April1980 RAIN Page 21 BenderldeMoll respond It is always difficult to open up a reevaluatIOn of an Issue-especially one that we all have strong feelings about. And it is crucial to have feedback in the evolution of such questioning. The response to our Populat;O/1 piece in the Jan. issue was well-thought ourand appreciated. It made us see where we left important things unsaid and some of what needed to be said more clearly. Let's continue the dialogue. To raise questions about an issue we feel needs to be thought through more deeply is not, we feel, cloing a disservice to people who have been working long on population. Our questioning arose from a realization that the population issue is being used to divert our attention from the real causes of starvation, cultural collapse, urban problems, erc. Avoiding that issue and the new perspectIves it opens would do vastly more disservice to us all. It is important to continually test our assumptions as our understanding of things changes, or we get locked into increasingly unreasoned and untenable positions. If we fail to dig deeper into the population question we not only fail to resolve the root problems but miss also the opportunity to join together productivt>ly with people whose hearts are with us, but whose experience and understanding of the issues rightfully differs. Our statement concerning wilderness vs. meditation drew fire for being anthropocentric. It was purposefully so. We were addreSSing what appears to be the dominant motivation of "wilderness" preservationpeople recreation. We suspect that is more central to most people than are eagles and bears. How many wilderness areas ace there that totally exclude people and leave it alJ to the other creatures? And how many "wiLdhfe refuges" are set up with special facilities around them for hunters to pick off the arriving and departing migratory birds? , Our sense is that our attitudes and relation to the rest of nature is vastly more important than preservation of wilderness as something we're not part of, and closer to the root of population pressures on natural systems. Why can we not live as a part of nature in peacdul coexistence with the rest of it? Native AmerIcans and other cultures have been able to do so. Preservi ng wilderness is an essential holding action to slow the decimation of nature by our industrialized culture. What is ultimately more essential, though, is to deal with what there is in our values, our institutions and our economic system that makes us destroyers rather than enhancers of life. Similarly, we see the urban impacts of population to be more caused by cultural patterns than numbers. The Boston-Washington slurbanoid exists not because of numbers but because more of us have chosen, either individually or institutionally, to migrate there than to a pattern of small towns which could accommodate as many people. And any time spent in what remnants of civilized cities survive in Europe reminds us that our 20th century cities are unloveable by choice. We have given over two-thirds of the land to the automobil\!, built tities as economic rather than humane places, and replaced conversations with neighbors with the blare of our stereos and TVs. It is our social policies that breed urban crime, not our numbers. Many good living places exist- in cities and in whole countries such as the Netherlands-with densities far higher than 650 people per square mile. LikeWIse, some pretty horrible ones exist with 'densities lower than 30 plsm. The impact of absolute numbers is a relative and cultural thing. We have a friend once from Brooklyn who couldn't stand the "wilderness" of White Plains, and we have known people to whom Oregon's population was as overwhelming as that of New York. Our use of the term "global extinction" may be too extreme for the popuLarion hazards we face. We need to realize, however, that the combination of factors we have generated-both in the dest~ctiveness of our weaponry and the rHlmbel\of disea.5es whose virulence we have been increasing, make the results of the "Black Death" a weak comparison. More relevant perhaps is the "virtual extinction" of Native Americans with our yet primirive 18th century technology and diseases, the genocide of Cambodia, East Timur, the Amazon basin and parts of Africa. We hope global extinction is still an improbability, yet it is increasinglya possibility, Massive cultural disruption is a virtual certainty, and its effects upon a culture interwoven on a scale such as ours is an absolute unknown. The major area of misunderstanding about the article is that we seem to have given the ide.a that we were 1) in favor of breeding in great numbers, and 2) against any form of population control. In reading back through our piece, we can see how thot misunderstanding developed. To clarjfy, we agree that from certain perspectives population is a problem, but we don't feel It IS tiJe problem. Our feeli ng is that it is more often a symptom. While we need to deal with population and wilderness and hunger, we need more importantly and sImultaneously to deal with our materialism and greed, our dispassionate cruelty to other people and other forms of life, and our conscious and institutionalized suppression and exploitation of other countries and peoples. These- things are ra rely spoken of In the same breath as population, and almost never as the root causes of the "population" problem. It IS Important that we can each make choices about our own impacts on future population numbers and our own environment based on informed knowledge about personal, communIty and regional resources and goals. That choice includes knowing what levels of density an area can support with food and other necessities and knowing how many children one's own family (an emotionally and finanCIally foster. It also involves having means of birth control at hand to act upon those choices. Being able to make informed choicessometimes for many childr!'n, sometimes for none-ensures a kind of empowen nent that is quite the opposite of the situation today I where many of us have little control over our own hves. When momentous deCISions affecting our livelihoods, the quality of our food and environment, as well as our general level of well-bemg are being made by others far away without knowledge of local needs or situations, no meaningful personal action is possible. When our economic system operates at a Kale that prevents us from realiz1118 the real impacts of our numbers and our appetites on others and olher orcas, no meaningful actIOn IS possible. Dealing with population "problems" on a governmental or global scale produces at best a muddle. and more Iikdy policies brutally controlling "others," not ourselves. We don't know if we need mort' people or less-ironically, we probably need both. There is nor one balance between people and resourceS, but many, depending upon cultural sensitIvities and practices. We need the diverSIty of dIfferent cultural sensitivies, and ones in touch with people, nature and life, - Tom Bender and Lane deMolJ
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz