[Conrad]

Hey Touron-- Thanks for contributing. I mean that.

[touron]

Hopefully my contribution or lack thereof will not result in me being "limited". I think a prudent stewardship of our existing resources (e.g. water, electricity) will go a long way towards alleviating resource pressures. And then right over the fence, we have outerspace, which makes our own Earth seem infinitisimal in size. Who knows what resources lie beyond?

[Trevor]

I don't think there is really an ethical option of restricting the freedom to conceive. Even if there were some restrictions barring multiple births, it seems like it would be a waste of productive time and energy to enforce such an ordinance (if it could be enforced at all). I think progress ultimately lies in a higher distribution of education on efficient-resource usage and increased technological output to respond to a potentially greater pressure placed against our systems. Though the level of people may be on a rapid rise, I don't see why our mechanisms to cope can't rise at an even more rapid rate.

[pdknight]

I hate for this to be the first post of mine on this site, so I hope it doesn't label me as that guy. Population growth, along with a great deal of current environmental issues, are fads and based on junk science. Sure, populations grow, that is what they do. People falsely look at growing populations as a drain on resources. In my opinion, people are capital, people themselves are a resource. More workforce, more people can do more. True, more people consume more. However, taking measures to restrict populations are sheer nonsense. Things work themselves out in the end. Modern technologies have taken out what used to keep populations in check, disease, famine, and the like. I don't see this as a bad thing, but I'm not a person that gives a tree a higher value than a human life. People talk about limiting family size, personally, I'm glad my parents didn't make that choice, else I wouldn't be alive! Everyone is for taking measures to limit the population, but no one wants to be the one to implement it. I read a quote somewhere by a tree hugger who said the only truly environmentally friendly thing you can do is to shoot yourself. Despite his environmental convictions, he never volunteered... Like every species that has come before us and every species that will come after us, we will have our time, and we will become an afterthought in the history of the planet. To think that we have this fantastic impact upon it is plain arrogance. When our species goes the way of the dinosaur, it won't take long for it to seem as if we were never even here.

[SK]

[pdknight]

Ice has always been melting and freezing, look at geological history. The last ice age is just ending. Ice ages don't just happen in the course of a few years, nor do the climate phases when there is little or no ice, the Carbiniferous(unsure of spelling) lasted millions of years, with hot temperatures all over the globe, and no ice! It happens, we have a cyclical climate. We only recently have been able to witness these changes, and we are witnessing a point in earth's climate cycle during a melt. Give it another few undred thousand years, and our descendants will have expanding ice caps to complain about, not their disappearing. You want to regulate human population and breeding through laws. Several recent totalitarian governments have tried this, it didn't go too well for them. The chinese are trying it, and they don't exactly have a history of good ideas. But sure, get all the ideas you want from a totalitarian regime with a miserable human rights record. As fas as our impact on the environment, volcanic eruptions, in a few hours, dwarf the human impact on the climate. Natural processes do so much more to impact the environment than human activity does. River quality in Africa? When they start giving a crap about their own quality of life, they will do something about their rivers. It also seems you want to attribute Katrina to human activity. If I am not mistaken, hurricanes happen all of the time!!! NOLA is built below sea level, in the worst possible place to build a city. I doubt human activity persuaded it to hit the city... No doubt humans imoact the air quality around our cities, I didn't say that they didn't. My statement was pointed at the theory that there was no global warming until humans came along, the "scientists" that say that humans alone are to blame for ice melting, and so forth. Our planet has seen so many climate changes and mass extinctions in its history, my statement was that this change is only one change in the thousands of changes that have occured in the past, and will continue to happen. Limiting birth rates through opressive laws through the deprivation of fundamental human rights is not going affect the climate changes of this planet. If you are so concerned about it, I encourage you to be the first one to start. Make your impact zero, don't have any children, stop doing anything to impact the planet. You can not do it, and it is mere hypocrisy to demand it of others.

[treeswarper]

[Conrad]

It is ironic that when people (especially women) have more education, prosperity, and the power to control their own reproduction, i.e. when they can afford more kids, they tend to have fewer kids.