Polemic promises of the possible

I’d like to quote Paul Ehrlich on this one, but I won’t because that old population doomsayer (still ticking at 92 years) made quite a dill of himself with his predictions, so instead here’s Phil Collins:

“There’s too many people, making too many problems, with not much love to go round.”

Do what you will with the ‘love’ bit, but the driver behind all of our challenges — primarily that being our energy requirements — is the error of thinking a growing human population is a good idea.

Those who do are up against our finest scientific minds.

Iconic entrepreneur and social pest Dick Smith once brought all of the science behind overpopulation together to confront Australia’s collective ignorance about it.

It was 2010, and his campaign made for a book, countless interviews and speeches and a documentary backed up to an episode of Q&A where he teased it all out.

It then went nowhere, which puzzles me, because we bang on about our energy needs and not once do we draw attention to the root cause.

It was cathartic to see Smith’s industrialist critics —- when asked if they saw all resources as infinite — stare back like numbskulls; however, they do have the upper hand as we continue with an economy based on infinite growth in a finite world.

How is it affecting life? Let me count the ways.

Dick worked out that in 2009, Australia grew in number by the population of Tasmania.

To keep up with this, we needed three new major hospitals, 300 schools, 1200 cops, one university and 190,000 homes.

Every year.

And that was 15 years ago.

We don’t meet even one of those demands but, hey, we’ve got some of the best ambulance ramping rates and underfunded schools in the western world.

And longest peak hour journeys per capita, and crammed trains and crowded beaches and most expensive public parking in the world, so it’s not all bad along with housing crisis, education crisis, health crisis, carbon crisis and energy crisis.

David Suzuki’s famous petri dish analogy of the planet should be sufficient, but it isn’t; Ehrlich’s 1960s predictions did come true, but he didn’t foresee what also came along (technological changes as stop gaps); and whatever you do, don’t get Attenborough started on the subject (last time I had to fib: ‘Sorry Sir David, but my mother’s calling’).

And the far left puzzle me as well, the Greens wanting to arc up with accusations of racism if we dare suggest we cease immigration (60 per cent of our growth), and the civil libertarians start doing their dance if we talk about limiting offspring to one child per parent.

Shouldn’t both of these groups be concerned with the consequences?

I recommend YouTubing Dick’s doco.

If you believe in evolution, go back and read Thomas Malthus. My reasoning? He was the biggest influence on Darwin, yet all Malthus wrote about was natural populations of any living thing and how they boom and then bust.

And we are a living thing. Keep that in mind when we bust.

But I don’t rate this bloke, who I won’t name: a notable politician who said Australia’s population growth was not an issue because we still had a long way to go to resemble Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has 1500 people in every square kilometre. We have about three and a third.

Think that one through: we have a polly saying it won’t be a problem until we look like downtown Dhaka.

Alarmingly, there are enough of us to vote such intellect into parliament.

When is Dick going to run for the Senate?

Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.