textfiles/magazines/EUTHANASIA/population.1

                                 Population #1
                         Bricks Carved From the Chaos
                                by Mike Merrill

1.
    Why do things go bad?
    There is insanity everywhere..
    There must be a reason for all the decay.  I see crime go up, incomes go
down, neighbors get meaner, wars get more vicious, competition between world
aggressors to create the most shocking atrocity.  No one feels they are taken
seriously.  Pollution gets worse, even when we try to love our planet and
recycle and shop conscientiously.  Water becomes more scarce.  Natural
disasters seem more and more frequent.  It costs more to own a home than it
used to, and the home I can afford gets smaller and smaller.  And there are
more and more problems impossible to list.
    Why?
    I'll tell you.
    It's because there are too many people.

2.
    All our dreams of tomorrow: of peace, of unity, of living in the light of
love, of technology eliminating work, of leisure spent in the arms of nature --
all our dreams will be nothing unless we embrace this truth.

3.
    Many among us feel they sense the coming end of the world.  They see the
gathering destruction: billions of people starving, topsoil erosion,
deforestation in the tropics, pollution making people sick, nuclear weapons in
many nations' hands.  Who has enough perspective to say they are wrong?

4.
    We don't think about the ones who haven't been born yet.  The moment here
and now demands all our attention.  Living pulls so much from us that we don't
have energy to think about more than what's right here.  But time passes
anyway.  And just as sure as we feel sexy on Saturday night, and just as sure
as those DNA molecules untwist and rewind, there will be another generation,
also with Saturday nights and untwisting DNA.  And so on.
    Just because they're not here doesn't mean they don't exist.  Historians
and philosophers talk about the past as alive in the present.  We live with the
consequences of our past actions and the actions of others who have lived
before us.  We speak the language formed directly from the thoughts of the
past, so our thoughts are in a sense repetitions of those gone by.  In the same
way, the generation in 20 generations will live with our thoughts and actions.
Our thoughts and actions are literally the future.
    Now, I am filled with sorrow for that coming generation.  War for Americans
is a fun little adrenalin kick.  Genocide is overlooked by the free world's
leaders, unless there's an economic incentive to say no.  Governments get away
with whatever they can.  Psychological depression is endemic.  Laws are a game
to play with.  There are traces of human waste in every corner of the world's
oceans.  Many people think God is dead.
    No news here, I just thought I'd summarize before going on.

5.
    I have come to see that almost all our problems, all the evils in the
world, arise from, or at least are greatly exaggerated by, this one little
problem: overpopulation.

6.
    Some caveats:
    I cannot prove the things I say here.  They can't be addressed adequately
using the current set of concepts.  And I cannot invent a science.  The need is
now, this year, this day, and a new science takes decades to unwind in history.
    I cannot defend myself against the hands of those humans whose religions
and moral convictions compel them to oppose these words.  Of you, opponent, I
ask forgiveness.  Please consider that my moral conscience demands compliance,
just as yours does.
    Do not think that I am a Nazi.  I don't care if my race (white Europeans in
America) eventually loses its separate identity through racial intermarriage.
In fact, my hope for the future of America in part relies on the prospect of
that happening.
    Finally, it is impossible for me to attain expertise in all the sciences
and other areas of study I touch on in this document.  I am a generalist.  And
so, to the experts: please correct me.  My address is listed at the end of the
document.
    Take all this or leave it; it's all the same.  But listen to me for a
moment, and ask yourself whether these words don't speak to something in you.

7.
    An interesting example of social breakdown in a crowded population of
experimental animals was created by John Calhoun at the National Institutes of
health in the late 1960's and early 1970's.[1]  Calhoun created a "Utopian
environment" for mice to study the effect of exponential population growth on
social behavior.
    The mouse environment was a 101-inch-square pen with 54-inch-high walls,
constructed with nesting boxes on the walls to maximize breeding space.  The
floor of the environment was covered with ground corn cob, and paper strips
were providing as nesting material.  Calhoun provided adequate food and water
in regularly spaced hoppers.  The room temperature was relatively stable during
the years of the experiment.
    Calhoun put four male and four female laboratory mice into this space on
July 9, 1968.  The first 104 days, which Calhoun called "Phase A," were
characterized by social turmoil as the mice adjusted to their new environment.
The first litter was born at 104 days, and the population began to expand
exponentially, doubling every 55 days.  This was "Phase B." At day 315, with a
population of 620 weaned mice, the population growth abruptly slowed to a
doubling time of 145 days; this was "Phase C."
    At this time, the social structure began to deteriorate and violence levels
increased.

...  there was no room for emigration.  As the unusually large number of young
gained adulthood, they had to remain, and they (contested) for roles in the
filled social system.  Males who failed withdrew physically and
psychologically; they became very inactive and aggregated in large pools near
the centre of the floor of the universe.  From this point on they no longer
initiated interaction with their established associates, nor did their behavior
elicit attack by territorial males.  Even so, they became characterized by many
wounds and much scar tissue as a result of attacks by other withdrawn males....
Female counterparts of these withdrawn males tended to withdraw to higher level
boxes that were less preferred by females with litters.  Such females were not
characterized by the violent aggression of the withdrawn males.

    Mouse fertility decreased, baby mice were abandoned, fetuses spontaneously
aborted, and maternal behavior disappeared.  The dominant male mice could no
longer defend all their territory from the masses of males, and began less and
less to defend the nesting sites they were associated with.  Thus, the nesting
sites became exposed to "invasion," and in response, the nesting females became
aggressive, taking over the role of the dominant males.  The aggression carried
over to their offspring: the mothers attacked their young, wounded them and
forced them to leave the nest early.  All social interactions between the mice
were of short duration and superficial, and no real courtship or parenting
behavior could develop.
    The population peaked at 2,200 mice on day 560.  No baby mice survived
infancy after day 600, and the population began a decline.  The last conception
was about day 920.  An attention toward the end to add some healthy mice failed
to rejuvenate the population.  Calhoun reported that on June 22, 1972, there
were only 122 survivors.

8.
    The Kapapuya tribes of Native Americas formerly lived in Oregon; they are
now nearly extinct.  Here is one of their prophecies:

In ancient times
a Kalapuya lay
in a grove of alder trees
near the forking of the Santiam
and dreamt a most unusual dream.

When he awoke at night
he told the people:
"The earth beneath our feet
was completely black,
in my dream."

No one was able to say
what that signified,
that dream of our green earth --
so we forgot it.

But then the Whites came
those farmers hard as iron,
and we saw how they tore open the earth with the plough
the pastures
the little prairies beside the Santiam.

And we knew
that we were to be a part of their dream
their dream of an earth
made black forever
by the wounding plough.[2]

9.
    An Armenian soldier, being bussed towards a battle with Azeri soldiers in
the south of what used to be the USSR, says, "God has given us the right to
stand on this land."  He kisses a silver cross on a chain around his neck.[3]

10.
    Every year a good chunk of southern California burns.  And every year
recently there have been disasters when these fires sweep over residential
areas.  Why does this happen?
    Fires are natural in the region.  Dry summers follow wet winters every
year, and plants dry out.  Lightning touches off the inevitable.
    People choose to live there.  They like warmth; they don't like Idaho and
Montana and Illinois as much for that reason.  And those people whose houses
regularly burn down were choosing a place to live, there was no affordable warm
land without those dangers.
    Spaces fill up with people, and eventually people take what they can get.

11.
    All the problems that are currently blamed on technology and our "wasteful"
Western way of living are exacerbated by human crowding.  For every additional
human in America, you need several thousand more kilowatts of power a day.  A
few more pounds of toxic emissions go into the air as the polyester for the
baby clothes is synthesized and the play pen is built.  A few more gallons of
water a day are polluted by sewage.  Eventually another car will be on the
road, another computer will be in a home, another household will be producing
solid waste.
    It is probably not a sin to drive a car and make plastic and throw things
away.  It is when these activities are multiplied by 300 million that they
begin to become a problem.

12.
    Technology itself is a human adaptation to address the problems caused by
overpopulation.
    The word "technology" comes from the ancient Greek technes and logos,
meaning "craft" and "thought," respectively.  Technology is a way of
intelligently crafting the environment around us into a form we can use.
    We created technology to allow us to dominate the earth so that we Ens can
prevail over what we see as the chaos of the natural world.

13.
    Most homes in the world currently are heated by wood fires.  This is the
way it has been for almost all of human history; fossil fuels and such
technological innovations as nuclear and solar power are very recent phenomena,
and currently are limited to relatively industrialized areas.
    Heating one's home with wood, though, carries with it one main limitation:
one must obtain wood.  If there are no trees in the area, one must import the
wood from somewhere.
    I have no proof, but I submit that it would be difficult to heat all the
homes in the United States with the wood we have growing here now.  And if we
could, it would soon become a very ugly country.
    We have become dependent on fossil fuels to maintain our high population
density; we don't need to use any land to grow wood for fuel.  And the fossil
fuel will run out someday.
What's the answer?
    Inevitably, unless everyone obtains solar and wind power sources, we will
have to set aside some of the land we currently use for food to grow fuel
instead.  And the best way to do with less food is to have less people.

14.
    Fossil fuels allow our cities to exist.  How would we live without these
fuels?  They bring our food in.  They move us to our jobs.  They get us out of
the insanity of the city when we want to get out.

15.
    Many summers I go on vacation with relatives at a lake in Maine.  Over the
past 20 years, the water has become murkier, the air has become dirtier, the
traffic has become noisier and heavier, the number of canoes passing by the
back porch daily has increased.  All these changes accompanied an increase in
tourist traffic.  It is true it has become a more popular area, but the
increase in traffic is partially a consequence of increased population.  More
people means more vacation spots needed; some spots closer to cities will
become crowded and people will travel further, even way up to Mount Desert
Island, to find less crowded areas.
    People seek these less crowded areas to recover from civilization.  That's
what we all first liked about America: the open spaces, the sense of freedom
when we are immersed in nature.  All of this is disappearing.
    The frontier died quite a while ago.  Now, it's pretty tough in many places
to find a place to be alone.
    I know I am lucky to be able to have these vacations.  I'm including this
description as a read-to-hand example of a population increase affecting
quality of life.

16.
    Fear of violence is a national obsession in America.  It crafts our habits,
our travel routes, our relationships, and our levels of awareness as we go
through our days.  Women walk alone at night only in the safest of
neighborhoods.  Men, every day on the street, measure each other's aggression.
Anger is almost a sin, not because of the emotional damage it might do, but
because of what might happen.
    The root cause of violence is aggression, a behavior hardwired into us.  In
other animals, aggression is a mechanism for spacing individuals out across the
land, for ensuring that each animal has enough territory to survive.  This
mechanism was calibrated within us a long time ago, when our population
densities were much lower than they are now.
    In the 20th century, high population densities are excessively stimulating
this mechanism.

17.
    According to the Bible, a long time ago God said, "Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."[4]
    I think we've subdued the earth at this point.

18.
    All life seeks to increase its numbers.  Living things tend to produce
large numbers of offspring, a larger number than necessary to keep population
levels constant.  This reproduction is necessary to fight adversity in the
environment.  As Charles Darwin noted in 1859, "There is no exception to the
rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high-a rate that, if
not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single
pair."[5]
    Thus, oak trees drop thousands of acorns, and as of 1992, the average human
female produced 3.3 children during her lifetime.[6]  (The number for humans is
smaller because humans take great care of their young.)
    Given a conflict between the tendency to increase and destructive forces
such as predation, population levels will fluctuate over time, as one force or
the other becomes stronger.  As a population in a favorable environment
increases in size, eventually the destructive force will become the limits to
the amount of food available.
    Territoriality, mediated by aggression, is the mechanism that has evolved
for taking care of this problem, and organisms ranging from slime molds to
humans use it.
    The main reason humans have such a problem with violence is that our drive
to increase our population has acquired powerful tools -- technology and
medicine -- that have allowed us to propagate far beyond our original
densities, the densities at which the "set point" for our aggression mechanism
was established.
    We want territory, but there is less and less of it per human because the
population increases on a finite amount of land.
    Why else would we dream of cities under the sea and travel to distant
planets?

19.
    There certainly are other causes of violence and war, such as economic
injustice and extremist ideologies.  But these are proximal, apparent causes
that rest on the fundamental fact that humans have multiplied far beyond their
original condition, and into a state of imbalance.

20.
    In prehistoric times, when we evolved from other primates into our current
form, population densities were low.  Back then, it must have been relatively
frightening to see a stranger.  A stranger might be friendly or hostile, and
might be honest or dishonest.  Then, as now, the possibilities of ways a human
can behave were limited only by what is conceivable.  And there was no
universal social structure or government to regulate behavior.
    Our genes carry with them the memory of that time.  And today, they cry out
when we see hundreds of strangers a day, bringing fear, and objectification,
and aggression, and violence.
    Humans were not designed to live in boxes piled up on top of each other, as
in modern public housing.  They were not designed to live in places where one
can walk for a day and pass the dwelling spaces of one million people.  These
are foreign environments to the human animal.

21.
    If all this is so, if the squelching of territoriality by population
pressure is the root of violence, why has this not been apparent through
history?  The answer lies in the taboo nature of the subject, the extent to
which most human cultures deny its existence.
    The number of children a family chooses to have is a private decision in
most cultures.  In America, talk of someone else's family size will bring
discomfort and hostility into the conversation.  Fears of genocide float in the
backs of people's minds.
    It is only today, in the age of broken ideals, of smashed religions and
philosophies and values, when many old systems of thought are dying, that we
can begin to address such an issue with clear minds.

22.
    To be out at sea is a perennial human longing.  We don't belong out there
biologically; we're land-dwelling bipeds, with no fins and no blowholes.  It is
technology that allows us access to the sea's surface.
    We like it because it gives us space to ourselves.  At sea, we can control
the extent to which we interact with other humans.  Our minds can find peace.
    On land, the distance I can travel without encountering another group of
humans is limited.  On land, the number of humans who can break into my sphere
any moment is almost limitless.  The phone rings and I am obliged to pick it
up; any stranger can talk to me on the street; many acquaintances, who could
show up at any moment, have legitimate claims on my time.
    At sea, there are limits to what other humans can do.  They are far away,
and there is so much space and air.

23.
    In a small town, you can't get away with anything.  The people who see you
every day, who watch you work, who know what you buy at the supermarket --
these people know your character and see the way you treat others.  What goes
around comes around, and you pay for your sins.  If you are selfish and rude,
you are treated poorly yourself.  However, good work and good acts earn you a
reputation, and bring you back respect and joy.
    In cities, however, you can get away with things.  The people who see you
being rude to a clerk, cutting someone off in traffic, and slipping into the
pornography store will never see you again, so you don't have to worry about
reaping the consequences of your actions.  You can do what you want inside the
cloak of anonymity.
    In this way, cities become magnifiers of our own lack of self-discipline.
They become sink-holes of bad karma, where everyone, out of laziness and
incivility, treats others in the worst way.  There is no obvious reward for
being honest, honorable, principled, polite.  And so these virtues, which truly
hold together our civilization, are abandoned as self-defeating qualities.  All
of this is because of the density of the human population.

24.
    Humans tend to fear the wilderness.  A city dweller walking through the
forest imagines bears, snakes, axe-murderers.  A child falling asleep in a tent
notices all the little sounds around him.  A hiker in the West scans the
terrain for bears.
    In our home turf, where we are familiar with the common dangers, this fear
takes the form of respect.  There is no longer anxiety at the wilderness in
general, but a set of planned behavior patterns set aside in anticipation of
known dangers.  The Louisiana resident knows what to do in case of a hurricane,
but is terrified at the thought of a blizzard.  The Toronto resident can handle
snow and keeps sand in the car trunk, but couldn't imagine how to hide from a
hurricane.  The scuba diver knows the shark; the mountain climber knows the
crack he jams his hand into; the Kansas farmer has plans to handle a tornado.
    But under these forms of respect is the same fear of the wildness of
nature, which can break through the comfortable routine at any time.  We know
that nature can take away our lives at any time, and that we are fragile.  We
see the wilderness as "out there," and we are "in here."  We must look out for
ourselves lest the powerful and impersonal hand of nature sweep us off the
earth.  We know we will die and we fight back because we don't want to.
    To make our lives more secure, to create a safe and comfortable space for
ourselves in the chaos, our species has learned how to craft what is around us.
Our hands make wood into houses and ore into tools.  We develop systems for
arranging plants so they produce maximum food.  We develop imaginative ways to
kill the plants and animals that interfere with our goals.

25.
    When something doesn't work, we take notice.  We light up inside and look
around us, taking in the environment to determine what went wrong.  Usually we
assume that things we use every day will work when we pick them up.  If the
spoon I eat my cereal with were to fall apart halfway to my mouth, I'd sit up
and take notice.  The inner light would come on, and I'd start examining my
utensils more carefully.  My motives would become clear to me then: what am I
trying to do?  Eat my breakfast.  But the bigger picture?  I am trying to eat
so that I can survive.
    Survival is the underlying issue with this tool, as it is with most tools.
We use tools to dominate the world so we will be o.k.  I want my cereal so I'm
not hungry; I want my furnace and my clothing so I'm not cold; I want my motor
vehicle so I can get to work so I can have my cereal and my furnace.  When
these tools break, the environment I have created temporarily is no longer
fulfilling its purpose: to allow me to survive.
    (Of course, one could insert an idealistic argument here: "Isn't there more
to life than survival?  Love is the ultimate purpose of life.  If I have love,
I have all."  But the very fact that we can make these arguments rests on the
fact that we have enough energy to make them, instead of spending all our
energy scrounging around for food and shelter.)

26.
     What if I were to escape the fear of not being o.k.?

27.
    Ethnic groups and nations tend to fear their populations will decline.
This fear has a competitive component to it: if the neighboring group has more
people than us, they could overpower us and take our resources.
    Here are a few tiny bits from French history:[7]
    * "A nation must have a population dense enough to keep stable an
equilibrium with her neighbors." -- Arsene Dumont, 1890.
    * Prior to World War I, French postcards showed a picture of five Germans
bayoneting two Frenchmen; another showed large German babies looking down on
smaller French babies.
    * "Denatalite [a lack of births] isn't a health problem, it is a problem of
national defense of the first order, perhaps the most important of all.
Tomorrow it will be the problem of national defense in itself." -- Fernand
Laurent, 1937.

28.
    "The adversary in war is the growing crowd of one's neighbors.  Their
increase is frightening in itself, and the threat it contains is enough to
release the aggressive drive of one's own corresponding crowd....  In this
rivalry between growing crowds lies an essential, and it may even be the prime,
cause of wars....
    "For the progeny of man is sparse, coming singly and taking a long time to
arrive.  The desire to be more, for the number of the people to whom one
belongs to be larger, must always have been profound and urgent ...  In war men
wanted to be stronger than a hostile horde and were always conscious of the
danger of small numbers....  Man's weakness lay in the smallness of his
numbers."[8]

29.
    "Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower
scatter them in forest and meadow.
    "Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that
you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of
the earth in your garments.
    "But these things are not yet to be.
    "In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together.  And that
fear shall endure a little longer.  A little longer shall your city walls
separate your hearths from your fields." -- The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran[9]

30.
    Listen to me, and we can go back to the promised land.  The thing that
people have been searching for is graspable, is attainable, within the limits
of what we have now.  Peace, plenty, joy, natural beauty, stability, love ...
there it is, right over there.  We just have to walk over there.  We just have
to take the correct bend in the path.  The only problem is that it requires
facing one big taboo ...  the number of children brought into the world in
every generation.  But next to the survival of the world, I don't think it's
that big a deal.
    I'm talking about, and here's the vision, a worldwide, systematic
consensual non-genocidal non-coercive reduction in the world's population.
It's the only way to solve our problems, to relax people so they no longer get
that murderous itch, or the covetousness towards the neighbor's property.  It's
also a great way to create sustainability.

31.
    Ask yourself why it might be that Americans have been moving west for 200
or 300 years, why the center of population keeps moving.
    It's because the people who move don't like the crowds.  People like to own
their own land and have their own space to walk in.  They'd rather do that than
live in a one-room apartment in a city.  So they move west to the uninhabited
land.
    But now we're working at cross-purposes to our own desires for land and
space and breathing room.  Our national population keeps going up.  So there's
less and less land, less and less money per person, and more unfamiliar faces
on the street.  The environment is more damaged with every additional person.
One more yearly volume of human sewage needs to be absorbed somehow by the
land.  It can't hold an infinite amount.

32.
    If we just all calmed down and stopped breeding so much, we could go to the
Promised Land.  It would be right here; it would be every square inch of the
world.

33.
    Imagine a city about 60 years ago somewhere in the central USA.  Joe
Average wants to buy a house there that he and his wife can raise kids in.
(This is 60 years ago, remember, when women were still in the habit of staying
at home because they had to in order to have enough children to propagate the
species.)  He finds out that a large tract of land to the north of the main
city is going to be designated as a park.  So, being a quick sort of guy, he
goes out and buys a lot next to that park, across the street.  He has a house
built.  He and his family move in.
    Years pass.  The kids grow up and go to college.  More houses are built
around the park.  Average houses, not houses you'd consider to be mansion-like,
but not little boxes either.  The city starts to become more populated (that's
what's causing more houses to be built).  Soon, there isn't really any open
land around the city to speak of.  It becomes cheaper to build multi-story
structures than to expand horizontally, so that's what happens.
    As the city becomes more crowded, more people begin to visit the park,
because, after all, people like open space with trees and grass.  This is o.k.
with Joe Average.  He's a social guy.  But soon, as poverty increases in the
city, he notices that the people walking around the park are starting to look
resentfully at his house.  They could never afford his house on their salary
(property values around the park have gone up due to the laws of supply and
demand).  Joe starts to get uncomfortable when he goes out to mow his lawn.
It's a lot different from when it was back when he bought the place, and it was
all open space with few people.  Joe's neighbor's house gets broken into, so
Joe has to buy an alarm system.  Joe's wife has become afraid to walk outside
at night.
    Now, what is the cause of the degeneration of Joe's neighborhood?  Is it
that he is an oppressor?  Is it a social class thing?  Is it just the way
things are, so we might as well accept it?  Or does it have something to do
with population growth?

34.
    One of the classic animal models of an increasing population is the
bacteria culture.  A single bacterium, placed on a growth plate, will begin to
divide and eventually will fill it up.  Its growth pattern follows an S-shaped
curve: the growth starts off slowly, speeds up to an exponential rate, and then
slows again as the colony reaches a stable population.
    One might be tempted to find this a comforting thought, that even the
simplest form of life will stabilize its own population.  But the reason the
culture stops growing is because the bacteria begin to starve and are poisoned
by toxic waste products.

35.
    From the Statue of Liberty:

    "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
    I lift my lamp beside the shining sea."

    If I ran a country, why would I need to send my masses to America?  Why
couldn't I just send them off to some free land to make homes for themselves,
make a living, and prosper?
    This is obvious, I think, to most people in the world, but I'll explain
anyway.  It's because there is no more quality land in most countries; so the
overflow comes here to America, where we have a lot of land that was until
recently practically unused by modern industrial standards.

36.
    In 1994, Vietnam's population reached 72 million people, an increase of 60
percent since the end of the war with the U.S.A.  This made Vietnam the 12th
most populous nation in the world.  By 2025, its population is projected to
reach 168 million.  The nation has a land space roughly equivalent to New
Mexico's.
    Most employers now are threatening to fire workers who have more than two
children.[10]

37.
    In May 1994, in what was described by United Nations officials as one of
the largest single-day population shifts in modern history, members of the
Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda forced 250,000 Hutus from their homes and across
the border into Tanzania.  Tens of thousands of both groups had been killed.
    In the refugee camp in Tanzania, a few days after the migration, there was
of course little fresh water and food.  Relief workers worked overtime to keep
the people alive.  Corpses floated down the river from the fighting.
    Why would any ethnic group want to remove such a great number of people
from their land?  What is so valuable about land?[11]

38.
    We are all rushing toward something as our human population increases.  We
are rushing toward that day when we will all see the root of our problems.
When we have too many people on the earth as a result of billions of personal
and private decisions, it destroys what we all have together.  On the day when
we all see that fact, on the day when everyone's life is affected by it, we can
all together resolve to change it.
    Until that day, there will always be an incentive (from a biological
perspective) for a small group to multiply and increase its numbers even if the
rest of the world tried to stabilize itself.  That group will increase its
population relative to the others, and will achieve some measure of dominance.
    But when the day our species as an entity realizes what it has done, we can
all agree to relax.
    We have dominated the earth.  We have proven we can prevail against nature,
despite the obstacles and adversaries it throws at us.  This should be a
calming thought.  It should bring deep peace and reflection.
    When population goes down, there will be more land per person.  Real estate
prices will go down, and everyone can own land and feel space around them.
Using the efficient farming technology that we developed under the pains of
population pressure, there will never be hunger.  A surplus of crops can be
fermented into alcohol, and we will never be short of fuel.  With fewer people
and the emerging green technologies, we will have a minimum impact on the
environment.  There will be clean air and water.  Without swelling populations,
without aggression-producing high population densities, and with general
prosperity, violence and war will decrease.

39.
    I have heard that gardeners are among the most well adjusted and happy
people on this earth.  I think it is because their work is the work that we all
were designed to do.
    Our myths tell us we were given the Garden a long time ago.  We screwed up
back then and we lost it.  However, we can get it back.


Notes:

[1] Calhoun, John B. "Death Squared: the explosive growth and demise of a mouse
population."  Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January, 1973.
66:80-88.

[2] Quoted in Kaiser, Rudolf, The Voice of the Great Spirit: Prophecies of the
Hopi Indians.  Trans. Werner Wunsche.  Boston: Shambhala, 1991.

[3] Auerbach, Jon.  The Boston Globe: "A vicious war to the death between
Azeris, Armenians has been largely ignored." Buffalo News, 5/1/94, p. F8

[4] Genesis 1:28.

[5] Darwin, Charles.  The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  New York: The
New American Library, Inc., 1958, p. 75.

[6] United Nations Population Fund.  The State of World Population, 1992.
New York: United Nations, 1992, p. 40.

[7] Teitelbaum, Michael S., and Jay M.  Winter.  The Fear of Population
Decline.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

[8] Canetti, Elias.  Crowds and Power.  Trans. Carol Stewart.  New York:
Viking Press, 1962.

[9] Gibran, Kahlil.  The Prophet.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985.

[10] Browne, Malcolm W.  "Crowding and Managerial Gaps Imperil Vietnam."  The
New York Times, 5/8/94, p. 1.

[11] Lorch, Donatella.  "Out of Rwanda's Horrors Into a Sickening Squalor."
The New York Times, 5/8/94, p. 10

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