Filed under: News
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ted Turner:
"We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals."
File under: Existential suffocation
2:57 PM ET | 04- 3-2008 | permalink
This is my favorite quote from the piece: "I've gotten a lot better, though. It's been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid."
We caught you!! heh.
He is essentially correct. No one can say with certainty what effects global warming will be or how fast they will occur, but what is obvious is a certain amount of resources will support a certain number of critters. How many humans can the world support? The problem is if we let nature answer this question though disease or water/food/land shortages or wars over water/food/land shortages it will get ugly. Maybe global warming will take us out or maybe something else will. Either way we should take the probability of global warming as yet another wake up call and attempt to engineer a soft landing. Clearly letting the population grow without bounds and consume resources as it wills is a recipe for our own undoing.
Unfortunately, Dave Wiley, like Ted Turner, is engaging in my favorite spectator sport: liberal racism.
That's right. Liberal racism. According to Dave Wiley and Ted Turner, there's just too many of those people overpopulating the Earth.
Tell you what, Dave Wiley (and Ted Turner). If you're SOOOO concerned about overpopulation, how about sacrificing yourselves. Dr. Kevorkian's out of jail, after all.
What? Not interested? I didn't think so. Overpopulation is always a problem for other people but not for yourselves.
Mathew Scallon writes: "Unfortunately, Dave Wiley, like Ted Turner, is engaging in my favorite spectator sport: liberal racism."
I think you are misusing the word "racism". Is "speciesism" a word? Your idea has merit even though I assume it was intended sarcastically. Voluntary euthanasia as a solution has two problems. First, it is a tough sell as the centerpiece of an environmentalist movement for reasons too obvious to go into. Second, it's currently illegal in most places. Advocates would find themselves being thrown in jail a lot.
Ted Turner's idea to consider global warming when making reproductive choices is only slightly more persuasive, unfortunately. It is swimming upstream against the biological imperative. It is an idea worth considering though. As choices go how many children we have is much more important for the future of our planet than what kind of car we drive or how diligent we are about recycling.
Dave Wiley writes, "Your idea has merit even though I assume it was intended sarcastically. Voluntary euthanasia as a solution has two problems. First, it is a tough sell as the centerpiece of an environmentalist movement for reasons too obvious to go into. Second, it's currently illegal in most places. Advocates would find themselves being thrown in jail a lot."
'Nuff said. This is, as I said before, little more than liberal racism.
Actually, Matthew, it was in large part because we think there are too many people in the world that my wife and I aren't having children of our own. (And this isn't something we can change our minds on, thanks to modern medicine.) So you wanna explain to me how I'm being racist or hypocritical by not wanting to contribute to overpopulation myself?
Dear Stewart,
I'll happily explain why calls for overpopulation are normatively racist. When population control advocates like Ted Turner claim that there are "too many people in this world," he never points to Europe, North America, or even Japan. No. He and others like him only point to South America, Africa, and every place else in Asia other than Japan and Russia. Now, what do South America, Africa, etc., all have in common? They are mostly made up of people of color.
Now, if you've decided not to have children, that's between you and your wife. But that's not what going on here. It's one thing to say that you don't want to add the overpopulation (which is a myth, but let's save that topic for another day), it's quite another thing to demand it of someone else, particularly when those other people just so happen to be people of color. That's what Ted Turner demands, which is why it's liberal racism.
@"Actually, Matthew, it was in large part because we think there are too many people in the world that my wife and I aren't having children of our own."
We made a similar decision for similar reasons. The only way this could be considered racist is if I had something against half-Polish, half-German, with a trace of Cherokee Americans. In my prejudice I really stuck it to... me.
In the interest of full disclosure my wife wanted children, and I didn't. We came to a meeting of the minds and hearts and decided to have one. Unfortunately mother nature gets the last vote.
This might make an interesting topic for the BPP. I wonder how many people take the environment into account when making reproductive choices? Is it on the increase? Who could be interviewed on the topic? Probably not Ted Turner.
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