Debate

DEBATE PREP: OVERPOPULATION partner: Alec

Against (issue); For (not an issue) people are already neglected at current pop.; will boost economy need more crops, land is converted, resources lost; better technology for world resources consumed faster; more research,info,knowledge lower quality of life overall if resources dwindle; more trade business lower value of currency; right to children less biodiversity=less meds/resource devlop; there is still room for more people food prod. and land use (Ishmael); no indication of resources dwindling more pollution; immoral to kill or restrict populations overcrowded cities; difficult to right a fair pop control bill humans are not natural/like other species; as birthrates fall the population levels off and starts to fall losses of food/water refer to "Tragedy of the Commons"

unemployment: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate.aspx?Symbol=USD [] [] []



An Overpopulation of Malthusians


‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’ Thus wrote Tertullian in 200 AD, when approximately 180 million human beings lived on the planet Earth. Brendan O'Neill gives us a little history of the perennial overpopulation worries. His excellent article entitled [|Too Many People? No, Too Many Malthusians] contains these conclusions: > The **first mistake** Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is //not// the only variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: they are variables, too. > The **second mistake** Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to //finite thinking//, to a lack of future-oriented imagination. > And the **third and main mistake** Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met. > We don’t merely use up finite resources; we create infinite ideas and possibilities. The 6.7billion people on Earth have not raped and destroyed this planet, we have //humanised// it.

[] //If something cannot go on forever, it will stop//. [] World Hunger: **India** [] Water shortages: NEW YORK: Many of today's conflicts around the world are being fuelled or exacerbated by water shortages and climate change is only making the situation worse, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly today. Deforestation: Technology: Global warming: