainly isn't, at the moment, because there are too many people and not enough resources to go around. Competition between humans is inherent in the capitalist system, under which there is no social planning and resources are controlled by a minority.
Tets ignores some important points. Firstly, the majority of humanity, the peoples of the Third World, do not consume much at all. Secondly, the majority of people in the first world do not have any choice about what we consume. We do not have democratic control over the media, over advertising, over technology or over what is produced and put onto the market. Thirdly, people are part of the environment and bear the cost of environmental destruction continuously, not after the event.
Tets sees the solution to population growth in reproductive biology. Assuming, as Tets has, that safe contraception and abortion is "available to anyone who wishes to use it in this country" (which is simply not true), what about the Third World? Contraception is not something that can be just forced onto the peoples of undeveloped countries. Use of contraception must above all be a choice. For contraception to have any affect in the Third World, the general standard of living would have to be raised dramatically. This means a fundamental change to the way society is organised.
It is not "geometric population growth" that "inevitably leads to social injustice and environmental destruction" or even simply consumption, as Tets claims. To achieve a sustainable population and environment we must confront the way society is organised under the private property, capitalist system.
In his letter, Tets mentioned Cuba, as if to prove that even in a socially planned society population growth and therefore environmental destruction is inevitable. We would like to quote Fidel Castro:
"The Peoples of the Undeveloped Countries are not poorer or hungrier, nor do they suffer diseases, nor are they illiterate as a result of high birth rates. The uncontrollable growth of population does not respond solely to biological factors; it is above all precisely the factor of the social, economic and cultural conditions to which our people have been subjected throughout centuries of tion."
Alison, Anne, Emma, Jane, Jerusha, Kate, Kevin, Rebecca, Rob, Sam and Trish
Resistance, Adelaide
[Edited for length.]
Environment centre attacked
Darwin's leading newspaper is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its latest all out assault on the Environment Centre Northern Territory (ECNT) and the environment movement generally.
Having no facts to support its argument that stripping Australia of its finite natural resources will by some magical act reverse our economic decline it resorts to outright lies.
The first lie is that the ECNT is taxpayer funded when it is only partly taxpayer funded. Funds for the ECNT come from membership subscriptions, fund raising activities, donations from the general public, shop sales and the donated labour of volunteers as well as from governments.
Second lie, that it is the green groups who are incapable of understanding what is happening in Australia today. It is people like the editorial staff of Darwin's leading newspaper who press for more investment, more development, more population, more pollution and more everything that is destroying society as we have known it who are those with the problem.
Third lie, always put forward as a postulate, is that development and exports play any role in paying off our national debt. It is not the Australian taxpayer who owes that money, it is the state governments, semi-government instrumentalities, companies and individuals that have borrowed that are responsible.
Terms like "the collapse of new investment in wealth creation" are simply gobbledegook to disguise and excuse the continued destruction of our national assets — our mineral wealth — or to deceive the public into thinking that there is something magical about investment.
It is all very well to say that "excessive zeal and extremism in the pursuit of radical environmentalism has been a big obstacle to development". Almost every major development has been fast-tracked since the Federal Government abandoned ecological sustainability and environmental protection.
The next big lie is that backward societies are the worst environmental offenders, backward of course meaning technologically underdeveloped, or undeveloped, whereas in real life highly developed countries like the United States are the greatest polluters.
C.M.Friel
Alawa NT
[Edited for length.]