vobiblog

Well, not unless you want to be sent back to the stone age. I was listening to a forum from the Brisbane Ideas Festival that was broadcast on Radio National’s By Design. Professor of Sociology Frank Furedi, who was part of the panel had this to say about sustainability:

Well I think there are maths, and there are maths and the way I look at it is that from and environmentalists perspective another human being is another consumer, and extra mouth to feed. From and humanist point of view, another person is an extra pair of hands that can do things and more brain cells that can solve problems. So, I welcome more people on this planet of ours, and I think that’s on balance, and positive thing. Ever since Malthusianism began in the 18th century people have been predicting that as more people come on the globe, the planet will be destroyed, but I think that’s just a loss of faith in our humanity.

I also have to put in a good word for unsustainability, I think unsustainability is not always a bad thing. Over the history of human civilization we’ve transformed ourselves, we’ve transformed ourselves and the world, and we discovered that things that could be done at one point could no longer be done later on. That’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is, but its not always a bad thing because we discover new materials, we discover new ways of doing things. We can now live in parts of the world that we couldn’t a long long long time ago, and contrary to current myths, that the world is becoming more and more a dangerous, destructive place, actually we are much more able to deal with our nature and the nature out there than before. Most important of all, we are much more sensitive in the 21st century to the rhythms of nature than people back a long long time ago despite all the ideas about how people close to the earth understood what was going on and I think we gotta get real and look to the future and be a teeny bit more optimistic.

I really can’t work out which team this guy is batting for. There is a big difference between optimism and sticking you’re head in the sand. Why wait until some critical resource shortage or environmental problem, caused by our unsustainable ways, backs us into a corner before doing something about it. Surely someone with such faith in humanity would be an advocate of this. As for more people on the planet, lets get the existing 3 billion people who are living in squalor actually contributing to society before engaging on a program of population expansion.