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Showing posts from April, 2010

Happy Earth Day! Please, die already (The Korea Times, April 22, 2010)

Happy Earth Day! And Please, Live, By Casey Lartigue Jr. The annual Earth Day celebration (marking its 40th anniversary today) makes one point clear about the issue of overpopulation: There are too many people who think there are too many people. Doomsayers have long warned that Earth would soon be overburdened with too many mouths to feed. Despite a continuous rise in living standards and continued success in feeding more people with less land and labor, alarmists continue to bombard us with deadlines and dire warnings. ``Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us," warned the theologian Tertullian of Carthage. The keynote speaker at an Earth Day rally? No. He was talking in the second century about the 190 million people he believed were rapidly depleting the Earth's resources. When British economist-cum-clergyman Thomas Malthus warned against overpopulation in 1798, there were fewer than one billion people on the planet. T