Broken/Special:Badtitle/NS100:JamesMoore/UN Report On A Sustainable Future Mentions Family Planning
The United Nations report Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing[1] published a year ago on the 30th January 2012 mentions the importance of access to "family planning" in relation to a sustainable future of our civilisation:
62. Improving access to family planning, reproductive rights and health services is also fundamental to sustainable development. It not only provides immediate health benefits and reductions in maternal and child mortality, but slows population growth, helps end poverty passed on from one generation to another and lightens the burden on countries with poor natural resource endowments. Access to family planning and reproductive health services is closely linked to overall gender equality: gender equality tends to be higher where they are available, and vice versa.
It's recommendation 3(c) is as follows:
3. Governments should accelerate the implementation of commitments to advance gender equality and women’s rights, including through the repeal of discriminatory laws and removal of formal barriers, the reform of institutions and the development and adoption of innovative measures to address informal and cultural practices that act as barriers. Particular emphasis should be given to: ....(c). Ensuring universal access to quality and affordable family-planning and other sexual and reproductive rights and health services.
While this is obviously a step in the right direction, I cannot help but think that we could avoid a lot of human suffering, human death, species extinction and global warming if we adopted the more "radical" approach of a global birth stop period of several years duration, repeated (with short breaks in between) until the world's population has been reduced to a sustainable level of perhaps 2 billion, preferably half a billion.
If we don't do that then just think of all the forest we'll need to convert to new farms to grow the food we need. Of the additional fish we'll [try] to catch, many species of which are already at critically overfished levels.[2] Of the increased pollution caused by the additional industry required in order to supply the increased demand of goods to the still growing population. Of the increase in atmospheric warming due to the ever growing carbon dioxide and methane produced not just by vehicles but by cows that worldwide increase the global temperature more than all the cars put together.[3] Don't think about what would happen if the vast quantities of methane under the oceans and in the permafrost is let loose...it's too scary.[4]
Also do you really want to live like sardines in a can? Check out this look into the future if you would like to explore that idea. You might be rich in this life and live in a nice spacious apartment or house (or you might not) but perhaps in the next incarnation you won't be so fortunate (existing sardines excluded). Neither will I. Don't believe in reincarnation? My friend, it is just one logical reason for you to exist. Nothing in this universe is random, everything came about due to certain laws of Creation/The Universe of which we know only a relative few.
