> Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<some snippage>
>
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/22/EDGKO68MID1.DTL
>
> An excellent article by Nick Shulz and the
> co-founder
> of Green Peace on the failures of the environmental
> movement.
>
> My particular passion on this topic is easily
> explainable. Norman Borlaug has saved the lives of
> more people than _any other human being who has ever
> lived_. ... He did so by bringing the
> miracles of modern (largely American) agricultural
> technology to the Third World, particularly India.
> For this he won the Nobel Peace Prize, incidentally.
>
> For that, he has been largely reviled by most of the
> environmental movement, which generally believes
> that the world would have been better off if the
> countries
> of the Third World had been forced to "control their
> population" (by this they actually mean mass deaths
> through catastrophic famine, but hey, it was only a
> bunch of poor brown people, and Greenpeace and its
> cohort have never seemed to care at all about people
> like that)...
As a doctor, the notion of just allowing people to
starve to death is repulsive -- that's why groups like
The Heifer Project, who promote environmentally
sustainable economic growth on a tiny scale (helping
individual families with training and starter animals
like ducks, goats and cows etc.) are so worthy.
Lumping all environmentalists into the radical fringe
is incorrect and misleading.
And since I'm on a tear, I will not-so-tangentially
toss out that the idea of letting women control their
own fertility is apparently repulsive to some in this
administration. Yet when women have been educated on
the possibilities, and know that the children they do
have can be vaccinated etc. and so evade the cruel
mortality stats of less-developed countries, many
chose to limit the number of children on their own.
IIRC, there was a good study in India which
demonstrated this not too long ago (I'm remembering
reading it within the past couple of years, but in
fairness it could be only that that's when I read it,
not when it was published).
Debbi
The Dragon And The Tiger Maru
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
