by seldom_seen » Sat 17 Nov 2007, 07:19:02
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'T')he 1970 Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) cyclone killed a minimum of 300,000. The actual total could possibly have been over a million. We westerners have now completely forgotten about it.
Garret Hardin used this disaster as the subject of his essay "Nobody Dies of Overpopulation."
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat killed those unfortunate people? The cyclone, newspapers said. But one can just as logically say that overpopulation killed them. The Gangetic Delta is barely above sea level. Every year several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms. If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place. Ecologically speaking, a delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril.
In the web of life every event has many antecedents. Only by an arbitrary decision can we designate a single antecedent as cause. Our choice is biased — biased to protect our egos against the onslaught of unwelcome truths. As T.S. Eliot put it in Burnt Norton
Go, go, go, said the bird
human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
Were we to identify overpopulation as the cause of a half-million deaths, we would threaten ourselves with a question to which we do not know the answer How can we control population without recourse to repugnant measures? Fearfully we close our minds to an inventory of possibilities. Instead, we say that a cyclone caused the deaths, thus relieving ourselves of responsibility for this and future catastrophes. Fate is so comforting.
No one ever dies of overpopulation. It is unthinkable.