



By Frosty Wooldridge

University of Colorado, Dr. Albert Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or globally.”

Additionally, he said, “Any organism that grows past maturity exhibits either obesity or cancer.”

Both results will kill the organism long before it reaches old age! The same holds true for any civilization. Jared Diamond’s book—Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed—illustrates it clearly.

Nothing in the natural or unnatural world can continue growing. Given enough time, whether a machine, city or civilization, that entity will self-destruct and collapse. Examples abound in China, India, Mexico, Bangladesh and other overloaded countries. Dr. Joseph Tainter wrote—The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Yet, with all the realities facing Australia, ‘innumerates’ as Dr. Bartlett calls them, step up to the microphone to display their educational ignorance. Bartlett said, “It’s time to try again to correct the educationally credentialed but innumerate experts, (innumeracy is the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy), who say that growth is inevitable.”

Yes! It may be in the animal world with deer, lemmings and locust, but, NO! It’s not inevitable in the human world with choice, birth control and reasoned action.

In this treatise, “Populate or Perish”, Jessica Brown speaks on populating or perishing. Let’s examine her work.

“Population has been dominating the headlines for weeks, but you could be forgiven for wondering what on earth the debate is actually about,” said Brown. “Tony Abbott thinks it’s about migration. Bob Brown thinks it’s about the environment. And Julia Gillard hasn’t really given us much of a clue, except that she thinks that whatever it is, it’s in western Sydney in places like Rooty Hill. Our federal leaders don’t actually have much to do with the challenges brought about by population growth – rising house prices, overcrowded buses – so it’s not surprising that they have so little to say about them. In fact, these problems fall firmly in the domain of state governments.

Again, Dr. Bartlett steps into the fray with his gifted analysis of ‘innumerates’, which make up the bulk of politicians. They create problems so they can solve them, but, the problems compound themselves beyond solving. One look at India illustrates the point poignantly, i.e., 1,000 children die every day in India from diarrhea, dysentery and other water borne disease, but they still add 12 million annually. They cannot deal with their death counts except to add more to make even greater death counts in the years to come. (Source: www.populationmedia.org)

“This gives us a clue as to why they are going unsolved,” said Brown. “To seriously meet the challenges of population growth, we first need to deal with some problems with the functioning of our federation.”

Make it clear! No one can ever meet or solve the ‘challenges’ of overpopulation except Mother Nature. Her solutions grow more brutal with population growth. Reality check: 18 million humans die of starvation annually around the world. (Source: www.worldhealthorganization.com)

“However, most of the costs of population growth – the new schools, the new roads, the hospitals – must be met by the states,” said Brown. “Here we have a fundamental disconnect. The federal government gets all the benefits of population growth, but state governments bear the costs.”

In the end, any civilization bears the costs beyond money into the areas of unsustainability, water shortages, energy, environment and quality of life.

“But as George Megalogenis highlighted in The Weekend Australian earlier this year we have already had something of a natural experiment in what happens when governments take this approach to population growth,” said Brown. “You could call it the “Bob Carr effect”. The former NSW premier famously declared that Sydney was full, and spent a decade studiously avoiding doing anything to prepare for the fact that Sydney’s population might grow.”

Reality check: no entity can keep growing without pause. Return to Bartlett’s Law!

Brown said, “This kind of approach suggests that if we could somehow limit population growth then all our infrastructure and environmental problems would be solved. But the almost inevitable reality of population growth and ageing means that we can’t afford to be complacent about meeting these very real and pressing policy challenges. A good example is housing. We have about nine million households in Australia. But if our fertility and migration levels remain constant we will have about 16 million households by 2050. If we were to dramatically cut migration to 70,000 a year – the number suggested by some small-population advocates, such as Labor MP Kelvin Thompson – we would still have 14.5 million households by 2050.”

Brown added, “Even under the most restrictive assumptions of zero net migration and falling fertility, we will need an extra three million houses by the middle of the century.”

She refers to ‘population momentum’, but again, the best way to deal with it returns a rational leader to reducing all immigration to zero and work within that civilization for solutions today and not allow them to explode into tomorrow.

“If governments don’t lift some of the constraints on building immediately, our existing housing shortage is going to get much worse in the very near future, regardless of what happens with migration and the birth rate,” said Brown.

Brown fails to understand that water, energy and climate destabilization along with another dozen irreversible and unsolvable problems will overwhelm Australia, Canada, America and other overpopulated countries long before the need for more human housing. See Dr. Jack Alpert’s rendition of our future:

Must see: Rapid Population Decline, seven minute video by Dr. Jack Alpert-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWduFB_RX0 and at www.skil.org

Also: Must see DVD: “Blind Spot” www.snagfilms.com/films/title/blind_spot/ , This movie illustrates America’s future without oil, water and other resources to keep this civilization functioning. It’s a brilliant educational movie! www.blindspotdoc.com

“There is a very real danger that the debate at the federal level about limiting population growth will translate into excuses at the state level for not doing enough to prepare for the inevitable challenges ahead,” said Brown. “Issues like housing and transport require urgent policy reform and should be at the centre of our population debate. Until we realign our federation so that the states share in some of the benefits of population growth – and perhaps a more competitive type of federalism is the model here – it seems unlikely that they will rush to shoulder the costs of that growth. Until then, perhaps it’s time we brought the premiers into the population debate.”

Brown makes her biggest and most profound ‘innumeracy’ statement when she said, “Until we realign our federation so that states share in some of the benefits of population growth….”

Again, return to Bartlett’s Law. Visit his website: www.albartlett.com to see exponential population growth cannot and will not continue one way or the other.

Jessica Brown is the Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies, and co-author of the CIS’s coming report Populate and Perish?

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Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com He is the author of: America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. Copies available: 1 888 280 7715