<<it would have pointed out that in terms of pollution and
resources it is approximately 50 times more disastrous for the planet for an
American child, and 35 times more disastrous for a European child than for,
say, a Ugandan child to be born.

However, I think the climate has changed on this topic.  There is now less
resistance to thinking about it, and Sir David Attenborough has publicly
agreed with me!>>

So did Jonathon Porritt. But these people are too intelligent to have said 
it by virtue of their own minds. Anyone who knows the first thing about the 
economics-demography interface knows that we in developed countries have too 
low a birth rate to sustain economic well-being in the century to come. This 
has been said since the '60's. And economic decline inevitably means 
environmental disintegration, as priorities change.

As for your comments on birth control, I find them paternal and at odds with 
evidence. In the developing world, large families are not the result of a 
lack of voluntary birth control; they serve tangible cultural, economic and 
strategic roles, both on governmental and familial levels. If you suggest to 
communities or governments that they should conform to methods of birth 
control that you have for them, you merely provoke suspicion of your 
motivations.

This is the immense problem I have with modern attitudes on these topics, 
that I believe we here should seek to transcend. Everyone forms opinions as 
though there is an obvious wisdom, written in every line of what we see in 
the news and so on, that we have acquired by way of impartial research in 
noble academic institutions and our honourable news-gathering apparatus; and 
from this enlightened perspective we should spread our instructive ways to 
every corner of the globe.

In truth, this is much more the product of our own ignorance and armchair 
fact-seeking, by which our mind takes the path of least resistance: ie. 
accepting what is fed to us via the media, and not asking questions about 
sources of funding of research, higher agenda pervading the messages we get 
through the media and so on.

I suggest we get real on these things. Forget the climate debate: it's all a 
manipulative distraction from proper wisdom, as is everything that is so 
ridiculously hyped in mainstream media. If the powers that be wanted to do 
something about CO2 emissions and so on, they'd do it, through their own 
measures, without involving the opinions of the masses; and if they didn't, 
they wouldn't get it splashed all over the news.

Tom