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Nature and Society Quotations used in the December 2005 - January 2006 edition
Hit by drought, this country of 12 million people is facing its worst maize harvest since 1992, producing just 1.25 million tonnes – or 37 per cent of the food stable needed for national consumption this year, the agriculture ministry says. Malawi is the worst affected of six countries in the region and needs food relief to see it through to the April harvest after the widespread failure of the 2005 staple maize crop. Reuters, 8 November 2005
The population debate has been characterised by a range of unsupported and often meaningless assertions. First it is often said that if the population doesn’t grow the city will stagnate. Of course, if that is true then we must grow forever. The Canberra Business Council [and others …] attempt to make an emotional connection between stable population and stagnation, decline and decay. And it reflects a failure of imagination; for these people, development in the city cannot be conceived in terms of enriching and improving what we already have, it can only mean tarring over more paddocks. Clive Hamilton
[The second unsupported assertion] is the claim that economic growth depends on population growth. This assertion has recently been debunked by Chris Richardson of Access Economics. Economic growth depends on improving productivity and the labour force participation rate rather than an ever-expanding population. …The growth lobby always seems to argue that more growth is necessary without ever canvassing the endpoint of growth. Presumably the city could stretch from Goulburn to Cooma and they would still be arguing for more growth. Clive Hamilton
There is a clear mismatch between forecasting natural disasters at some indeterminate time in the future and the short lifetime of local and national governments in modern democracies. And there are few, if any, votes to be had in raising levees or creating new building codes for earthquake-prone cities. New Scientist, 10 September 2005 reflecting on whether our political framework is equal to our environmental predicament. We never thought we’d see the day when a remote control would make it onto a Christmas list, but the Logitech 880 has made it onto ours. It’s a universal remote you program using the Logitech website. You can program a ‘Watch Sports” button on the Logitech that turns on your TV and changes it to the right mode, turns on your Foxtel set-top box and switches the channel to Fox Sports, and turns on your surround-sound system, tunes it to the TV and sets the volume to 11, all with the touch of one button. That’s got to be worth $399 Australian Financial Review,
Going after every last hydrocarbon to fuel our wasteful vegetative ways is doing untold damage to our future prospects on the planet. Kelpie Wilson
The age of sloth is almost upon us. Labour-saving devices being developed today could leave the human race facing an epidemic of obesity. Scientists have forecast that in 50 years people will save an hour a day as a result of new technology, but that the resultant inactivity could take years of their lives. Chronicle of the Future website
There are more human babies born each day - about 350,000 - than there are individuals left in all the great ape species combined, including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobo and orang-utans like this one. Richard Cincotta, ecologist
December 2005 - January 2006 edition accessible here
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