What are dog-in-the-manger countries saying to the world when they want
their own people to have more children to fill up their country? The
example here is Australia . Think-
1.A country like Australia could double our population
with the 18 million poor and jobless people in South Africa
alone. A sixth of the world's six
billion people are economic refugees, often crowded in
slum-cities or homeless.
2. Take 'eco-tours' of Australia, to
see fragile saucer's edge we live on, the degradation
we still inflict, the growing disaster in our heartland - the
Murray-Darling Basin, our unreadiness for the next big drought,
even the water problems of our little 'big' cities.
3. Study history. "Who can doubt our
ability to continue to find solutions?" ask columnists,
passing the buck to faith in some future breakthrough. Past ages
too, vainly hoped their gods would save them. Who can doubt our
equal capacity to pull disasters upon us, and our science
assisting in the disasters, unless we work according to the
present situation?
A recent book, Population Crises and
Population Cycles by C & WMS Russell,(Galton
Institute 1999) sets out evidence of how it was population growth
that overstrained their current resources that contributed to and
even caused the collapse of so many civilisations in the Middle
East, Asia, Africa, Central and Southern America. In the animal
world, population explosions end in crashes. We do not solve ours
by eye-shutting.
