This is likely to be the most inflammatory post I’ve made in a long time. So I’m going to start off with the request that if you’re going to post a comment, respond with something rational and logical, not just an emotional reaction that everyone is entitled to everything everyone can give them, or that I’m such a horrible monster for even considering these things.
That being said...
There have been commercials on TV for as long as I can remember, soliciting people to donate money to feed the starving children in Africa. They show these well-groomed and well-fed white people, standing in the midst of a horde of miserable, toothpick-thin kids clad in shreds and rags, and begging you to send money to feed, clothe, educate, etc.
Fuck that. Kill them off. It’s more merciful than letting them starve to death. It’s also more merciful than feeding them, so that they can grow up and reproduce, and then we’ll have three times as many gaunt faces, their starving sunken eyes pleading for assistance. If we ignore for a moment the fact that we’re talking about members of our own species, what’s more humane? Killing them off outright; letting them starve to death over a prolonged period of time; or catering to their short-term needs, which only really increases the population of starving people?
They’re starving because there are too many people there for the land to support. So rather than trucking in food (which isn’t a solution; it’s a stopgap that only exacerbates the problem), we need to bring the resident population in line with what the land can sustain. I’m willing to bet that these people would grow food if they could, so raising the productivity of the land isn’t really a solution.
There is the argument that fertilizers would rejuvenate the land, and allow these groups to produce more food for themselves. That’s probably true, but it’s going to require a continuous input of additional fertilizer to maintain that kind of output. And in fact, it’s only going to exacerbate the problem, because that additional food production will lead to an increase in the population, which will require more food to support, and the vicious cycle continues.
Regardless, the continual importing of nutrients from elsewhere to grow the food is not sustainable. What happens when the other locations run out of guano? Or is this entirely chemical fertilizer, which brings with it its own slew of problems? It doesn’t matter where the fertilizer comes from, it leads into a batshit downward spiral one way or another.
Even given enough nutrients in the soil, the real reason many of those areas are having problems is that they’re in the bloody desert. Irrigation is such a large problem, even in wealthy nations, that there’s no feasible way to implement it in poor nations. Which is why, for instance, Saudi Arabia is phasing out their wheat crops to conserve water.
Which leaves us with depopulating the land, down to a sustainable level. Population biology tells us that the two ways to decrease the population in an area are to emigrate to elsewhere, or to increase the mortality rate relative to the birth rate. Relocating the population is potentially a solution, but it’s too much of an inconvenience to the people in the areas that would be receiving refugees for them to be welcome. NIMBY. Yes, we should help them, but not if I personally have to be inconvenienced by it. The only other possibility is to kill them off, which people obviously (and understandably) find distasteful.
But since neither of these options can be agreed upon (or even suggested without hellacious backlash), indecision leads to inaction, and we’re left with starving masses who aren’t getting any relief, of any kind. Why am I the asshole for taking the long view and stepping outside petty, insignificant human emotions and looking at it objectively?
The exact same argument is chronically used to justify deer hunting. If we didn't go out and shoot thousands of white-tailed deer every year, they'd overpopulate and starve. The fact that that's only true because we've eliminated the predatory that would normally keep their population in line is beside the point. They're in danger of famine if we don't artificially keep their population down. That's exactly what's happened with human populations – unsustainable agricultural practices have increased local populations while depleting the available food supply, leaving many people with insufficient food. But it's politically incorrect to apply the same logic to humans that we do to other animals, or even to refer to “other” animals, since humans like to think that they aren't.
And before you go off calling me racist, or elitist, or anything else like that, I’m not just picking on poor Africans. The same applies to everybody everywhere – or at least, it will in the near future. The time for worrying about individuals has passed, and the time for worrying about the health of the planet has come. The planet is ill, and civilization the cancer.
That’s not just hyperbole, that’s actually an amazingly accurate allegory. Cancer arises spontaneously out of normally functioning cells. It diverts resources towards itself for its own growth by growing new blood vessels (neovascularization). It metastasizes, leaving its site of origin, migrating and invading anywhere else it can get a toehold, no matter who or what it inconveniences along the way. It lacks contact inhibition, and expands ruthlessly, marginalizing or just brute-force pushing anything that happens to get in its way.
That last point needs a bit more explanation, for the non-bio geeks in the audience. If you grow a culture of normal cells in a dish (and don’t stimulate them artificially), they’ll expand in a flat sheet to the edge of the dish and stop. Cancerous cells don’t do that, they just keep growing all over the place, regardless of what they come in contact with. That’s why brain tumors in particular are so dangerous – there’s only so much room in the skull, and as a tumor grows, it crowds the rest of the brain and impairs its functioning.
So if you’ve made it this far, and you have some legitimate point to make, go for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment