The argument is sound, but the name stinks! Who but a technically literate (OK, I really mean “geeky”) person, would even understand “pro-life*” – let alone know how to say it? So it’ll never catch on. Also, “pro-life” is a label chosen by groups not well-known for rational and balanced discussion. So giving your sound ideas and arguments a label that piggybacks on such a label, directly invites instant dismissal of your ideas and their proponents – both yourself and all your allies. Hardly wise, in my estimation. I think it better to distance myself from any possible association with irrationality or reactionary thinking.

I prefer to think in terms of the “creative surplus” – of useful production over useless consumption. If I eat a grown man’s food every day, and use that energy to create some goods or services of greater value to the world than the food I ate, I have a creative surplus. (It doesn’t happen every day! Nor even every year …) If I don’t, I must acknowledge that I’m a drain on the world’s resources – and that means on the resources available to a honeybee, a bacterium or a saltwater crocodile as much as to a human being. (You see, I really AM for all life!)

Of course, the accounting of such creative economics involves some serious value judgements; it’s far more than mere dollars and cents can measure; it’s more about what makes sense than what makes cents. But the important thing is this: that no matter how hard it is to make such an accounting, I do hold myself accountable.

And by the way, I hold you accountable, too . Not to me, but to the totality of this amazing experiment called “life”, wherever it may be found and whatever form it may take. Because the hallmark of living, as opposed to nonliving, things is that they are creative. They transform raw inputs into finished outputs, in the process increasing order and organisation, and decreasing entropy. Their outputs are also preferred by other living things to the raw inputs; in that sense, they’ve done somebody a good turn.

Creative living things do good for every other living thing. You might say, if you really want to use Latin tags, that they are PRO BONO PUBLICUM. Or even Pro Bono Universum!

Actually, I’d be happy to be considered even Pro Bono Bonobo … But perhaps PRO BONO VIVUM would do us for a label?

Another approach might highlight the urgency of the need for the best possible care and expert attention, using a suitable label such as LIFE SUPPORT.

“Truth alone triumphs” ~ motto of India ~ “Satyameva jayate” (Sanskrit).

Natural philosophers and scientists have been speaking out about what they somehow knew to be true for hundreds of years. We appear to be in a time and of a generation in which the whole truth, based upon the best available science, is rejected. With regard to the primary cause of certain converging global threats to life as we know it and the integrity of our planetary home, elective mutism orders the days of our lives. On what grounds is the rejection of what is somehow real to be justified?

On this good evening I trust my note finds all of you well.

In 2001 a peer-reviewed, lead article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, was published in the journal, ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT and SUSTAINABILITY. The scientists who wrote the paper are Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel.

During the last “lost” decade virtually every expert in the field of population biology and demography has assiduously ignored this new, apparently unanticipated and certainly unwelcome research.

Perhaps a new day is dawning when it is permissible to speak openly about “the last taboo”.

The willful denial of what could somehow be real usually results in dangerous matters being made even worse because any chance of responding ably to a challenge is spoiled by the absence of the science necessary for making sound judgments regarding the challenge.

Please consider that the science of human population dynamics is “the last of the last taboos” because the growth of the human population on Earth in our time is occurring on a scale so gigantic that humanity, life as we know it and the integrity of Earth is being threatened by the unbridled, skyrocketing increase of human mass.

Once the measure of this proverbial “mother” of all global challenges is taken, it will be possible for leaders of the human community to find ways of reasonably addressing and sensibly overcoming any threat to human wellbeing and environmental health that are based upon universally shared, humane values.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.countercurrents.org/salmony030510.htm
http://www.panearth.org/