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We have seen the problem, and begun to understand it. What, then, is best for an individual to do? First, know the problem and the effects of various actions that you could take, lest you go to great effort and expense and only make things worse. That's a common result of simplistic altruism.
For example: You might send money to a charity which claims that they will send your money on to a poor little girl with big teary eyes in Central America who would supposedly starve to death. But with your kind and generous help --she will grow up to have a half dozen children... who will all starve to death. What have you done!?
Question: If there is a nation than cannot supply enough food to feed themselves, and are starving to death, what do we send them? Food? Or birth control? If both, how much food? Enough to support their current population, tho it be more than their land can feed? Enough to feed them at mere subsistence level as they helplessly increase their population?
A recent anti-abortion commercial says to "make another place at life's table for an unexpected pregnancy". This seems to push a purposeful ignorance at us. First, pregnancies don't sit at tables. But we'll be generous; they mean the people that potentially result from pregnancies.
. . They make a very bad (and unethical) point. To use their simile, there are fewer "table-places" with food than there are people now! The average world density is --so far-- 110 people per square mile of land. Including the expanding deserts.
. . Rwanda has 820 people per square mile! The worst is Bangladesh, with 2250! Average.
. . There will be 4060 people in that same little square mile by the year 2020. (IF, if, if!) El Salvador and Haiti will top one thousand by then. Where will they grow food?
. . Because the best contraceptive program for those poor countries is female literacy/education, it may be best to spend money that way, rather than in sterilization. So: is it cheaper to educate, or sterilize? On the personal level at least, sterilize, certainly. Education would be much more costly than a mere $2-300 sterilization. (and it would be much cheaper if done at the local prices.) Of course, that ignores the corollary benefits of that education. How much is that worth? And an educated young woman will soon decide to pay for her own lil operation.
. . Surveys show that childless couples (in the U.S.) are happier with their lives. They're certainly wealthier; the cost of raising a child is rising rapidly. Last we heard, it cost a quarter million dollars per child for education alone. You could keep that money. And let's see, with compound interest....
. . If you, as an aware adult, now face the choice of whether to bear a child or not, the ethical credit or blame is on your shoulders. That potential person would eat increasingly rare food, and would produce pollution for his/her entire life, merely by consuming resources, then throwing them away, as we all do.
. . Past our own minimal or non-reproduction, what else can we do? It would be a horrendous waste to spend a good fraction of the energy of your life and then figure out too late that you'd done more harm than good. It needs study.
. . What can one person do? Just do what would solve the problem if everyone else did what you do. Decide what nation/area is just to the left of the peak, and remove one or two people from there. Now the problem is: where?
REASONING: "Why not start on your doorstep?"
1. The U.S. is a country whose human numbers are almost under control. To sponsor a local person would violate condition #2 below.
2: Trouble; danger. "Damaged" Americans are more likely to be violent, mentally ill, or cause troubles. An immigrant, tho perhaps also "damaged", is in a strange culture, and more likely can "disconnect" from his/her past. Also, you can produce more difference per person this way. This also makes him/her less likely to leave the family (yourself).
3. Tho their plight is terrible compared with the average American --poor Americans are that much better off than the average would-be refugee.
4: You'll get more appreciation for their escape from a life of poverty and danger. (You'll need a reward, if you're human.) A person would be wise not to claim pure altruism; such would certainly be suspect.
To take a person out of a population that will replace him/her by having one less starvation-death... only increases the population of the world by one; that's no good. There would be one starvation-death there in either case, so you'd have done zero good, and, from the population-increase here, harm. Besides, people here do ten to twenty times the harm.
. . Also, easing the population-pressure slightly there, you would (slightly) postpone the eventual socio-political remedy that that country will inevitably be forced into. That ultimately results in one (or more) extra deaths.
. . In the U.S., likewise, the extra (if temporary) population here would sooner encourage the drafting and implementation of a rational, strong population policy for ourselves. It may even be more important to push for that than to import an immigrant. But you could do both.
. . The U.S. population rise is only about 1% per year, of which .7% is from a natural (internal) rise, and rest by immigration. However, we produce the most pollution and destruction, so our population is the most important to control. A sterile immigrant would raise our population by one, yes, but only for their lifetime.
Okay, if we choose to sponsor an immigrant... from where?
. . There are very few successful nations: Hungary, Germany, Austria, Denmark and--surprisingly --Italy! You'll notice the absence of Japan, which most people assume is under control. The nearly-successful nations: United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Bulgaria.
. . It seems best to limit immigration to those nations close to the top of that statistical hump. Ideally, to that nation that wouldn't make it otherwise. I can't tell you which that will be.
. . Scandinavia has a deprived and discriminated-against ethnic group: the Sami/Lapps.
. . Brazil is a unique question, in spite of its soaring population. They have a $120 Billion debt. ($30 million a day interest!) They borrowed most of this from ignorant and unethical U.S. banks. "Ignorant" because they failed to see that their chances of getting it back were negligible. "Unethical" because they knew what Brazil was going to do with the money: destroy the Amazon Forest.
. . Brazilians have a $2,500 average income, but it's poorly distributed. Some are very rich; others live a short and miserable life on the streets. The nation's inflation was incredible: 934% in 1988, which is 64% a month!
. . Lower population-pressure would ease their disastrous deforestation and decentralization policy, and therefore, ease the greenhouse effect for the entire world. It's probably best to take a person from a (temporarily) forested state like Rodonia, or Acre.
. . It seems to me that there's a bell-shaped curve --probably steep-sided-- that divides the survivable nations from the hopeless ones. We'll call the height of the curve "difficulty" or --as it plunges to the right-- "survivability". We are forced, then, to triage --to divide into three groups. Lifeboat ethics. The few fortunate; the many doomed; and, to our point: the questionable.
. . Now we've put nations in an order across the curve; good to bad prognosis. With our bell-shaped curve on a chart, something like a triage is now possible. The problem is where that peak is, amid that line. To know, one must predict environmental effects; wars and other political foolishness/incompetence; refugees to/from neighboring areas, etc.. Any omniscient volunteers who can tell us?
. . On the left, we have the technological and economically advantaged nations --from "got it made" to "good chance". The leftmost nations have it made; their populations are low and not expanding.
. . The rightmost nations are hopeless, doomed. They may someday achieve population stability, but not before an enormous and horribly tragic lesson in the consequences of no control: mass misery and mega-death. Till then, any food given them will only make things worse there.
. . We can demark a third category: the nations near the top, on the right side. We may be able to pull them over the top of our bell-shaped curve because they're close anyway, and because the slope is not so steep there. These are the only nations that we can help.
. . Down the slope, advantages are lost. Over toward the rightmost point, we slide down past India and China, where there are fairly poor economies, a late start on technology, and a poor chance to achieve much more of it before they get overwhelmed by their own weight. At the rightmost bottom, Mozambique has very little technology, a very poor economy, and a horrendously high birthrate. Next year's headlines, if we are still able to care.
. . In that terrible old phrase, these nations are best served by "benign neglect". The sooner things get bad there, the sooner they'll begin to do something about it. The faster things get bad, the easier people will realize what the problem is; (in Erlich's example,) like the frog that sits in a pot and doesn't know the water's heating to a boil, because it went up slowly. A frog dropped in will jump right out. Think frogs are stupid? Maybe so, but we are in no position to criticize that frog's intelligence! We continue to turn up our own burner!
. . But let's imagine that we've chosen the country and area. Now; who? What kind of individual? The preferred person:
. . 1. is a female; they have the children.
. . 2. is young; to save the greatest number of person-years per person.
. . 3. has always lived in poverty and has had no education,
. . 4. but has somehow avoided most psychological damage.
. . 5. plans on having children, but hasn't yet. (Obviously, immediate sterilization is a condition of immigration! If not, you've done vastly more harm than good.)
. . 6. has no close family ( You can't start the never-ending sequence of immigrant relatives. Or can you?)
. . 7. isn't too much of a culture clash with you or your area.
8. Eight, or more like the most extreme number that we could list below, because this is the most extreme example I can think of: someone who has a contagious non-fatal disease that would have been a drain on the resources of their family and, to a degree, their area; but a disease that is easily, completely, and cheaply curable here.
. . Unfortunately, there's at least one more confounding factor. Is the water coming to a death-boil too slowly for the nation to notice? Maybe we should let things get bad there (or here) quickly, and even help it get bad! We're not going to recommend that, tho --things are bad enough-- just call it to people's attention.
. . Conditions for Gaia, one of its species, or an individual... are best, on the average, when things that can be dealt with... get worse quickly, rather than as slowly as we can make them go. This way, they are more likely to get recognized and dealt with while the background of the situation is still not so bad.
. . So, if you're going to play god --and you are, no matter what you do-- get the data you need, then do something positive.... Or admit that you'd rather let them die than let yourself get inconvenienced.
P.S.: Don't hurry it; I haven't decided what's best myself yet. When and if I do, I might still be wrong. But maybe, instead of doing something, we could just study the problem forever, like congress does.