The challenging part of being a parent is setting boundaries for your children. As parents, we know, giving your child everything they think they want is NOT in their best interest. Or ours. We would raise a generation of “entitlement”- I want, therefore I should have. The real world has limits. The real world has consequences. The real world (physics) does not care. What does that translate into?
Re-Localizing Quality Foods
The simply way to illustrate this is using food, something we all relate to. Given the choice between fresh cookies hot out of the oven most of us would choose to eat one (or one dozen) instead of broccoli. And that’s OK… unless you make it your lifestyle. We recognize that our body can not sustain itself on junk food. Luckily our body will, looking at those cookies at some point, say ENOUGH. I need some real food.
OK. Let’s extrapolate that out to some areas that are not as clearly seen and the internal limits not as explicit.
Historical Constraints
Historically population growth was constrained by disease, food availability, and war (kill off the young men). We lived in a world bound by certain constraints. If you could not grow enough food, or have something to trade for food, you starved. If you did not eat well enough, you were more susceptible to disease and would die off. If you had “resources” that others wanted they would come to take yours (war). I.e. If they did not have enough food or resources, your’s was up for grabs. Pretty basic raw life, for most of history. We’ll just move in and take over someone else’s stuff (land, food, gold, timber, you name it).
To some degree there was a rough check and balance system, by nature, in play. Too many people? Some will die (starvation, disease, war).
Technological Trap
What happens in today’s world. Because of our technological increased capacity to feed the “world” (in varying degrees, but still, compared to history) our population numbers have exploded past the carrying capacity of many countries. It’s called OVERSHOOT.
Overshoot… you are consuming more than is being produced. Your waste products are not being broken down fast enough to prevent toxic buildups. You are consuming the very things you need to provide your future.
The answer, in the past, has always been to move to fresh territory. Take it and use it, regardless as to who was there originally; in human terms “might” trumps all. Your tribe (family, clan, tribe, country, race, etc) comes first. Everyone else becomes the “enemy” and it translates to “OK to take from”.
Reality Is A B.I.T.C.H.
We have now reached the end of that storyline. Out of room, no new territory to take, used up, spent, killed off what was there… what does the future bring?
It brings us face to face with the constraints of reality. Unless, of course, you want to continue the ‘head in the sand game’ that has been played for the last 100 years. As adults we must face the real world and start thinking as adults and not as “entitlement children” who think the hard&fast real world is subject to our wants.
I have little hope that this will happen because we seldom want to give up what we have at present; letting go and moving to a simpler life that respects the limits. We need to treat our land as a valuable resource to be nurtured and preserved.
That’s where the Britxit comes into this picture. It’s a country where the common people have said, enough is enough. We have too many people to take care of as it is. It’s the same theme you hear in the USA about illegal immigrants, etc.
A simplistic way to look at this situation is: Should your children starve so that others do not? When you limit your childbearing to provide for the children you have, does that mean that others can come and have as many children as they “have the right to”? and you pay the bill? (i.e. you give up conserving resources, living within your ecological footprint?)
Those questions are tough ones to face. 
We either face them & deal with them or endure the consequences long term.
Seriously, each country needs to be able to provide the basic needs for their own population. Develop a society that sustains itself. Relocalize your food supports.
56 Countries can NOT feed their population without importing food; many of those countries do not have resources to trade for food… and yet their populations are expanding.
When we took the technological steps to develop medicines we removed a constraint that in one sense of the word, kept things in a ecological balance (a rather raw brutal balance). If we choose to remove a constraint then I believe we also need to exercise a balancing technological constraint by utilizing birth control. (I’ve always said that providing food aid needs to include providing birth control as well.) It’s a part of living within nature; not abusing it.
Immigration Policies
This is NOT going to be a popular policy but we must rebalance or nature will do it for us.
If you don’t allow immigrants then you figure out how to live without their “slave labor”. If you can’t fill the job, then the the cost /value will go up until someone will, or learn how to do without.
Moving to another country is another example of using up all the resources in one area and moving to another, to utilize the resources that are there.
Immigrants, refugees are part of that pattern. It sounds cold blooded and harsh to say it, but shifting the problem elsewhere is not a solution. It’s a temporary fix that will result in the same outcome, UNLESS we constrain our population base.
Right or wrong, christian or not, fair or not, it is a reality that must be dealt with or nature will take care of it in her own way. And it ain’t a pretty way….
The proverbial Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Disease, Starvation, & War.
2016 – we are at 7.5 billion
Ruminations 