Yes, rogue captain, we are poisoning ourselves. And we continue to live and push population growth in areas that cant support that population unless huge amounts of food and water (and oil -us westerners) are transported into those areas.
I feel that it is so much easier to have babies without any training on how to parent, than it is to, as, doc says, get a license to drive a car. Add to that people have multiple babies with any way to feed, house, etc those babies, (or sometimes, as a means to garner more free-to- them monies from democratic govts and charities). Its both a feeding issue, and a child rearing issue.
Licensing is all fine a and good regarding having a baby. But how do you enforce it? I would dread seeing what the Chinese people went through happen again, either there, or somewhere else. How are you going to minimize the uber -rich from taking too much advantage of a truly limited 'resource' - the licenses? How will you keep the killing / disposing of / etc. the many females that wont be born because people generally prefer (and I believe wrongly so) male babies? And what effect will the new genetics have in the role of 'making' babies? And to whose benefit? Will we end up with a genetically programmed caste system?
Now to the person that wrote about the humanitarian impulse regarding this issue. While I agree that our species needs better ways to handle this, and I agree that killing off zillions of people is wrong, I also believe the idea of growing 'even' more food as a humanitarian is a losing proposition. Actually, in terms of the total amount of human suffering, it may be worse than not raping the planet to grow even more food. Every-time we come up with a way to grow more food, the green revolution, massive amounts of oil turned into fertilizer and chemicals to grow more food in the west / USA, etc., the total food supply goes up. Much of that surplus is given to very poor countries. What happens, there is now more food so the population grows. We cannot 'win' the fight between food growth and population growth. Pop will grow until all food is consumed - surpluses get turned into new humans. The only difference, now is that more people end up hungry and starving than would have if the food hadn't been sent in the first place. Very sad. Until self sustaining means to grow foods locally for most populations is created, systematic starvation will occur. The only question, sadly, is how many will starve. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh and inhumane. But if organizations would stop pushing industrial scale food production, and instead find ways for each area to grow their own food, and make things of value to trade for other things, these Malthusian starvation episodes and perpetual hungers will continue.
I don't believe its truly humanitarian to throw the poor people a fish, as that merely postpones the starvation cycle until they have even more babies -and even more people to suffer. Instead, make them part of the 'family /community' that has enough food. When I gave the poor some food, they called me a saint, when I asked why there were poor people, they called me an anti-American, unpatriotic socialist, tree hugger. Until the uber -corporations and the uber-rich (who control the uber corporations) return massive amounts of their ill gotten gains, the poor will starve. And humanitarian folks, who truly want to help the poor , will continue be tricked by the propaganda machine of the uber wealthy into thinking that throwing some food at the poor is equivalent to implementing a truly just economic system that would allow these poor, and their descendants to escape abject poverty - and have the leisure time to rear capable children with love.
