From: "Dave Bedggood" <dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 14:05:02 +0000
Subject: M-TH: Against Nature TV Documentary




Thanks to James for posting the TV transcript. Very good enema 
for the intellectually constipated Westies.  I agree that the attempts to 
regulate and control population etc from outside are a form of 
imperialism - recast as humanitarianism but really a disguised 
nativism for regulating the poor non-white reserve army,
making sure they don't swim in the Westies gene pool. Its 
interesting too that the pomos post-colonialism lines up with this 
Westie front by granting people the differance to die with dignity.

Getting the information accross is one thing, But we can't  wait 
about for the population to stabilise at 11 Billion. In 
the process many millions more are going to die.  Doing something 
about it is the point. Hugh's point about class being central to 
ecology needs to be developed. Proyect accuses him of trotting out 
formulae, Justin of boiler plate slogans. Isnt it interesting that as 
soon as a troskyist on this list talks of the need to organise a 
solution that does not depend on sweet talking the bosses, people get 
upset. 

Its also interesting to hear people trying to reclaim Marx as a 
founding greenie, as if nature was divisible or not already social.
Marx is all about saving labour you can't get more conservative than that.
Marx was for the development of the forces of production, and overhrowing 
capitalism when it became intolerably destructive of those forces. 
But it would be the working class and the poor peasantry who decided 
when the destruction was intolerable. The point being to gain control 
of the means of production and to further develop the forces of 
production. That's why only those socialists who have transitional
 demands capable of putting workers and peasants in control of the
 means of production are worth listening to. 

When we had a debate about Kabila's ousting of Mobutu a few months 
back on these lists, I don't rembember anyone objecting  to the 
obvious fact that the demands put forward by Trotskyists to 
facilitate worker and peasant control of the mines, land and 
transport would  also bring the control of the Congo economy 
closer to "socialism".  Any step towards workers control of the means 
of production shifts the debate about the demographic transition out of 
the environmentalists abstraction of population fetishism, and back into 
the category of relations of production. But since in Congo anyway, 
the stablisation of population increase under capitalist social relations 
will be a very painful process, so much better to do it under socialist
relations, no?

 Dave.
> 
> Tonight Channel 4's documentary series Against Nature continues with a
> programme on population 'the Myth of Too Many' 8.00pm
> 
> The follwoing is an edited transcript:
> The superfluous four million - and the rest
> 
> Over the last 35 years, the population of the earth has doubled. Next
> year it will expand by 86 million people - that's three babies a second,
> or another Birmingham every four days, or another UK every seven months. 
> Today there are almost six billion people in the world, and
> environmentalists argue that this is already unsustainable. Professor
> Norman Myers, of Green College, Oxford, puts the optimum world
> population at two billion or less. Further population growth over the
> next few decades, it's argued, will be disastrous. 
> 

Dave Bedggood


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