We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children

[barb162]

(The devil is making me post this; I have neighbors who think like this. Population control? Not them. This Onion piece states the problem so well...as if the planet has infinite resources )


We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children

By Brenda Melford
June 28, 2006 | Issue 42•26

As we move into the 21st century, it is our responsibility to think of the future of the earth—not for ourselves, but for those who will inherit what my husband and I leave behind when we're gone. If we do not join together and do what's best for this, our only planet, there may not be an environment left in which my five children, and their 25 children's 125 children, can grow up and raise large upper-middle-class families of their own.

Nothing less than the preservation of my descendents' lifestyle itself is at stake.

Imagine a world devoid of pristine wilderness for my progeny to explore on the weekends in the sport-utility-vehicles of the future, leaving my youngest son, Dylan, with nowhere to blow off steam on off-road adventures. Imagine a world in which my beautiful middle son, Connor, is denied his twice-daily half-hour hot showers because of water shortages. Picture what it would be like for my oldest boy Asher, preparing to start his first semester at Stanford, to have to go without basic amenities such as cable television, satellite radio, central air, or massage chairs, all because of the shortsighted squandering by his parents' generation of our non-renewable energy sources today.

Though it seems like a far-off nightmare, this terrible vision is all too possible. Would you want to live in a world where my five children had to endure such horrible deprivations? I know I wouldn't.

snip
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49845

[babylonsister]

1. So your neighbors have 5 kids? Do you have any? And I'm

familiar with that ole devil! :evilgrin:

[barb162]

3. I 'm child free

But these neighbors have bigass SUVs and they think oil and natural gas and all the other resources, like fresh water, should just be there forever for them. All the stuff about oil fields being depleted and petroleum engineers not finding large new fields, peak oil... that's all poppycock. POPPYCOCK! Harrumph

[orwell]

2. Oh...

...the humanity!

Thanks for the laugh...

[barb162]

4. You're quite welcomed

[lindisfarne]

5. I honestly don't understand how anyone could have even one child,

knowing the mess we've made of the world - I could not live with the guilt of what they'll have to face in their lifetime. I'll adopt, if I decide to have children.

[skids]

6. Easy...

It's not human nature to just "pack it in" when the going gets rough. We throw the next generation into the wind regularly, and there are plenty of cases to be made that we wouldn't be here today if we hadn't.

Not to say it isn't admirable to consider the impact of your own potential contribution to an inflated population, just that if you believe that the values and character (and to a much smaller extent the genomes) that you impart to chil"chances of getting heart disease"dren are worth their effort and risk to carry through to the other side of hard times, for their descendents' sake, that's a tenable position to hold.

It's a far greater sin to have children and neglect to give them any sort of meaningful heritage, no matter how well off they are economically.

[lindisfarne]

7. It's not just an issue of world population. The bigger factor is whether

they will live in a world of conflict due to fighting over fossil fuels, what the impact of global warming will be 20-50 years from now on air quality, water quality, food availability. The next 20-30 years will be very interesting: either we'll make dramatic changes to offset global warming and slow it down enough, or we'll continue to refuse to make the necessary changes. Another possibility is we've already passed the point at which we can fix things (hopefully this is not true - but the melting of the ice in the Arctic and the exposure of the land underneath, and the loss of the reflective cap of ice, among other things, worry me immensely).

The federal deficit is another recent concern that's been added. Health care in the US. The downward spiral of education in the US. Labor laws and job security in the US. I don't think I'd raise a child in the US.

I just saw An Inconvenient Truth and a friend I went with said he was afraid he was going to be really depressed by the film. I wasn't at all worried about that: the general message of the movie is already known to me and I've been convinced about global warming for about 2 decades. There were details Gore mentioned that I didn't know but the general picture was already known to me (I went to support the production of these kinds of films).

I honestly don't see how anyone could want to bring a child, who they will love beyond almost anything, into the world we've created, for the child to face the mess we've created.

We've only in the past 45 years or so had the ability to really control our ability to pro-create. Before then, we could slow it down, but condoms aren't 100% effective, and abortions weren't safe, either. We had children because there was no effective way to prevent them 100%.

We now have a choice, and we have a far greater understanding of our position in the world, and how we're affecting the entire planet, than has ever been the case in the past. It's not just a matter of genes. The greatly decreased birth rate in the developed countries shows this. The LA Times had an article on this.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barash10may10,1,1760560.story

From the Los Angeles Times
Sex is essential, kids aren't
Why are 30% of German women choosing to go childless? Free will, baby.
By David P. Barash
DAVID P. BARASH is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

May 10, 2006

THE GERMAN PUBLIC was recently shocked to learn that 30% of "their" women are childless — the highest proportion of any country in the world. And this is not a result of infertility; it's intentional childlessness.

Demographers are intrigued. German nationalists, aghast. Religious fundamentalists, distressed at the indication that large numbers of women are using birth control.

And evolutionary biologists (including me) are asked, "How can this be?" If reproduction is perhaps the fundamental imperative of natural selection, of our genetic heritage, isn't it curious — indeed, counterintuitive — that people choose, and in such large numbers, to refrain from participating in life's most pressing event?

The answer is that intentional childlessness is indeed curious — but in no way surprising. It is also illuminating, because it sheds light on what is perhaps the most notable hallmark of the human species: the ability to say no — not just to a bad idea, an illegal order or a wayward pet but to our own genes.

When it comes to human behavior, there are actually very few genetic dictates. Our hearts insist on beating, our lungs breathing, our kidneys filtering and so forth, but these internal-organ functions are hardly "behavior" in a meaningful sense. As for more complex activities, evolution whispers within us. It does not shout orders.
<snip>

[skids]

10. Yes, I do realize that.

I was lumping all that into "population" because as we know that's what overpopulation causes: war, famine, economic collapse and destruction of the environment.

While some people "say no" and that's admirable, other people so not, and they cannot be faulted for believing that passing on their legacy is worth the work and suffering of the next generation, because if the human race (or any subculture thereof) just went belly up any time there was a period of suffering, it wouldn't survive.

I guess it depends on just how much you value the human race, and your subculture of it in particular.

[bloom]

11. I'm starting to think

that if any culture makes it - it will be the Chinese/Asians.

We may all need to learn to like eating jellyfish - and whatever else is going to thrive on our globally warmed planet. Kudzu?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x5311834


Also:


Jellyfish Flourish As Water Warms

Global warming lends power to jellyfish


''There is evidence of jellyfish explosions around the world that appear related to the adverse impact of human activities, and those include global warming,'' said Sarah Chasis, the senior attorney for the New York City-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

Historically, Narraganset Bay was the northern limit of the combjelly, whose domain extends as far south as Argentina. Last November, combjellies were documented for the first time in Boston Harbor, although in numbers as yet too sparse to affect the harbor's ecology. But this is not the case in Narragansett Bay, according to Barbara Sullivan, an oceanographer from the University of Rhode Island who has been studying the organism for the last two years with a grant from the National Science Foundation. In Rhode Island, warmer water is changing the rules of who eats whom.

The combjelly's ability to reproduce is temperature related, and traditionally the animal's population exploded during the warmth of late summer and early autumn. But because the bay has warmed an average of 3.4 degrees during the past 20 years, the combjelly is now reproducing and ''blooming'' four months earlier, which enables the organism to gobble up the eggs and larvae deposited in the spring by spawning fish as never before.

''We have seen areas of the bay where these things have cleaned out everything edible floating in the water column,'' she said. One consquence has been the demise of the winter flounder population, although no one is ready to place the blame squarely on the combjelly. In 1982, approximately 4,200 metric tons of the flounder were landed in Rhode Island. In 2000, the most recent year for which state statistics are available, approximately 600 tons of the flounder were caught.

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=4003&Method=Full&PageCall=&Title=Jellyfish%20Flourish%20As%20Water%20Warms&Cache=False

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Glad my sarcasmometer is set to "hairtrigger" threshold today ...

You (with some help from The Onion) made your point nicely.

[NNadir]

9. Sometimes the Onion is the best reporting there is.