From: gerhaush@aston.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 14:11:42 -0000Steve Morningthunder writes:Immigration allows the country losing population to ignore its own responsibility, and compounds the problem in the country receiving population, assuming that the latter is indeed seeking a sustainable economy, rather than the glitter of growth.
My reply: I don't accept the second point. It still seems to say that, if people happen to live an a poor nation, that's just bad luck for them.
Let me try again. When a country is exceeding its carrying capacity, which most are, the path toward sustainability is to achieve a manner of living that is below that threshold. Exporting people is a means of avoiding that responsibility, a means of continuing with inadequate cultural mechanisms to regulate birth. (or, consumption far beyond sufficiency in the case of other nations) Population migration is one thing when the receiving nation or geographical region is at less than carrying capacity, but neither the US nor the European countries are such nations. The case can be made that among those favored with excess capacity are Canada, and New Zealand.
The world as a whole has quite exceeded its carrying capacity through dependence upon phantom acreage, at least according to Wackernagel and Rees in their studies of ecological footprints. The extension of global trade which extracts every bit of available carrying capacity, the movement of peoples to take advantage of perceived opportunities, drives the system toward unity, in which the resilience of separate cultures, ecosystems, and methods of government are overridden. Globalization is thus one of the risk of ecological system collapse as well as of markets.
Any country that labors to become truly sustainable, serves futilely as an example to the world if other countries do not follow suit, but instead see to the migration of their over-population into that sustainable region. The US is no longer the New World that once beckoned with new lands for the taking.
The simplicity of the above perspective depends upon understanding that the present mechanism of world trade is not one that can be considered ecologically fair, because of the valuation of currencies. Countries can now gather disproportionate wealth through trade because the emergy content of each national production is not factored in the currency exchange rate. For example, "Environmental Accounting" by H.T. Odum states that Japan receives 8 times its emergy cost in its transactions with resource supplying countries, the US 4 times. pg. 210.
The problem is getting under the declining curve of global carrying capacity. The present effort is still one of a growing upward curve of growth that has or must intersect with carrying capacity. Part of the solution would be a fairer trade between nations no longer based upon a zero value for the environment. And, part of the solution is to realize that global sustainability implies each bioregion, or country, trending towards its own sustainability, bearing its proper portion of responsibility, even when that means willfully reducing its population or consumption.
How that is going to come about without the presence of "Gort" from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" remains to be found.
--
A wall of infinite dimension stands before the present course of human evolution.
It is the wise finitude of the earth and its resources.
Steve Morningthunder
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