There are liars, damned liars, and economists.

In their attempts to appear to be both mathematicians and scientists, economists achieve neither. Yet they continue to be so influential, for many of the reasons stated so well in this discussion. Perhaps our population reduction measures should begin with economists.

Science

25 January 2008

Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being

by John P. Holdren, the President of the AAAS …
_____________________________________

The reason why I became involved
in registered politics, way back in the
early 1980s (even though I had known
that politics was almost totally bullshit)
was the nuclear arm’s race at that time.

Inside that context, I thought it was interesting
that one area where the exponential growth DID
actually slow down and reverse was in the area
of making nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Holdren wrote:

“… the buildup of the global nuclear weapon stockpile
from a dozen in 1946 (all in the possession of the United States)
to the peak of about 65,000 in 1986 took just four decades;
another two decades later, the number had fallen …

Of course, since it only takes a few hundred
nuclear weapons to destroy most of civilization,
& anything more than a thousand nuclear bombs
can probably leave nothing living on the surface
of the Earth, except insects and grass, while the
use of ten of thousands of nuclear bombs might not
be survived by anything but bacteria, & others that
were able to hide enough, somewhere underground …

building tens of thousands of nuclear bombs was

totally INSANE, and yet it was happening,

at an exponentially growing pace,

up until the middle 1980s …

Therefore, it is extremely significant
that the exponential growth of nuclear
powered weapons of mass destruction,
DID NOT continue to grow at an
exponential rate forever …

Through some political miracles,
the politicians & military men
faced the facts that more &
more nuclear weapons was
an INSANE thing to do.

In the context of a world were almost
everything one looks at has been
growing at an exponential pace,

that nuclear weapons STOPPED doing that is extraordinary!

It is one of the very few, clear, examples
that the madness of growth was heeded.

Of course, the world still has
tens of thousands of weapons,
while only one thousand is
enough to wipe out all of
global civilization …

But nevertheless, it was one significant area
where a “need” for more and more and more,
finally reached the point where it was stopped.
_______________________________________

While I am the topic of this article by John P. Holdren,
this is a typical article from an extremely intelligent
and well-informed man writing about our problems.

It fits inside oxymoronic views
of believing in the gestalt from
the bullies’ bullshit, and then,
offering solutions within that
bullshit frame of reference.

It is what I would describe as “brilliant stupidity.”

It does not face all of the facts
regarding entropy in societies.

It does not face the facts that
governments were the best
organized criminals
and terrorists.

I agree with Holdren when he says:

… urge every scientist and engineer …
to read more and think more about relevant fields outside
your normal area of specialization, as well as about the
interconnections of your specialty to these other domains
and to the practical problems …”

I have been writing about the importance
of the emergence of a transnational
scientific community for a while.

However, that community has to liberate itself first,
before it could be a liberating influence in society.

The transnational scientific community
of scientists, engineers & technicians
is an extremely important aspect of
futures hope for the human species.

More than any other group, they have the power
to become organized and influential, however,
more than any other group, they need to go
through the paradigm shifts against the
bullies’ bullshit world views …

Fundamental problems throughout
sociology and political sciences are
that the biggest bullies’ bullshit
are the dominant social stories.

The total insanity of building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons,
when one thousand was more than enough to destroy the world,
somehow managed to persuade people to stop doing that …

I can barely think of another area
where people actually imagined
things enough to change doing
what they were doing …

When it came to their nuclear weapons arsenal,
where the bullies’ bullshit was the most
astronomically INSANE thing possible,
exponential growth WAS STOPPED.

The total insanity of building hundreds of thousands
of nuclear weapons, to be able to do death controls,
managed to work its way through to force changes.

Several times in the past, we only barely
avoided starting some nuclear wars, and
the threat is always still there …

But nevertheless, it is is SIGNIFICANT
that there is that one real example of
exponential growth actually arresting.

What we need now is for the purposes
behind the perceived need for bombs
to be better understood, so that
we could develop death controls
that would be more effective.

Please forgive me for saying that I believe my not-so-great generation of elders is literally on the verge of devouring the birthright of its children and mortgaging their future, while not giving so much as a thought to the needs of coming generations. My generation may be remembered most for having ravaged the Earth and irreversibly degraded its environment, leaving our planetary home unfit for life as we know it or for human habitation or both.

Unfortunately, many too many of our brothers and sisters as well as virtually all the political leaders, economic powerbrokers and ‘talking heads’ in the mass media are not yet acknowledging the distinctly human-induced predicament looming ominously before humanity, even now visible on the far horizon. Because human overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation appear to be occurring synergistically, at least to me it makes sense to see and address them as a whole. Picking the most convenient or most expedient of the three aspects of the human condition could be easier but may not be a good idea. The “big picture” is what we need to see, I suppose. At some point we are going to be forced to gain a “whole system” perspective of what 6.6 billion (soon to be 9 billion) people are doing on Earth. That is to say, the human community needs to widely-share a reasonable and sensible understanding of the colossal impact of unbridled production, unrestained consumption and unregulated propagation activities of the human species on Earth……. and how life utterly depends upon Earth’s limited resource base for existence.

If human beings can share an adequate enough grasp of the leviathan-like presence of the human species on Earth, then we can choose individually and collectively to behave differently from the ways we are behaving now, lest my generation could lead everyone to inadvertently precipitate the massive extinction of biodiversity, the irredeemable degradation of environs, the pillage of our planetary home and, perhaps, the endangerment of humanity.

Sincerely,

Steve

I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t connect development of renewables with per capita consumption or vice versa. I take them to be independent of each other.

Well yeah, technically renewables don’t lessen per capita consumption; they just shift it to renewables (which carries potential problems we rarely hear about… e.g., the question of the ecological impact of usurping a much larger portion of the sun’s energy reaching the earth). But it seems much of what is perceived to be the problem of per capita consumption is that it’s consumption of nonrenewable stuff. So I was just referring to the consequent decrease in per capita consumption of fossil energy. e.g., the high per capita consumption of oil in the US would go way down if oil were mostly replaced with wind and solar. Perhaps I should be more precise with that and just say some EU countries are leading the way with renewables.

I really like your idea of asking the EU to be leaders here.

The EU is in a great position to start doing so on population as a result of some sub-replacement fertility rates and soon to be slowly declining population sizes …. If they can embrace that the economic challenges this may pose, and about which economists complain, pale in comparison to the ecologically challenges of continued growth, they can be the world leaders in a new way of thinking about humanity.

What I assume you are getting at is embracing population decline as a positive outcome and figuring out how to adjust to it without replacing that decline with greater immigration. That’s what I’d like to see happen. Japan is perhaps a in a more extreme situation in terms of an aging population with less than replacement rate fertility. Can they decide it’s a good thing on the whole and redirect a greater portion of the declining population toward caring for the aged? Or will this cause them to kick open the doors to immigration? Or will they ask the elderly to do more for themselves?

One part confused me:

A number of European countries are already leading the way on per capita consumption in their development of renewables. Germany and Denmark come to mind.

I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t connect development of renewables with per capita consumption or vice versa. I take them to be independent of each other.

Figure 1 shows the composition of world primary energy supply during the bulk of the fossil-fuel era to date, from 1850 to 2000 ( 40 ). Energy use increased 20-fold over this period–that number being the product of a somewhat greater than fivefold increase in world population and a somewhat less than fourfold increase in average energy use per person.

But you shouldn’t have to be a former president of the AAAS to understand this simple idea.

I think we agree on about most (not all but most ) of what you discuss in your comment.

So again, my argument is the effectiveness of focusing resources disproportionately (but not exclusively) on the “Developed” World for a greater payoff.

Yes. Though we need to aim efforts nearly everywhere, I’m all for developed countries leading the way on both population and per capita consumption issues. In fact, what do y’all think of this idea: The EU is in a great position to start doing so on population as a result of some sub-replacement fertility rates and soon to be slowly declining population sizes (already occurring, barely, in some mostly Eastern European countries). If they can embrace that the economic challenges this may pose, and about which economists complain, pale in comparison to the ecologically challenges of continued growth, they can be the world leaders in a new way of thinking about humanity. A number of European countries are already leading the way on per capita consumption in their development of renewables. Germany and Denmark come to mind. I would hope the US might follow not far behind. (Unfortunately, we’ve recently seen a rise in our total fertility rate, so this will take some work.)

Let me know if you see any flaw in the thinking of the paragraph above. I’m thinking of putting that idea into an article I’m probably going to write for an EU publication.

Were the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan to seriously change their approach to population and consumption, it would strike everyone as less imperialistic and condescending to address it in the world’s poorer countries.

Yes, definitely.

the reason population growth projections have been decreasing is the growth of female education and political power, especially in Developing Countries, where women with free choice decide much more often to have less children? Clearly, this is an agenda that should be pushed forward with all due haste and focus,

Yep. I always push such issues as women’s education and empowerment as central to this issue. Here’s an early effort of mine in that regard.

Neither forced sterilization nor handing out prophylactics have noticeable effects on population growth in absence of female political power

No doubt true for the former. I’m not quite as sure on the latter. It’s anecdotal, but I do hear arguments for the efficacy of simply making available family planning resources (Okay, probably more than simply handing out prophylactics) where they’re scare. Here’s Jane Goodall talking about villagers’ appreciation for a family planning team sent to assist them.

I suspect the precise needs are going to vary a great deal according to the specifics of the country/area involved. But certainly women’s education and related issues are typically a key. Here are a couple of studies supporting the importance of women’s education:

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2105295.html

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2001.00033.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=padr

The second also points to child mortality as a key.

Do you have any other references? I don’t know what studies are considered definitive here.

But beyond women’s education and empowerment…

I think the current problem with the Global Gag Rule, whereby some NGO’s are underfunded in providing family planning assistance, is likely hampering efforts to bring down fertility rates in some developing countries.

The approach used my the Population Media Center, developed by Miguel Sabido, has some research evidence to back it up.

My impression is that there’s a great deal of room for more research and creative thinking to identify additional effective, humane approaches to bring down fertility rates. Relative to things like military spending, so little has been invested in such work, surely it would be worth it.

but a huge part of the reason for the population taboo are the horrible and misguided things done in its name in the past

Yes, but that is also used in what I can only conclude is a deceptive, propagandistic way by those who see their agendas as competing with the population issue to prevent more focus on the latter. Certainly horrible things have been done in the name of other valid pursuits which we don’t now avoid. For instance, some people abuse their children in the name of “guiding” or “rearing” them. But we don’t discourage appropriate guidance or child rearing as a result.

So my thought is that the best response to that taboo is to talk about it, get it out in the open and show that addressing population need not, and should not involve draconian measures. Ultimately, if there can develop a widespread acceptance that it’s a valid, fundamental need, then it’s just a matter of making sure it isn’t abused.

Thus a strategy of population and consumption decrease seems best for “Developed” countries, and a focus on substantive equity, redistribution, and political power and reproductive control seems wises in the Developing countries. Not only does speaking of women’s empowerment and reproductive control sound more palatable to those who’ve been victims of “La Operación”-like schemes in the past, it *is* the vehicle that’s been shown to be successful in reduced population growth.

Yes, as long as you’re not suggesting we avoid talking about population or acknowledging openly that what happens to it is a key measure of the success of such programs. I’m definitely opposed to the approach advocated by some and coming out of the 1994 Cairo Conference of trying to address social issues while purposefully avoiding talking about population in the process. You may have seen this major report from the UK which concludes it’s an approach which has caused us to lose focus, lose funding for family planning, and generally lose ground in addressing the population issue. (More here.)

The intellectually honest approach is to focus on those social issues and say forthrightly a major reason for doing so (among other solid reasons) is to bring down fertility rates in the hope of saving a huge number of lives in the coming decades. We can deal with the taboo through open communication. (An exception, perhaps, could be something like Paul Chefurka’s most recent approach, which is not misguided or deceptive, as are the arguments of the population deniers, but stems from his particular expectations regarding relatively imminent collapse.)

I asked in a discussion recently, “Can anyone think of another major social or environmental issue which has been dealt with successfully by denying its importance (see my essays on Betsy Hartmann) and/or willfully avoiding talking about it?” Maybe there is one, but I’ll bet the track record of that approach isn’t very good, you know?

a great article by Sloan in 2007 in Biotropica and another by Ravnborg in 2003 in World Development show some very good initial proof that local population size isn’t necessarily connected to environmental degradation; this connection shows up at the national scale but is weak at the local, at least in terms of deforestation

Right, it’s not always the simplest possible relationship. Just to highlight the idea, you could have rural villagers next to a rainforest, not disturbing it, while a corporation (or large rancher or…) is coming in and destroying it. Clearly, reducing the population of villagers isn’t going to help with that.

But the basic link between population and environmental degradation is rock solid as I suspect you’d agree. It’s just that it isn’t always as simple as “these people in this spot doing this particular damage.”

In the example I gave we might well find that the increasing demands of a growing global population for the products of the corporation or rancher are are at the root of the problem. It also may be possible, of course, for some environmental degradation to be unrelated to population. Nevertheless, population size and growth is a huge cause of degradation.

I want to be clear about that because those studies (e.g., Sloan, 2007) are sometimes used deceptively as “evidence” by those wishing to dismiss the population-environment link. Don’t be fooled.

talk of population without talk of substantive equity isn’t just asking to be caricatured as old-style draconianism, but also overlooks the most effective tool we have for reducing population growth.

Well, one cannot always talk about everything, eh? As much as I write about population, the only way I could always be sure to talk about equity, women’s issues, etc. would be to write a canned passage or two and paste them into every comment or essay. My focus is very often on trying simply to convince people of the seriousness of the population-environment link. Solutions are of course essential, but there are still a lot of people who remain unaware or unconvinced of the basic link and its urgency.

Okay, enough on this. I haven’t read Blair’s comment yet.

I agree with your emphasis on the importance of

“female political power”

However, what I disagree with is the mostly implicit, but still absurd, ideas that human rights or freedoms exist outside of their economic and ecological contexts.

“Female political power” and “women’s empowerment and reproductive control”
should not be advanced under the rubric of the bullies’ bullshit view of the world, where human rights and freedoms exist without real limits, but as impossible ideals.

In my view, the most effective expressions of “female political power” and “women’s empowerment and reproductive control”
are going to be educating them to understand what they are doing in the real context of unavoidably necessary death control and new age warfare.

The real trade-offs are between continuing to have the limits be dealt with by men trying to kill each other with weapons, (which threatens omnicidal destruction) versus transferring the locus of death control more into the hands of women.

Impossible ideals are characteristics of the bullies’ bullshit world view, because they make it easy to be hypocritical, and to actually do the opposite of what one says one will do.

Basing behaviour on impossible ideals guarantees the opposite will happen in the real world.

Building something that will necessarily collapse only makes sense if one expects and wants it to collapse.

All of the world’s institutions are run that way, and none more so than the United Nations.

The United Nations is a dead end institution because it was built by professional liars and immaculate hypocrites.

(The lesser NGOs mostly follow the same pattern, of wanting to say what they are doing is helping, while not taking any responsibility for the systematic ways that what they are doing is actually backfiring. You know, like teach people how to fish, but not worry that they will then be able to wipe out the fishing stocks.)

All of the various Charters about human rights and freedoms that I am aware of have a phrase about “reasonable limits.”

However, not talking sanely about those reasonable limits is the central feature of not doing anything to slow stop and stop exponential growth until it goes into catastrophic collapse.

The most important feature of educating women to have power and make choices is that they are being drafted into taking more responsibility for living within the real limits of our economics and ecology.

Any REAL expression of female political power enables them to change the real robbery rates, which are the ways that natural resources are being consumed. The most important of the real robbery rates are the rates of killing, or otherwise stopping human potential from being fulfilled.

Any sufficiently advanced society has to hate spam, and that will including hating the reproduction of spam people.

The fundamental problems that are chronic and inherent in the nature of life are that human beings must act as robbers in their environment, and humans always have the potential to reproduce at an exponential rate that is unsustainable.

Any sustainable society has got to hate spam and stop it.

I totally agree that the best ways to resolve these problems require radical changes in the role of women in society, and a great increase in their political power and ability to control their reproductive rates.

However, to be honest, that means they become much more active players in the death controls.

Basically, the empowerment of women means that they too become more effective bullies.

They become significant robbers, who thereby change the overall real rates of robbery in the economy and ecology.

All of that kind of radical change towards new age warfare is required by the fact that men fighting each other would lead to using weapons of mass destruction, which would destroy almost everything that they were fighting over, in totally insane ways.

“Substantive equity” would really be more equal power to control the rates of robbery and killing.

Educating women should not be educating them to believe in the fairy tales about freedom and free choice. Educating women should be educating them to face the facts and make their tough choices.

As long as the bullies’ bullshit view of basing our actions on impossible ideals is the way we talk about solving our problems, we will continue to be guaranteed to fail.

That will continue to be running society with huge lies and hypocrisy, which is precisely the reason why we are in so much trouble now.

The goal is to distribute and democratize the necessary death control.

Not facing the fundamental facts of life means we can continue to get away with talking about our problems with a bullshit language.

My fundamental point is that anything which stops the economic activities and human population from growing bigger must be some form of death control.

Facing that fact of life is what is necessary to then make the best choices, given that we have no other real choice.

Failing to make better conscious choices means we default and defer to a future situation when there are no more options left, and the worst possible genocides are the only things left that could happen.

Women should be educated to realize that, if they to not do it, then men will have to still do it later, and that will be worse for the women, and worse for the men, and worse for all future children who shall have a much harder time surviving in a world after the fight for resources and survival has destroyed the planet more than we can imagine.

I will repeat my point that we need deeper military ethics, in a new age warfare, to achieve the death controls that can stop exponential growth.

That is the honest way to talk about these problems, and that is the breakthrough honesty that we need to solve these problems.

Half-assed hypocrisy about women’s rights and freedoms that do not face these facts will not work.

Impossible ideals about female empowerment will backfire badly.

Substantive equity is not going to happen because people agree to share, unless they that is seen as a change in the real rates of robbery.

The actual mechanisms of what happens are robberies.

Cooperations are ecological equilibria between the rates of robberies done by different actors.

The way to build towards the ideal goals should be based on changing what already exists, and which is therefore what needs to be actually changed.

We already have real systems of death controls and debt controls that direct the development of human ecology and political economy.

Those things are already deeply buried under the bullies’ bullshit view of the world that hides the truth as much as possible.

Using those kinds of bullshit notions about human rights and freedoms, and thus too, female rights and freedoms, is a dead end, because it builds elaborate lies on top of previously existing hypocrisies.

Everything that actually enables women to limit reproduction IS a form of death control, and calling it voluntary “birth control” is misleading.

The kinds of fairy tales that our society likes to tall itself have been developing for a long time.

We tell ourselves social stories that are as far removed from the fundamental facts of life as civilization has been able to achieve.

The fundmanetal natural fact is that human beings have to kill to live. The realistice ideal is that we should try to kill the minimum necessary to stay alive. Right now, we mostly deny the first fact, and therefore, are as far away from the realistic ideal of what we should do as we can possibly get.

In the end, the most important thing is that the direction that human ecology takes, is the direction that human evolution takes.

New age warfare is necessarily taking more conscious control of directing future human evolution.

I’d like to come back to two or three points I may have (unsuccessfully) made in my original comments.

One is that of the Developed Countries’ footprint. It is absolutely true that we can’t effectively address environmental problems by exclusively focusing on population *or* consumption; it’s also true that the Developed Countries, because of (generally) better governance structures and more coherent, stronger non-governmental actors have much more latitude to do both. The relative payoff is great, considering that this, what, 25% of the world uses 40% of the resources? So again, my argument is the effectiveness of focusing resources disproportionately (but not exclusively) on the “Developed” World for a greater payoff.

Two, this would also have effects on consumption in the rest of the world, as per some earlier comments both about the Western “model” of consumptionism and the complex feedbacks between population growth and consumption. Western popular culture and industrial food are not solely to blame for worldwide increases in resource consumption intensity, but they are major contributing factors. Were the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan to seriously change their approach to population and consumption, it would strike everyone as less imperialistic and condescending to address it in the world’s poorer countries. To be sure, they are contributing more than their share, but my question is — what effective means to you propose to address population growth and consumption in Developing Countries? We do all realize here that the reason population growth projections have been decreasing is the growth of female education and political power, especially in Developing Countries, where women with free choice decide much more often to have less children? Clearly, this is an agenda that should be pushed forward with all due haste and focus, but a huge part of the reason for the population taboo are the horrible and misguided things done in its name in the past — forced sterilization (see especially Puerto Rico’s “La Operación) being a notable one. Neither forced sterilization nor handing out prophylactics have noticeable effects on population growth in absence of female political power, thus while we can speak of population growth in the Developing World, it is of utmost importance to *always* pair it with concerns for equity and access to *sufficient* consumption. Those who reproduce most are the poorest and thus many are those who consume *below* their fair share, even in Developing countries consuming net *more* than a sustainble share. (Urbanization and elite consumption no doubt account for the lion’s share of this consumption as well; I’d be interested on information of resource consumption from the world’s poorest rural subsistence areas – not the factory farms they may work on that consume resources but don’t distribute them back to those who are disadvantaged and likely to have “too many” children).

Thus a strategy of population and consumption decrease seems best for “Developed” countries, and a focus on substantive equity, redistribution, and political power and reproductive control seems wises in the Developing countries. Not only does speaking of women’s empowerment and reproductive control sound more palatable to those who’ve been victims of “La Operación”-like schemes in the past, it *is* the vehicle that’s been shown to be successful in reduced population growth.

(And one last point — a great article by Sloan in 2007 in Biotropica and another by Ravnborg in 2003 in World Development show some very good initial proof that local population size isn’t necessarily connected to environmental degradation; this connection shows up at the national scale but is weak at the local, at least in terms of deforestation, and they both show that it is not the faster-growing population of poor that consume the most resources on agricultural frontiers, but the relatively small number of medium-and-large landowners and rich farmers, who have the money and resources to, for instance, by a small farmer’s farm and expand it further into the forest. Again, equity and elite consumption confound the population issue at a local scale, and empowerment and substantive equity would do much to address it. I suppose this is my overall point — talk of population without talk of substantive equity isn’t just asking to be caricatured as old-style draconianism, but also overlooks the most effective tool we have for reducing population growth.)

That’s a key point and one I’ve tried to make often when told population isn’t an issue in developing countries because their per capita consumption is so low. That many countries, some with very large populations, are now growing very fast economically, and therefore fast increasing per capita consumption, is a reason, possibly related to what you pointed out on Trinifar, for the US (and others) to set an example of population reduction.

Just for reference, because the problem Magne point to is a major one, that’s something I’ve often pointed to in discussions on various blogs and sites. I got into it a bit in this article and in some comments here recently. Not sure where else.

- —

There is one aspect of population growth concern which is not mentioned by Monbiot, and which is not touched upon in the discussions so far, either here or at GIM. I’m thinking of the development dimension: the fact that the fast growing populations of the south are going to pursue a standard of living that is well known to Americans but seldom displayed in countries like Malawi, Chad, Albania, Bolivia, El Salvador, Laos, and Burma. Now, China is on the move in Africa, and pursues policies that are highly popular on that continent; namely an industrial growth approach which African people, and governments has craved for ever since the 1960s, as a much better solution to opening the poverty trap than the charitable funds made available to poor countries by means of development aid from countries of the western world.

New factories are being put in place, owned and run by the Chinese, but which benefits the population more directly, in the form of employment, salaries, and wages. Which means that other enterprises are growing, too, as a side effect of the first: big industry jobs for the people. The lifestyle side of the equation is certainly also going to be seen, as China will continue to expand and therefore also continue to be a most welcome guest and business partner.

This is the point when I say that “I’m afraid of Americans.” As the prevalent lifestyles of the United States of America — as spied on television screens all over the world — works as the target for all developing countries and cultures around the world.

I’m musing of a future in which most African households may be fixed up with refrigerators in the kitchen, airconditioning sets in the living room, and a cheap but practical gas-fuelled vehicle parked in the frontyard of the house. As a matter of fairness: whoever would go ahead and deny the majority of Africans the luxury of a refrigerator, airconditioning sets, and a car? Even if that would mean that CO2 emissions would increase very quickly? As a growing third world population is about to take a quantum leap in a direction which all those who are aware of what poverty looks like, smells like, and feels like, would have to applaud?!

Think about it.

Please, what quote have I taken out of context in any sort of misleading way? Because you mentioned context above, I provided a huge chunk of the Monbiot article just to show I was not taking anything out of context with regard to that particular part of the discussion.

The gist, as I’ve said, is that he went out of his way to discount the importance of population (“It’s an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.”) There is really no way to take that out of context. It’s a kind of headline at the top of his article, under the title. In venues where it wasn’t included the title was changed to things like “The Threat of Population Growth Pales Beside the Greed of the Rich.” I too encourage readers to read the whole article. Then decide if I have in any way distorted Monbiot’s message.