Saturday, May 5, 2012

Stop overpopulation hype, Bangkok Post. A personal response to Healthy GDP does not make healthy people article

By CHA-AM JAMAL
Phetchaburi. Published: 3/05/2012 at 08:38 AM - Newspaper section: News


Re: ''Healthy GDP does not mean healthy people'' (BP, Opinion, May 2).
The article has failed to grasp the essence of the argument between catastrophic overpopulation alarmists and the sceptics. The question is not whether there exists an upper limit of human population that could survive on the Earth's resources and production capability but exactly what that number is and whether we will ever reach or exceed it.
In the 1960s it was thought that the population then at 3 billion was already critical and that the Earth would not support more of us. If the population were allowed to grow, we were told, it would be at the expense of quality of life and risk of eventual implosion.
In the 1970s with no sign of degradation in the quality of life or of imminent implosion, overpopulation scientists arbitrarily changed the critical population level to 6 billion and forecast the end in the year 2000 when the population was expected to exceed the critical value. The 1973 movie Soylent Green spelled out a scenario for the coming disaster by overpopulation of human societies. That didn't happen either.

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