The post you are reporting:
Howard, Kath, Ray, etc....
The 'apparent' fact, (and an all too bald statement), tha'. Is hardly something that can be claimed as being owned by anybody other than the original estimator. Simply because this statement is repeated and repeated over and over again, does not make it any more useful or pertinent. It was this bald statement that I took against as 'vapid'.
I do not pre-suppose that anybody who is concerned about population density is demanding that something 'drastic' has to be done to reduce such population-density to a manageable level.
But, why is this 'factoid' so often repeated? And what can its statement and restatement achieve?
Is it/ can it be, more than just something to say as one's hands are thrown-up in despair?
I hope that people who voice their own concerns about ever-increasing population density, are in fact worried about how at all we can all manage to survive and prosper, how it is that we all could be fed and watered.
These things, even in my own estimation, are legitimate concerns, but worrying about something has never produced a solution to a problem yet.
I was trying to say that quite apart from this problem being looked at as ever-worsening, it should be viewed as solvable, and efforts should be made to solve it. This is why I took against the bald statement as 'wrong-headed'.
The issue about out-of-season-fruit & veg.
As we act and behave currently so much of what we do makes the problem of increased population density worse and worse.
The best, it seems, that we are able to do with regard to feeding people is to insist upon hungry people in Africa working their butts off to grow vegetables they do not eat and flowers they cannot eat, in order to make us in the developed world feel better about ourselves. This, I say, is not right.
There will be many reasons why people in the developing world breed as they currently do. I am trying not to be flippant and mention, long dark nights with no lighting or TV. Yet we in the UK will have heard of population spikes nine months after a power outage.
It strikes me that a person's reaction to a given stimuli is pretty much the same the world over. The minute we in the UK expect (rationally or irrationally) a shortage of something, what is the first thing a great many of us do?
We panic. We panic buy, and we panic stockpile.
To my mind, people in the developing world are little different.
Even in average times the common tiller in Asia and Africa and elsewhere feels it a natural imperative to father many sons, just so as to have one or two that grow-up to help him in his work and to carry on his line.
We in the west have made great inroads into the field of child-mortality. So much so that these aforementioned tillers found themselves with an excess of maturing sons, and for a while common sense, the realisation of better prospects - the forced sterilisations carried out by Indira Gandhi, things were improving - birth-rate wise.
Much, much water has flowed under the bridge since those heady days, much of it drowning out hope in the hearts of the people in the developing world.
And yet, instead of redoubling our efforts to give back to these places some small portion of that which we have taken, we instead continue to simply exploit them for all they are worth (and more) and then through many the 'bald statement' blame them for their ills.
The new thing is the creation of reliance on all things GM/Monsanto etc. among the farmers of the third-world.
In short, I too am concerned with the plight of 'people';you, me, them, us...everybody, yet will anything actually be done to help us all out? Will anything be done while we all chant, "there are now living more people than have ever lived"?