Skip to main content

RR talking on socialism, tomorrow


I am speaking tomorrow [see 'Capitalism and the Environment', above] on the relationship between capitalism and ecology. Lots to say, but for now I think the key thing I want to say is this: that the population issue HAS to be faced, because we have (b)reached the limits to growth. If one is serious about ecology and about localisation, one has to be serious about restraining population. It is not proven that this can be done entirely by voluntary means. We may have to think, e.g., about limits to family size, or at least about fiscal incentives for smaller families.
What is not good enough is the standard old socialist mantra of open borders and procreative freedom. This mantra only works if one just doesn't care either way about ecological limits -- as old socialists, indeed, generally didn't care, preferring simply to maximise 'production'.

Comments

Chris Hyland said…
I think what needs to be looked at first (and what probably has been but I haven't researched the topic) is the circumstances in which people have large families, eg rich vs poor or educated vs uneducated, and the circumstances in which communities and countries have reduced their growth. I've always thought that reducing income inequality, giving people a better quality of life (in the Green sense not the capitalist sense) and improving peoples education is likely to go some way to reducing birth rates.
19 February 2008 at 12:01
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post-Growth: A new vision for a fairer and more sustainable Britain

Post a Comment
Read more

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...
2 comments
Read more