From the publisher/By Arnold G. York
Pam Linn suggested in her column last week that perhaps we shouldn’t be feeding the animals in the wild because all we’re doing is increasing their food supply.
If that happens, it naturally follows, their population will increase.
She suspects the same thing about human overpopulation with our genetically modified crops that artificially increase our food supply.
This week we have a letter to the editor complimenting Pam that says, ” … you hit the nail on the head. It is a proven fact that overpopulation is directly related to increased food supply.” The letter writer has a solution apparently for both human and animal populations. “Slowly cut down the food supply and the overpopulation problem will slowly decline.”
Assuming that they’re both correct, and I suspect they may be, I began to wonder just how far we would go to protect our environment from overpopulation, and just how much we’re prepared to do.
We could require that farmers produce 20 percent less or that they destroy 20 percent of their crop, but we already do that in a way when we pay them not to plant crops. But then there would be a black market since we’re creating a food shortage, so we’d have to be ready to police that.
Since it takes awhile for populations to reduce, there would be people starving while the system accommodates itself to a sustainable population level. We, of course, would have to resist our natural but ill-informed humanitarian instincts to feed these people. Recognizing that most decent people would have a hard time saying “No” to a hungry child, we’d have no option but to remove these children, store them someplace, and then just feed them minimally until they die. Of course, as the people population decreases, the animal population will probably increase.
Hungry people would try to live off the land, so we’d have to guard against that and make it a capital crime to poach the government’s deer or other animals.
But then I began to wonder. Perhaps there are other things we do that increase population and therefore place strains on the ecology of the planet.
For example, in the last generation or so we have begun to extend our life expectancy significantly. There was something in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times about all the centurions now living. I don’t want to sound crass about it, but by the time most of us hit 70 or so, we aren’t of much economic utility to our society.
All that Medicare or Social Security does is prolong the inevitable. Despite what some of you might believe, death is really not yet optional in Southern California. We’re all going to die sometime. Medicare and Social Security merely delay it.
If older people died sooner, we’d be able to reuse their homes. Their heirs would get their assets while they were still young enough to spend them foolishly, the economy would prosper and we’d be saved the expense of both Social Security and Medicare and the environment would be better off.
We also, of course, would need to cut out legal immigration as many in the Sierra Club had suggested in voting in its recent plebiscite and also deal harshly with illegal immigrants by making it a capital offense. I know some of you might think that overly harsh, but we have to be strong and we can’t let residual liberal tendencies keep us from saving our environment.
Then there are several things that have always been the primo controls on population; famine, war and plague. We’ve already dealt with famine. War will pretty much take care of itself since human beings appear to have a love affair with their weapons, and there are countries all over the globe just itching to reduce each other’s population problems instantaneously.
Plague is of course a little more difficult. It seems to be a natural phenomenon occurring in all places, but the problem is how to keep it confined in the right places. Science may be able to help us there. We could give everyone the plague but only we control the antidote. We’re kind of doing that right now with worldwide AIDS. We didn’t create it, but we maintain control of the medications to cure it or at least contain it so we can then population manage for a better planet.
Our writer says, “We as human beings think we know best and each year we feel we need to find bigger and better ways to feed this burgeoning planet.” She’s probably right. The scientists would be a problem so we’d have to strictly regulate them or this would never work.
The logic of the proposal is ruthless but necessary, and in time we might get over our lingering attachment to our older parents, or unnecessary children. And although it would sometimes be difficult, in time we would see that it’s the only way to build a better world.
