Horizon now, BBC2 - Anybody Else Watching it? Overpopulation/Water etc

drc

PasturesNew wrote: »

He finished on: have less babies.
Stop having babies.
Smaller families.
Stop having babies.

But this is the problem. The countries with the most excessive population growth are exemplified by the following factors;

- poor with bad infrastructure/access to clean water/food
- deeply religious
- traditional patriarchal culture
- uneducated
- women are not highly valued

How do you go about telling people in such countries that they have to fundamentally change the way they live? It is going to go down like a led balloon, especially when their holy book(s) dictate that they "go forth and multiply".

lostinrates

Davesnave wrote: »

Dogs are great; sometimes just like people, and certainly fine child-substitutes, but in most cases we can't afford/don't need them now. It's like surplus children.

If we are going to get a grip on people population, we should be starting with dogs, by phasing many of them out over the next ten years. The majority live in towns which is an unsuitable environment, though poop-scooping has helped to make them more acceptable. In my adult life, I have never lived anywhere beyond hearing range of howling dogs, left alone by owners whose lifestyles don't always allow for the attention an intelligent animal requires. Fortunately, they have never been next door.

This isn't the pet forum. I wouldn't post this on there! However, I'd still expect an amount of flak here. For LIR, and others, I'd add that (apart from the fact that it isn't going to happen) I'd be all for making exceptions where people register dogs as child substitutes, or where dogs are genuinely required in a working context, but for the sake of the dogs, I'd make ownership as tightly controlled as it is for guns.

Of course, if we did the above, it would give dogs a slightly higher profile than children, so maybe everyone's inalienable right to have as many as they'd like, often with a financial incentive, might be questioned more. People wring their hands over Karen Matthews and Baby Peter, but I think they are just the tip of a massive iceberg which won't be altered significantly without all of us accepting more of a curb on our rights and a much larger emphasis on our responsibilities.

Kids and dogs: everyone should have one or two, but even if you are Madonna, it should be one or t'other.

Now there's controversial!

Well, I'm obviously not quite as hardline, but I DO think dog ownership should return to being a licenced and there fore tax able thing, with a higher amount payable for entire animals. In fact....I'd extend it to all pets. some pets require complicated and energy heavy heating (aquariums, reptiles), and others, like the humble rabbit, are rarely kept in fair conditions....rabbits, remember, are not solitary animals naturally.

Personally, I think her is still a very big place for working animals: and studies consistantly show thy have huge benefit for human poplace. Including crime rehabilitation. BUT despite calling ourselves a nation of animals lovers, I think we are less than we think we are.

As an animal lover and striong believer n tha value of meat eating, I think we should have fewer more regualted animals, and eat less, but better meat.

Its not so very contraversial Davesnave....many animal scientists, almost universally animals lovers!,would agree to at least some degree, with you.

Lotus-eater

To get it back on subject and away from dogs for at least one post....

I was extremely suprised that they didn't mention oil running out in the program.
It said that the world could support different variations in the amounts of billions of people, depending on how much we all consumed.
Not a word about the amount of food the world can produce depends almost entirely on oil. Make that in shorter supply and food becomes more expensive, the poorer countries starve.
IF oil runs out now, we all starve and go back to the nominal levels of population the world can support, without the skewed figures oil has produced.

Davesnave

Lotus-eater wrote: »

To get it back on subject and away from dogs for at least one post....

I was extremely suprised that they didn't mention oil running out in the program.
It said that the world could support different variations in the amounts of billions of people, depending on how much we all consumed.
Not a word about the amount of food the world can produce depends almost entirely on oil. Make that in shorter supply and food becomes more expensive, the poorer countries starve.
IF oil runs out now, we all starve and go back to the nominal levels of population the world can support, without the skewed figures oil has produced.

I thought I'd just go with the flow and use dogs as one example. To make any difference at all, we shall all have to invade our personal comfort zones.

Oil won't run out yet, but as extraction becomes more marginal, we can look forward to increased costs for inorganic fertilizer and therefore much higher food prices. The point at which meat protein become unaffordable for the bulk of the population will vary, country by country. In many parts of the less developed world, it already is, of course.

At what point somewhere like the US goes to war to protect hamburger supplies is an interesting item for thought. Some people would say we're already there with that too!

Lotus-eater

One thing that also concerned me was this:

Several UK companies are apparently on land grab missions, same as other rich countries (I'm sure we don't even know 10% of the true story here).
So what happens when those countries peoples start starving/dehydrating? Do the population sit back and die, or do they take/try to take the crops/land back by force?
And then what, mercenaries supplied by the corporations who own the land, or government troops sent in to support the food flow?

You can add on to that, emergency measures to cut off immigration and build virtual walls around countries as they all entrench to survive.

It's not a pretty picture and very easy to imagine the wars that are going to be fought in the future, as people have been predicting for a while. Indeed are already going on in some countries re oil (not that anyone will admit that )

In case you think I am just a doomonger, a relative of mine was high up in a particular oil company most of his (not inconsiderable) working life, he doesn't think oil will run out for 50 years, if then. So maybe there is hope for my kids generation.

Lotus-eater

Davesnave wrote: »

I thought I'd just go with the flow and use dogs as one example. To make any difference at all, we shall all have to invade our personal comfort zones.

I agree Dave, I just don't think it's going to happen.

vivatifosi

Thanks for pointing this programme out Pastures. Was out last night and missed it. However have just gone through Sky + and found that it is being repeated overnight tonight, showing at 12.10am Friday morning on BBC2.

BitterAndTwisted

One of the things that's shocking to me is that we all flush our lavs with drinking-quality water. I'd love to get some method of using recycled water from the bath/kitchen sink/washing-machine going but have no idea where to start.

I wonder sometimes what use is being made of natural fertilisers instead of petro-chemical ones. Goodness knows, we're all producing that stuff once every day and an awful lot of it seems to go down a ruddy great pipe into our seas, sometimes untreated.

Lotus-eater

BitterAndTwisted wrote: »

One of the things that's shocking to me is that we all flush our lavs with drinking-quality water. I'd love to get some method of using recycled water from the bath/kitchen sink/washing-machine going but have no idea where to start.

You should head over to the greenfingered thread, we had a good dicussion about "watering" your garden directly. This isn't really the right board to go into too much info
You can always only flush the loo, when someone has a No2 as well, no need for just No1's

The_White_Horse

why don't we in the west just club together and slaughter everyone in the third world and take their land. lets face it, the third world is just a waste of time. they do nothing except die and get diseases - they make no films. they just sit around with flies on them moaning that they are hungry.

the best thing to do is wipe them all out and turn africa into a big farm. once you get the third worlders out of there, the place will start working again.