Growth ideologues should be smiling now that Australia’s
population has topped 23 million.
 |
| Prof Tim Flannery posits Australia's ideal population carrying capacity is between eight and 12 million. |
More people, in corporate talk, equates with more profits.
Behind that shiny corporate facade, is a paradigm that
encourages endless expansion; a tumour-like growth of which any talk about
control is taboo.
Beyond that, any discussion about limiting population growth
is equally distasteful for almost immediately reason and logic is abandoned and
emotion hogs the spotlight.
The 2007 Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery,
presently a member of the Australian Climate Commission, has calculated that
Australia’s long-term carrying capacity was
between eight and 12 million.
He points out that Australia’s population had reached those
marks in 1950 and 1968 respectively.
Considering Prof Flannery’s observation we have either, in
the first instance, more than doubled Australia’s population carrying capacity or
nearly doubled the second number.
The idea of a “big” Australia is out of step with what Australian’s
actually need; rather than bigger, we need better.
Shepparton is bound for “bigger” with statistics on the City of Greater Shepparton website suggesting that by 2031 a further 16 500 people
will live here, producing a population nearing 80 000.
Arguments that bigger is always better and more beautiful
are riddled with fallacies; unintended consequences that are assembling on the
horizon now, poised to disable humanity.
Questions about the cause of climate change, an undeniable
scientific and practical reality, attract varied answers, most of which are in
themselves correct, but rarely do they focus on the reality that there is
simply too many of us.
Any suggestion that we somehow humanely control our numbers
produces an almost immediate and sharp passionate response loaded with
accusations of Nazi-like eugenics and a big brother-like forced abandonment of
our responsibility to pro-create.
That “responsibility” is many faceted, yes, we do have a
responsibility to pro-create, but at replacement level or less, but we also
have an intergenerational obligation, a responsibility to those that follow to
live with restraint, care for the planet and so leave the earth healthier than
it was then when we arrived.
Population growth is exponential and the likelihood of us leaving
the earth in better shape than we found it is becoming more remote as each day
passes.
Education is the first, the last and beyond birth control,
restraint and good sense, the only ally upon which we can call to slow the
world’s burgeoning population growth.
Modern life is loaded with endless distractions and the
corporate world, aided by myriad problematic institutions, would have us
believe all is well.
It is unfair however, to blame upon the world’s corporations
and our institutions as the real responsibility rests with us for we have
failed to educate ourselves and so do not understand the limits to growth.
