Yes indeed. Let us broaden the view - as Folkert van Galen suggests.
OPT does mention Bangladesh in a 2005 Press Release on its website at
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.ODPMSept05.html. The Press Release
notes that Bangladesh is the only country in the world larger than England
that has a higher population density. But also notes that UK's ecological
footprint per head of population is NINE times that of Bangladesh.
The size of the UK's ecological footprint is an indicator of the
environmental cost that UK's affluence imposes on the rest of the world.
OPT does not advocate that the UK should lose its privileged position, but
it does advocate that the UK should reduce its ecological footprint.
Estimates of ecological footprint do assume existing technologies. There
are many things that the UK can do to reduce its ecological footprint as
well as checking its population growth.
Many organizations more powerful than OPT are interested in helping
Bangaladesh to reduce its population growth. I imagine that many of these
organisations would look askance at suggestions coming from the UK. They
would thinking that at a world level the UK had greater need than Bangladesh
to deal with environmental resource problems.
If anyone has difficulty in following this argument I recommend looking at
the account of the meeting 'Environmentally Sustainable Populations. Why
the statistics matter' held on 30 April at the RSS. (I don't recall seeing
many members of the ONS at that meeting, Folkert). An account of the
meeting is given in a message on the 'official-statistics' JISCmail list.
The Files Area of the list's website includes a copy of the full paper on
ecological footprinting (by Martin Desvaux of OPT).
Ray Thomas
******************************
-----Original Message-----
From: email list for Radical Statistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Folkert van Galen
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 1:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OPT.
As long as there are hills in the UK on which you can find yourself to be
alone without seeing anybody, then the optimum level has not been reached.
To me the recurrence of the population scare (or bomb) very much sounds
like the rich man's fear to loose out on his acquired space, lifestyle, and
privilege. It's a new insight in the psychology of Western decadence. It
often sounds a bit like "all imported cars pollute and locally produced
ones are clean". Let's widen the view a bit more.
OPT is a charity. To be more charitable it could make itself useful to
study the situation in Bangla Desh, a country which is 4.4 times more
populated than the UK, which is often subject to flooding, is now at
severely under threat from sea level rising, it has variable harvests and
weather patterns, it enjoys generally a low irregular income for most of
its population, it has poor infrastructure and also high degrees of
urbanisation.
Despite this cumulation of precarities its population grows and continues
to grow (despite Malthusian teachings on populations correcting themselves
via famine and vice).
Could this be because the maximum level of a sustainable population has not
yet been reached here?
Or have the means available to sustain itself changed so much in favour of
a higher population density?
Surely, OPT's expertise is much wanted here !
I am curious to hear its views.
Folkert van Galen
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