What about those Brazilian peasants? Do we care about them?

Environmentalism is often at odds with human interests:

The human population is beyond a point that could be sustainably supported, but the means by which the humans would do the least damage, or damage the planet less quickly, often involve diminished lifestyles: living in smaller houses, restricting movement within smaller communities, using less modern conveniences, owning less stuff, etc...

The case is even more stark when we view the 3rd world... If the 1.3 billion Chinese people and 1.1 billion Indian people try to live like the 300 Americans... the damage to the planet would be inconcievable...

The struggle the environmentalist movement always has and always will have is to balance what causes less damage and what causes less inconvenience, harm, suffering, etc... to humans - which doesn't matter in a purely environmental sense.

This is why most environmentalists support reducing fertility. It would be easier to help the planet without hurting humans if there were less damn humans.

But instead now we have less babies and lots of old people. I guess that will balance out better in a few years though won't it? That situation looks like it will get worse before it gets better.

AND less starving old people. I'd take that over more starving people overall, with twice as many starving babies as starving old people...

:)

I think things are going to get VERY bad on this planet for the human race. We've built a society that absolutely requires an inconcievable amount of energy input from fossil fuel sources... and those sources are drying up.

I hope things will get better after they get worse... but getting worse is more or less guaranteed.

So, Tundrayeti, as far as you're concerned, those Brazilian peasants can just go jump?

Pretty much. The greatest stumbling block for enviromentalism is not that it is often at odds with human interests, but that many of its proponents can't see that the two are not mutually exclusive. How are people not part of the environment? How is the welfare of these farmers any less important than the plants and animals of the Amazon?

It's easy for Sting and his buddies to tell thousands of subsistence farmers to go find some other way to survive. And the asinine statement that there are simply too many people is in no way constructive. Wishing for these people to go away is not going to accomplish anything.

Until our first world crusaders can offer real solutions, the rain forest campaign remains the worst kind of hypocrisy.

No, in terms of pure environmentalism, the peasants don't matter... The struggle for the environmental movement is balancing the undenyable pressure of the needs of the environment, with the completely understandable desire for people to live a better lifestyle.

You need to try to read more critically. I'm VERY concerned with the 3rd and 4th world... I recognize that half of them face rampant starvation within a decade, and I'm actually trying to do something about it. (www.WindFuels.com)

But my sympathy for the Brazillian poor does not extend to such an extent that I feel comfortable with them burning down the rainforests just to improve their lot.

That said, the reason that the environmental movement hasn't sounded off very loudly about the rainforests over the last couple of decades is that we don't have any answers. If the carbon credit scheme doesn't work, then the rainforest is lost... Unless someone else can come up with a better idea.

It boils down to this: we need to offer enough financial incentives to the Brazillian government that they would actively police the forest just to keep the incentives coming. As long as food and fuel prices are high, the incentives we would need to exert to bribe Lulu into policing his border are immense. Brazil is the 10th most powerful economy in the world, and it's growing rapidly - partly because they're burning down the rainforest. If we can't offset that growth with an equal or greater financial incentive, Brazil won't change...

Last year Brazil's GDP grew by ~100 billion dollars (ppp). Do you have any ideas?

Instead of getting the "poor" to burn down the rain forest which will only give them at best a couple of years of harvests, and then the land will be taken over by big ranchers, how about distributing PARTS of the enormous estates which are only partly cultivated in other parts of the country?

The "poor" are not born, they're made.

As for overpopulation, yes we do have a problem. However, it has been shown over and over again that there are 3 things that have to happen together to curb population growth:

1. improving standards of living which always seem to lead to fewer children. In many countries in the Third World people have 12 kids because they're lucky to have one or two reach maturity. Most of the world population is made up of children.

2. improving women's status so that women are free to chose how many times they'll get pregnant (by using birth control, by requiring their men to use condoms, by safe abortions).

3. making birth control methods accessible for women and men (you know the Bush administration went on an anti-condom campaign in the Third World? The argument was that some of the condom distributing centers might also be giving advice on abortion and also that abstinence was the best. Of course in many third world countries, women get AIDS from their husbands. So what one hand giveth (HIBV meds) the other taketh (prevention).

(unfortunately, there's also the Malthusian mode of population control which is perhaps where the self destructive species that we are might be headed: wars, genocides, starvation, epidemics..... )

As I said, most environmentalists advocate reduced fertility, and I certainly am a part of that advocacy.

"As for overpopulation, yes we do have a problem. However, it has been shown over and over again that there are 3 things that have to happen together to curb population growth:

1. improving standards of living which always seem to lead to fewer children. In many countries in the Third World people have 12 kids because they're lucky to have one or two reach maturity. Most of the world population is made up of children.

2. improving women's status so that women are free to chose how many times they'll get pregnant (by using birth control, by requiring their men to use condoms, by safe abortions).

3. making birth control methods accessible for women and men (you know the Bush administration went on an anti-condom campaign in the Third World? The argument was that some of the condom distributing centers might also be giving advice on abortion and also that abstinence was the best. Of course in many third world countries, women get AIDS from their husbands. So what one hand giveth (HIBV meds) the other taketh (prevention)"

I think that our initiative with #1 should require cooperation with #2 and #3, and I would include #4:Strong rhetorical propaganda campaign to encourage lower fertility.

The reason I would limit the attempt to improve living standards only in countries that are willing to participate in the other requirements is that there will be a period of EXTREME population growth for countries with high fertility rates if we work diligently to lower mortality while WAITING for the population to curb fertility on its own. Without encouragement, dramatically improving lifestyle could lead to single-generation trippling of the population, which of course is unsustainable and the population would immediately plummet back into desperation and high mortality anyway.

With the onrushing energy crisis, I feel we're facing a stage of triage... so the 4th world shitholes that want to continue to enslave women and force them to pop out 10 kids apiece can remain 4th world shitholes... and we should fix the places we can fix.

This is pretty bleak, but that's the situation.

Let them eat feijoada.

Tundrayeti, if you empower women and provide effective birth control, they will have fewer children. Usually, in societies where women have low status, men do not get involved in fertility issues --so a woman could easily chose to be on the pill. The problem with the HIV epidemic stems from the difficulty of getting husbands to use condoms and on the large scale emphasis on abstinence in some countries (including our own!). Abstinence propaganda has been shown over and over again to lead to more pregnancies.

You can trust me on women's attitude towards pregnancy, I've had two kids and I know that there's hardly any woman who'd care to repeat the experience 12 times! Empowering women is not that hard, some Third World countries have nurses visiting homes and educating both husband and wife and providing them with birth control devices.... If survival rates of kids improve, the parents will want fewer kids. If people get a better standard of living, they will have fewer kids : these are known predictable facts.

If agribusinesses keep out of agriculture there will be more food to eat, and the above will have a better chance to happen (do you ever eat cucumbers imported from Mexico? Do you know who had to be kicked off their land to make room for that agribusiness? Sometimes people are not kicked off the land but an agribusiness sets up next to them and syphon all the water and the villagers have no choice but to move to city slums. Whenever I see imported water laden cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. I think not only of the land but of the water.... ). You have to look at the interrelation (feedback loop) of ecology and social conditions if you want to help stop, or at least understand, the degradation of our environment.

By the way, I think you might have misunderstood the term "Fourth World". It was invented by Canadian native groups to differentiate indigenous groups from the countries they live in (that's just about all nation states). Now they have revised this term and adopted "First Nations People" --a bit awkward but I'm a strong believer in the positive effect of naming oneself.

The "shit holes" you mention are often, if not more, the result of people getting kicked off their land rather than overpopulation. I'm baffled by the fact that China still calls itself Communist yet kicks people off their land with nary a compensation so that the land can be exploited for agricultural exports by international agribusinesses.

And yes, subsistence farming has actually done a better job at feeding mankind than agribusiness does.... As I said, caloric consumption has been in decline since the so called "green revolution". You can easily check the figures. I'm talking about the world here, and not the few wealthy countries in it.

I was taught that some people were arguing that another label should be used for the nations that were in a state of true desperation... and I agree.

Costa Rica is clearly a 3rd world country. Touring that country you find people living in very small shacks, often with chickens pecking around the yard... and they're poor. The average person in Costa Rica has less than 1/10th the wealth and only 23.5% the income of the average person in America... So we call Costa Rica a 3rd world nation.

However, bordering Costa Rica to the north is the Nicaragua, in which the average person has less than 1/6th the wealth and only 40% of the income of the average Tikan (Costa Rican person).... and we call Nicaragua a 3rd world country..

Far to the east, we find basket-case countries like Bangladesh, in which the average individual has 1/10th - in purchase power parity - the income of the average Tikan... yet we still call these people 3rd world.

In Africa we have nations like Ethiopia, which has half the income per person of Bangladesh... at this point people are literally starving to death in a very significant percentage of the population... and we call that 3rd world. Elsewhere in Africa there are several poorer nations than Ethiopia, with the absolute poorest nation being Zimbabwe - at only 1/4th the average income of Ethiopia... where more than 95% of the population is in a state of complete starvation... and what do we call this nation? "3rd world".

There's a clear communication difficulty when we stick to the old definitions: the fact nations that were less than 40%/capita our GDP are "third world" nations, and that's all we need... (?) So I was taught that some were arguing for the classification of a "4th world"... a world in which normal determinations of success did not apply, and people were not just lacking in wealth but were suffering a disease-riddled life of starvation and hopelessness.

Appearently my teacher was one of a very small number arguing for that, but it made a profound impact on me. How could we, with any attempt at intellectual honest, argue that Costa Rica and Zimbabwe should be classified as the same wealth catagory?

:)

Anyway, I guess I was wrong on that. I'll get back to the rest of your post later... gotta go.

:)

You should note that I specifically agreed with you on that. What I did not agree on is the priority of improving living conditions, etc... I stated that we should only improve those living conditions for countries that were willing to empower and educate women, and were willing to offer free distribution of birth control, and start a propaganda campaign to try to convince people to lower their fertility... There are still many countries where birth control is illegal, and men have absolute power over women. I would not want to give aid to those countries unless those countries relented and made birth control freely available and gave women more rights.

We agree on the women, I just think that must be done before we start offering aid to countries. It was that which we disagreed on.

Caloric consumption has only decreased during the period between 2002 and 2008 due to the growth in biofuels. Currently ~20% of the agricultural crops grown worldwide have been diverted to biofuels production, which leaves less food overall for human consumption. This is also due to the fact that for several decades food was plentiful, and far too inexpensive to justify large scale investment. So growth in food production dropped from 6-8%/year to only ~2%/year. Over the last decade - due to increased demand from biofuels - the price of food staples has increased ~4fold, and many governments (Including India and China) are once again diverting some of their resources away from city development back to rural infrastructure development... As the costs increase, agribusiness will continue to penetrate into these 3rd world rural locals, and food production will once again achieve the growth that it saw during the Green Revolution.

Subsistence farming does not achieve the yields that agribusiness achieves. Sorry.