December 23, 2010
BECAUSE OTHER HUMANS ARE DISEASE:
The return of the population panickers: In 2010, more and more of the supposedly great and good signed up for the misery-fest that is neo-Malthusianism. (Tim Black, 12/23/10, spiked)
Admittedly, the Something Must Be Done clamour had been building before 2010. In 2008, we had the hyper-intelligent, hyper-unreadable Stephen Hawking telling us there would literally be no room on the planet by 2600. And then of course, in April 2009, Sir David Attenborough came out as an adversary of procreation and promptly joined the Optimum Population Trust. ‘I’ve never seen a problem’, he announced, ‘that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more’.But such public statements were just a foretaste of what was to come in 2010. Pro-hunt, pro-posh Otis Ferry, son of fringe-merchant Bryan, got in first with an impossibly obnoxious turn-of-the-year Sunday Times interview: ‘[I] hate the thought of being accused of depriving poor Mrs Punjab of her [right to come here] but we’re all packed on to this tiny island, and I genuinely believe we are maxed out. But no one is brave enough to say there are too many people in this country.’
Otis clearly hadn’t reckoned on the bravery of the Balanced Migration Group. Including amongst their visually prophylactic number the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, self-styled Labour maverick Frank Field and Tory MP Nicholas Soames, these brave public figures bravely argued that there were simply too many people trying to live in Britain. Terrible transport and a dilapidated housing stock were not problems of transport and housing policy, they pointed out (bravely, I might add); no, they were problems of overpopulation. Little wonder that Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting was busy urging us to ‘grasp the nettle of overpopulation’. Grasping nettles! Now that’s what I call bravery, Otis.
Britain was no isolated hotbed of neo-Malthusianism in 2010. In the US, Great American Novelist Jonathan Franzen went so far as to foreground overpopulation in his Great American Novel, Freedom. In an interview this December, he noted that ‘on a bad day, taking a drive and trying to find some place that isn’t covered with sprawl, I feel like we’ve experienced cancerous growth rates. There once were these functioning cities, there was farmland, there was the wild. It seems like there was once some kind of balance. When you see sprawl plotted out on maps, it really has this cancerous look.’
Nevermind Ted Turner...
