I=PCT thread

For those interested in pursuing this issue, both those who want to
develop effective praxis toward the end Warren so trenchantly reminds us
of, and those who are still operating on the faulty assumption that there
is no such thing as overpopulation, understanding that there is some
overlap between the two, here are some excellent resources:

Harrison, Paul.  1992.  The Third Revolution:  Population, Environment and
        a Sustainable World.  Penguin.

Brown, Lester R. and Hal Kane.  1994.  Full House:  Reassessing the
        Earth's Population Carrying Capacity.  W.W. Norton.

Brown, Lester R. et al.  1999.  Beyond Malthus:  Nineteen Dimensions of
        the Population Challenge.  W.W. Norton.

I've already mentioned Ehrlich's latest, The Stork and the Plow.

I don't recall whether Jim Blaut included it in his list, but it is well
documented that the Rockefeller Foundation (if there's a better proxy for
U.S. Ruling Class, I'm not sure what it would be) began promoting global
population control following WWII.  Why?  Because they were convinced that
the growing populations in the periphery would exacerbate discontent and
lead to anti-capitalist revolutions.

I am well aware of this sort of politics, but it does absolutely nothing
to diminish the critical importance of addressing overpopulation, in both
core and periphery, as a crisis second to none.  The fact of the matter
is, the people hurt the most in the "second phase of the demographic
transition," with lowered mortality and high fertility, and thus a
population "explosion," are the poor majority, not the ruling class.  

And of course life other than human life suffers even more in this Sixth
Extinction.

I just finished reading John Bellamy Foster's AJS article on Marx and
ecology from last fall (his new book Marx's Ecology is next).  I highly
recommend it to everyone on the list.  I believe that if those who
consider themselves marxists were aware of the ecological analysis Marx
had developed (even if sketchily, and without integrating it with the
rest of his theory, which is a point I think Foster underplays in his
enthusiasm to portray Marx as an ecologist), they would be less prone to a
bizarre form of idealism on questions such as demography.

RH