🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1994Nov21.193548.16138@vexcel.com> dean@vexcel.com (Dean Alaska) writes:
>In article <3ajdag$lf1@news.arc.nasa.gov> watson@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (John S. Watson - FSC) writes:
> > There may be a connection, and the connection I believe is overpopulation
> > causes social injustice (some of it at least).  
>
> Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  I think that social injustice
> feeds population growth.  

How can unbridled population growth HELP the cure social justice problems?
I can see trying to keep the population constant, or decreasing it,
but I cannot see how overpopulating as doing anything constructive.
Alas, I'm skeptical that we can solve either though, 
especially outside the boarders of the USA.  And now that half the government
is Republican controlled, there no way we'll get any liberal social agendas 
passed.  So I highly advise decupling social and environmental problems as best 
they can  (as an engineer, that's the only way to solve problems anyway, 
"divide and conquer").  That way you won't alienate conservatives that 
are interested in fixing the environment also.

I'm all for any and all International efforts to solve the world's 
over population problems, as long as it doesn't sacrifice the US
or California to do it. There isn't any need for us to do that anyway.
If anything, we should be a sort of "population wilderness", so that
in the future, people in the other crowded overpopulated parts of the world
can look at America, and see what it's like not to have every square 
inch devoted to the human masses.  If they don't have an example to look
to, they'll probably think there overcrowd condition is "normal".
And maybe if the rest of the world see that California and the US
are serious out the overpopulation problem, they'll get busy and start
solving it in their countries, instead of assuming the USA will just be
a "sink" for their slopp-over.   Sort of like if you're a sailor on
a ship, and you notice another ship, which you know has a much smarter 
and more experienced crew, suddenly preparing for a big storm.

So I don't see increasing the USA's population as a way of solving
either overpopulation or social injustice.  And according to I=PAT
equailtion, moving people from the third world to industrialize countries
isn't a matter of simply shuffling humans around,  it actually 
increases the human impact on the world's environment, the same
as if that person produced  10 children (according to  the 
current estimates that 1 person in the US or Europe uses 10 times
as many of the resources as a person in the "third world").

> With the continuing fall in the income levels
> of Mexicans the problem is getting worse and things like NAFTA feed
> into that also.  Uh oh, another related issue.  The Mexican Asst Sec
> of Agri has said that NAFTA will results in 1 million people leaving
> agriculture every year for 10 years.  What will that do to the pressure
> to emigrate? 

Who knows?  Maybe nothing ... they'll all get the jobs that the US is
supposed losing to Mexico because of it (NAFTA).   Ph.d's in Economics
could not agree on the effects of NAFTA, and I've only had Econ. 101.

However, there are many other reason to assume (the birth rate alone)
that Mexico could produce 1 million people per year that want to come the US.
This will cause higher and higher pressure on them to immigrate to the US.
Which may cause an even more drastic response, and even more social injustice. 
The best solution is deal with the problem now while we still have an envronment
to save.

Another  little problem is that there aren't a lot (any) new agricultural
jobs in California.  California's farm land is being quickly being
paved over.  Every three months or so when I drive there the Great Valley,
I'm amazed at how many more new homes and shopping malls there are.
A lot of that is people fleeing the LA area.

>  We're just making the problem worse and the result is
> xenophobic policies like 187.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that
> people that voted for 187 are racist.  
> I think they are motivated by honest and valid concerns.  

OK, I won't say the people that voted AGAINST 187 were racist or whatever.
I think they had honest concerns also.

> But I think the result will be racist in an
> institutional way and the passage of NAFTA (which will not create enough
> new jobs to absorb those 1 million farmers a year) will contribute.

LEGAL immigration is much less racist than illegal immigration.

I've lived in two places in California for most of my life (20 years in 
one where I grew up, and 10 years here in Silicon Valley).
One area where  most the people were illegal immigratents, and one
area (where I'm living now), where there are mostly legal immigrants
from every corner of the world. The difference is night and day.   
One was middle class whites and poor illegal farm workers, 
not interacting at all, and the other is a mixture of every race, 
creed and colors, from all spectrums of the economic scale, interacting
in every way possible.  It's only where there are high concentration
of illegal aliens where this isn't happening.

Whether 187 works or not, what we really need to do is
make it so we have ONLY legal immigration.
So we can  CONTROL the growth, whether fast or slow.
We have no choices if we can't control it.

Then assuming we get enough people to agree that we want a stable population,
we can have it by only allowing only enough immigration 
to fill the gap left by our slightly negative growth rate 
(which seem to be typical for educated societes).
With legal immigration we get people from every corner of the world
at the rate which  we see fit for the time (whether ecological,  economical),
and a much smoother integration into the American culture, the "melting"
in the melting pot theory.  Then in another 100 years or so,
most anyone you'll meet will be a mixture of many races.
This will hopefully tone down the racial squabbling going on these days.

>>Some people think we've got 
>>the room, but I'd hate to have to live in that room.
>
> By their standards, you (or we) do have the room.

As an environmentalist, 
how much more do you think the population of the USA and/or California
can incease?   Do you think there is a limit, and what is it?
Assuming you think there is a limit, what will we do when we get there?

John S. Watson                  
NASA Ames Research Center MS/243-9, Moffett Field, CA 94035
<a href="http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/~watson/watson.html">John S. Watson</a>
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