Tweet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7429594.stm
The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has appealed for extra resources to help thousands of severely malnourished children in Ethiopia.
The organisation says more than 126,000 children could be affected.
The World Food Programme says nearly 3m Ethiopians will need emergency food aid this year because of late rains and the high cost of food.
.
.
It says the situation is the worst since the major humanitarian crisis of 2003, and is rapidly deteriorating.
The organisation says $50m (£25m) is urgently required for health, nutrition and water and sanitation.
The organisation says more than 126,000 children could be affected.
The World Food Programme says nearly 3m Ethiopians will need emergency food aid this year because of late rains and the high cost of food.
.
.
It says the situation is the worst since the major humanitarian crisis of 2003, and is rapidly deteriorating.
The organisation says $50m (£25m) is urgently required for health, nutrition and water and sanitation.
The gists of such stories, as I see them, is to attempt to prevail upon the sentiment, humanity, empathy of the rest of the world that is not starving. The effort, to my perception, is to hopefully force the rest of the world to feel some degree of pain for these people's sufferings and thus to donate whatever in an attempt to lessen the hardships or prolong the lives of those afflicted.
I wonder why is it that children are the ones who are shown to be the suffering versus adults who must be just as badly affected?
If there is any result of the world's concerns, demonstrated by whatever has been contributed to food programs over the last 50 years, about the starvation and hardships these Africans have experienced, I fail to see it. Perhaps life has been prolonged so that more babies can be produced so that the number of those facing starvation now, or next year, or next decade is or will be larger.
On all these pages of iTulip, how many problems are discussed now facing the world would not be considerably lessened or perhaps even disappear if the population of the planet was reduced by half?
One of the first things I might have learned in medicine (internal medicine rotation as an oral surgical intern) was "When one hears hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras." (In Africa that probably isn't true.) Years later I was confused to hear or read about Occam's razor: "a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities" until I figured out: horse--zebras = Occam's razor.
To my simplistic thinking, most of the world's problems would be lessened significantly if the population were to be reduced significantly--for my off-the-cuff preference, say by 50%. That is the simple answer. Any answer that does not take into account the ultimate necessity of lessening the population only unnecessarily escalates the complications of seeking a solution, which in my opinion ultimately will be a band-aid compared to any true solution of the problems facing mankind today.
I truly hate to kill a fly, though I do kill them because I despise them, because life is all that fly has; however, I seriously always apolgize to the fly for taking its life. The fact about flies and other noxious forms of life is that their lives are accidents over which their progenitors had no conscious control. It is not the same with us humans. We do have the possibility of controlling whether or not we produce offspring. It seems to me that we humans clearly do not all act in ways that are in our own best interest or the best interest of those who may follow our brief period on Earth. Society by ways of government make new laws when pushed to do so by the behavior of those whose actions are against the general welfare of the rest of society. When will those who govern societies take it upon themselves by the severity of population excess to enforce population control? Despite what anyone thinks of China's communist leaders, it has had the good sense to limit the number of children its citizens can bear. It's unfortunate that the policy was not begun sooner and has not spread to encompass the world.
I personally feel no remorse over the deaths that have occurred in the world because of starvation, disease, or natural disasters. It is truly unfortunate that people die of such and unpleasant to think about their sufferings, but each of two individuals are generally responsible when they procreate new humans--no one else is responsible for their actions, and thus no one else should feel badly about not bearing some responsibility for the outcome of the production of new babies for which the future is bleak at best. The true misfortune for those dying of starvation is that they were allowed to be born at all.
I am not asking that anyone agree with my sentiments about this problem, but I am seeking opinions that would make me think I may be wrong about the serious need to curb worldwide population growth.
What is made better on this planet by the continuous increase of human population?
. Let's pause and think a bit. Reduce the population by half... Well, which half? Since the issue is natural resources, let's start with those who consume most of them. So, we take out Americans, Europeans, and, for a good measure, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. That's about half, give or take a few hundred million. Is the rest of the world better off? I'd think not, although some would argue that the world would be better off without Americans ;). So, this does not seem to work.
Comment