Wasted years
Thanks to John Rowley of People & the Planet for this editorial.
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More than a decade after the world agreed a progressive agenda on population and development at the 1994 Cairo conference on the subject, today’s leaders are waking up to the reality of 15 wasted years. Cairo was almost unique in costing the money needed to tackle the developing world’s scandalously high maternal mortality and morbidity rates, setting out the spending needed on reproductive health and family planning, alongside other priorities for the health, status and education of girls and women in particular.
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May 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Hearing Paul Ehrlich again reminded me of how many years have been wasted in addressing the population explosion since Earth Day 1970–39 years! Another waste of 35 years has gone by since the 1974 oil embargo that hit the U.S. A strong case can be made that the Congress of the U.S. delivered the present economic meltdown by their refusal to deal with the realities of the biological sciences. The Congress is still in the same operating mode by insisting we have to grow the economy to get out of this recession/depression. Maybe we need to throw out the economists and the engineers to achieve a survival strategy for the planet. Let’s begin with the Army Corps of Engineers.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I agree that the past years have been a waste. I heard Paul Ehrlich speak in Stockton in 1970 or 1971 on Earth Day. I had already joined Ehrlich’s ZPG,Inc. and was involved in forming a Planned Parenthood affiliate. I had also called the Nixon White House and explained our predicament and they seemed to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem.
These were hopeful times. I thought there was momentum toward stabilizing our population that would be facilitated by the rapidity with which information could be spread. The Population Commission was established and recommended no further growth in the U.S. population. Their report is still on my shelf and no action ever became of it.
Here we are 38 years and about 3 billion additional people later including 120 million Americans and there is no where to be found a public discussion about THE PROBLEM of overpopulation. Apparently humans are in denial and thus incapable of avoiding a calamitous bust and decline in civilization. Is it a time for grief regarding our apparent fate or should we just be cynical, misanthropic or fatalistic and accepting of it? For sure it is getting late in the game.