He thought he saw a
Banker's Clerk Descending from the 'bus:
He looked again, and
found it was A Hippopotamus. 'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be much
for us!'
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie
and Bruno
Each and every year, worldwide 80 to 100 million more people are born
than die, most of them in the Third World. Every second, five people are
born and two die. Thus, each and every second means three more people on
the planet.
Each and every year, Canada takes in 1/4 million people - roughly one
per cent of the Canadian population. That's more than twice as many immigrants
per capita than either the US or Australia accept. Our intake rate is the
highest in the world.
80
Million versus 1/4 million? That's an underwhelming 1/320th of the net
global "gain" each and every year. The 1/4 million Canada accepts
can never make any difference to the 99.9% of people condemned to stay
in a Third World robbed of 'skilled class immigrants'. The UN High Commission
for Refugees identifies 27 million people worldwide who are "of concern"
to them -- in 1998, Canada will accept between 24 and 32 thousand of these.
The 1/4 million immigrants and refugees Canada accepts are an infinistesimal
drop from the global population bucket. However, for Canada, it is an ANNUAL
flood that is changing Canada as surely -- and just as radically as an
armed invasion would.
Clock sometimes slow to load. Please be patient
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INFO: This applet uses a logarithmic equation obtained
through a statistical analysis of the data at the following URL: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldpop.html.
As this is a regression, it may not match the figures from the above URL
exactly. This figure does take into account both births and
deaths, for those that have asked. And, yes, while the count may not be
exact, there really are, more or less, that many people on
the planet.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him
was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over
the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and
with death, and with the beasts of the earth. -- Revelations
6:8
A malignantly overpopulated earth staggering under the weight of our
numbers has figured in many a Doomsday scenario. Most of us have a nodding
acquaintance with the ideas put forward in Paul Erlich's 'Population Bomb'.
Some of the newest thinking speaks in terms of a "systems crash"
where the population will continue -- tick, tick, tick -- to increase while
it's business as usual until commodities like water become the flash point
for scattered 'tribal' wars. In the wake of WWII, two things altered our
prospects globally, and by association -- locally -- forever.
GLOBAL POPULATION IN 1950 - 2.5 BILLION
Relief workers from the UN and other aid agencies introduced rudimentary
public health to regions where such practices were previously unknown.
Freed from the historic contraints of hunger and disease, the consequence
has been a population 'explosion' of catastrophic magnitude. Unfortunately
birth control measures have not enjoyed anything like the same success.
Nigeria reports a fertility rate of nine children per female. China's one-child
policy has largely failed, newly-affluent parents simply pay off corrupt
officials. A recent population conference in Beijing saw the one-child
rule officially relaxed in a bid to offset disproportionate numbers of
the aging and elderly. The UN Child Fund predicts that within the next
few years, the infant mortality rate in the developing world will match
our own -- one in one hundred. Currently 1/3 of the world's population
is under the age of 15. They haven't even entered their "most reproductive"
years. Ironically, it is the developed world which has done the responsible
thing by voluntarily restricting the number of births, in precisely those
areas most capable of sustaining population growth. Static, even retrograde
birth rates permit the pro-immigration lobby to argue that 'we need immigrants
to maintain our population'. This essentially selfish economic argument
persists in the face of mounting evidence that the premise is not only
fundamentally flawed, but impractical in the long run. Presumably the coinciding
collapse of our pension, health and welfare systems are unrelated anomalies.
GLOBAL POPULATION IN 1970 - 3.7 BILLION
Any hope of responsible Third World reproductive strategies was abandoned
the instant the First World deferred to noisy 'special' and/or 'business'
interests and kicked open the door to unlimited immigration. In time, the
government helped us to understand that enlightened self-interest was selfish
of us and would, in future, be reserved for other groups and other cultures
to exercise exclusively on their own behalf. We have also been informed
that it is equally selfish to notice that while some regions produce children
at a rate never before possible, the rest of us are compelled to cheerfully
carry those kids on our backs. In the race to over populate the planet,
the planet is losing. When Sierra Leone achieved independence in 1961,
60 per cent of the country was primary rain forest. In the intervening
years, it has shrunk to six per cent. Deforestation leads to soil erosion
and malarial swamps. Virtually everyone in the West African interior has
some form of malaria. The systems crash scenario predicts that vicious,
lawless societies like West Africa and Road-Warrior societies like Somalia
will not obligingly disappear in the face of loving UN intervention, but
will perversely become ever more common. As our government reminds us:
nationalism and partiotism are not conducive to a multicultural paradise,
a 'borderless world' or a 'global economy'. Nevertheless, people tend to
ally themselves along clan-lines (as was demonstrated so graphically over
the past few years in Zaire, Burundi and Rwanda). In the meanwhile, ninny-countries
like Canada are utterly unprepared to cope with the brutal realities born
of such systems; the health, social and cultural implications are dismissed.
Discourse is forbidden and we are advised to rejoice in our diversity.
Hooray!
GLOBAL POPULATION IN 1990 - 5.2 BILLION
"Pray all you want, it will do you no good. There
is no more!" - Malthus
Thomas Malthus was the first human being in history to get his hands
on a comprehensive inventory of the world's vital and economic statistics.
The College of the British East India Company sent graduates to the far
flung reaches of Empire to gather all manner of data in an effort to comprehend
local populations, customs, resources, and of course to further trade.
In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that
in nature, 
plants
and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too,
is capable of overproducing if left unchecked - or worse - encouraged.
Malthus concluded that poverty and famine were inevitable, since the production
of human beings increases according to a geometric progression (1, 2, 4,
8, 16, 32, 64...) while increasing his life-support production (food) at
a merely arithmetic rate (1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7...). Malthus believed that
such immutables were a divinely inspired plan to discourage laziness in
Man and considered the lower classes spectacularly irresponsible and improvident.
Charles Darwin acknowledged his debt to Malthus in these terms, "I
happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population... here, then I had
at last got a theory by which to work."
GLOBAL POPULATION GROWTH Billions
____ -->|11
You are here----------------+ _ - ~~~~ |10
(gradual economic decline) | _-~ |9
| _ -~ |8
Overpopulation begins-+ V _ -~ |7
(unsustainability) | _-~ |6
V _- ~ |5 (now)
====== _-~ [----- projected by U.N. -------> |4
_-~ ***** |3
____ ---~ ^ |2
-- ~~~~~~ | |1
--|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|--
1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
|
Massive environmental
destruction & loss of species begins
It took the whole of human history for the population to reach one
billion. It took a little over a century to reach two billion in 1930.
The third billion was added in 30 years, and the fouth in only 15. It's
expected that in 47 years the world population will again double.
Where will they emigrate then?
It may be fashionable today to despise the "colonial expansionist,
imperialist missionaries and meddlers" of the 18th and 19th centuries,
but in terms of prospects for survival of the planet itself, one need look
no further than that shaky pyramid-scheme called 'international aid'. The
addlepated good intentions of Doctors without Borders, WHO, countless overseas
UN missions, and other feel-good (and profitable - at least in the short
term) franchises the world over, are in fact, busy digging a mass grave.
Globally, the UN employs 1/3 as many people as McDonald's. While the Third
World plunders resources and pollutes on a staggering scale, 77 "developing"
nations are to be exempted from the new "global-warming energy tax".
Widespread famines are forecast for the next 25 years. Meanwhile, 1/4 of
all birds, 1/6 of all mammals, 1/12 of all plants and 1/20 of all fish
species are either extinct or teeter on the brink of extinction as a result
of human intervention. This summer, 850 volunteer scientists and divers
conducted "Reef Watch '97", in an effort to document the state
of coral reef ecology worldwide. The results were worse than anyone suspected.
At 80% of the sites, mainstays like lobster and grouper no longer existed.
Marine biologists cited Hong Kong as worst offender, where the widespread
practice of 'fishing' with cyanide and dynamite kills off everything -
including the coral. No, our record is not unblemished either, but it's
impossible to see how mass immigration is likely to ease the demands on
our own, or any other land in any real sense. And real sense remains conspicuously
absent from any discourse on immigration and human overpopulation.
For a chilling look at the "systems crash" scenario read
Robert Kaplan's 1994 article in Atlantic Monthly: The Coming Anarchy -
How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism and Disease are Rapidly
Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet - at - http://dieoff.org/page67.htm
Thomas Malthus' 200 year old Essay on Population is still more advanced
thinking than we can muster today - uncomfortably prescient - at - http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/malthus/popu.txt
Also see:
Associated links