A comment to a comment to "أسطورة التزايد السكاني وأبعاده البيئية"

An answer to a comment on Nisreen's post that, became a post of my own ;-)

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Hi Nisreen,

I fully agree with you with regards to nature’s control. Nature has always been the conscious of humanity; it always finds ways to remind us “who’s the boss”. It always helps us to find ways to re-harmonize with it.

I see the point you were trying to convey and I would fully agree with you if we were speaking about a sterilized world that is not infected by “modernism", or lets be more specified and say “The culture of stuff” – stuff that costs money, and we need to continuously replace and get more of it.

I don’t think that the woman working in the field and nursing her children is poor if she lives in a similar culture that does not worship consumption or washing machines. In order to define “poor”, “rich” and other similar definitions and categories, we must relate it to other dimensions like time and place.

The woman in china, working in the field and that never seen a washing machine or a LCD TV or internet, is not poor. If she can survive and raise her children to be as healthy as possible within her time and place limits, then I do not perceive her as poor, regardless how different her life could be compared to mine.

The same woman, if in Egypt living in the grave yard nursing her children while begging for money so she can buy them food because the restaurant threw all the leftovers to the dogs and cats (in best case) instead of giving it to her, then she is poor. If she has no water to drink, because no water pipes reach the grave yard or she cannot afford buying (paying by money or equal to money, or even paying with her body) a place that has water, or she cannot drink from the polluted Nile , then she is poor. If because of her poverty she cannot run away from her “home” when her husband, relative and/or her neighbor abuses and rapes her, and when she gets pregnant unwillingly and cannot do anything about it, then she is poor. If she is struggling for her life, for her survival, then most probably she will not be able to read and write – it doesn’t mean that she cannot - she has more urgent needs.

Although I believe, like you, that there is enough food for everyone in the world, we both know that there are people starving as well and they are...poor. We both know that we eat and consume more than many others in the world. Not everyone is getting his/her share from the nature’s resources. Some get more, some get less.

Everyone that survives has a chance to a decent life (what is decent? Compared to what?), but let’s count how many made it out of the slums and grave yards and such. Once you are born with less, it is very hard to get more. The “environment” saves the world, exactly like with the animals, the strong survives.

The equation has changed, and this uncontrollable population in "modernized cultures" that is built nowadays on consumption, cannot bring any good to ecology and it needs to be controlled else we are creating a monster, a disaster. Therefore population in consumers’ countries must be controlled.

As for nature, I trust that it will always find ways to balance itself, even if on the expense of humans. It could be a natural disaster and it could be a war. The irony is that the rich mess with the environment, and the environment punishes the “poor”.

Culture doesn’t have to be written to pass it from one to another, we can pass it by songs, by behavior and tradition that is remembered and practiced. Other than that during the centuries only the privileged ones could learn to read and write and those wrote books and papers and made sure that the knowledge is preserved. At those times, women were not even allowed to learn how to read and write, not even the rich ones, and there were always rich and poor people before the invention of capitalism, before the invention of money the way we know it. So it is not black and white. There is so much grey, but some grey is darker and some is lighter.

So many topics related to each other. The chain of life. The cycle of chain of life.

A video from the Copenhagen Climate Change Demonstration In December COP15.