Race, Culture and Nation

THE LOCAL WORLD

PART VIII

by Geoffrey Dobbs

The Ozone Hole(s)

We must not forget the Greenhouse Effect's Twin Terror, the Great Polar Ozone Holes. Here the anxiety mobpsyche to which we are all being subjected goes along these lines: Scientists have discovered a huge hole in Earth's fragile screen of ozone over the Antarctic, and another is threatening over the Arctic regions. These let through deadly, cancer-forming ultra-violet (uv) radiation. Just 1% depletion of the ozone layer would cause 70,000 more cases of skin cancer; and it severely damages plants too.

The effect could be disastrous to the whole world's ecology! The culprit chemicals have now been identified as the gases in our spray-cans, refrigerators and some foam packaging, called CFC's (chlorofluorocarbon.s). This is a global problem which can be solved only by global action. International agreement has been reached in principle for limiting and finally banning CFC's in favour of ozone-friendly spray and refrigerant gases, and some major chemical firms have started to produce such substitutes, but the pace is far too slow and Britain lags behind. Use only goods containing ozone-friendly gases!

As with the Greenhouse Effect, the propaganda does not tell us whether these 'holes' are regular annual natural phenomena. We are left to assume it is due to human activities. A bit of enquiry reveals that one Sir Gordon Dobson and his colleagues observed the regular springtime depletion of the ozone over the Antarctic as long ago as 1956, long before CFC's were in general use, and described it is an interesting natural phenomenon.
He also noticed similar variations at Spitzbergen (Svalbard) in the North polar region, and explained some of the wide variations in ozone level from season to season and even day to day in his book Exploring the Atmosphere. Why then are we told that this discovery dates from 1982, or sometimes 1985?

An article by John Gribbin in the New Scientist 5th May, 1988 explains that scientists of the British Antarctic Survey at Halley Bay had been observing ozone levels above that spot since the 1950's but had not notified anyhting like the pattern that unfolded there in 1982, and since.

How Not a Polar Ozone Hole ?

A later note in the New Scientist (27 October 1990) explains that the intense cold in the Antarctic winter sets up swirling polar winds in the stratosphere and stratospheric clouds which can somewhat isolate the region. Since ozone is formed under the influence of uv sunlight (as well as broken down by it, in a continuous cycle) and the polar regions get no sunlight during the winter months, no new ozone can then be formed there, so how can there not be an ozone deficiency there in the spring?

The instrument used (the Dobson spectrophotometer) analyses the spectrum of sunlight for ozone lines above the site. If uv light (as we are told) acts by splitting the oxygen molecule (O) into atoms (0 + 0) which then turn other 02 molecules into 03 (ozone), how comes it that any uv reaches the earth's surface at all, since the denser bulk of the air's oxygen lies below the much more tenuous stratosphere?
This is merely where sunlight first impacts on oxygen diffusing up from photosynthesizers on the surface (though precious little from the Antarctic land mass). The strongest uv falls on the equatorial zone where sunlight is most direct, and hence most O3 must be synthesized there and some of it must move thence to the temperate and polar zones.
It is difficult to see how a regular post-winter deficiency at the regions of least or nil synthesis both of 03 and 02 can be a 'disaster.' There may be a simple explanation why it is thought so, but if so why is it not given?

This common habit of inflicting propositions on the public which, as presented, are contradictory nonsense (even if they are not) and then falling back on "trust the experts!" immediately arouses suspicion that we are again being sold some current speculative model as fact. Once it gets out of the laboratory into a conference and thence into the media it becomes an unchallengeable myth by sheer continual jabberation and journalism.

In recent years since the public has been hi-jacked into the fridge-freezer/supermarket lifestyle, CFCs, as we are told to call them, have become major industrial products in the billion £ class. Naturally there has been much work on their chemistry. Inertness was a property required for their function, and their action in the stratosphere would scarcely have been considered until the first alarm about the ozone layer came in 1971 with Concorde and the plans for large numbers of supersonic transport (SST's) flying in the istratosphere.
The concern here was about nitrogen oxides, which from traffic exhausts with solar uv at ground level can synthesize ozone, from aircraft in'the stratosphere, destroy it.

CFC's and Chlorine

So what about CFC's which (they reckon) are inert until they get the full blast of solar radiation in the stratosphere and then break up liberating chlorine monoxide (C10) which in turn can turn the 03 back into 02. Up to 1982 it was all speculative computer models based on the chemistry of CFC's ; but then, suddenly, and quite unpredicted by the models, WHAM! the normal spring reduction becomes the Great Ozone Hole over'the Antarctic and has occurred every spring since.
In 1987 instruments aboard a high-flying U2 spy plan (modified to spy on the stratosphere) caught 'the suspect molecule (C10) "red-handed," and since then satellites have been brought into action, also stratosphere balloons and whatnot. So there we are! or are we? It fits the revised model. The reaction they were looking for is one of those which may occur, and chlorine is identified as one culprit.

So are CFC's the only source of atmospheric chlorine? By no means. Volcanoes alone pour out a vast amount of chlorine (and much else) into the atmosphere and it seems very unlikely that none of it gets into the stratosphere. There is also an immense amount of chlorine in the sea which is whipped up by winds into the atmosphere, and much also is released by forest fires and by chloromethane from rotting vegetation, a phenomenon of great but unknown magnitude.
There is a chlorine cycle of continuous transfer from land to sea to air and back again, also a fluorine cycle. All the halogens are capable of acting in a similar manner to chlorine.

Then there are any number of other influences, the nitrogen oxides, water vapour, clouds, dust, then the greenhouse gases including ozone itself and CFC's, as well as CO2, methane, and many others, mostly of natural origin, some of human (oil and coal burning, aircraft, H-bomb tests, chemical works). Those which trap heat in the lower air cool the stratosphere and reduce the rate of ozone depletiuon, while those which deplete the ozone allow more heat to escape so reducing the Greenhouse Effect. The two effects are antithetic, as are many others in an almost infinitely complex situation, and the planet is more likely to find a balance than we are.

The enquirer finds that the Antarctic, with its isolating winds, its lowest winter temperatures and its stratospheric clouds which evaporate only in the spring, is a special case with a special chemistry of its own. Why must we be scared about its special Ozone Hole observed in and since 1982; especially when we are not told that about the same time the Antarctic volcano, Mount Erebus, started erupting; and the Sun entered on one of its more active phases?

In the North where most CFC's but also most other air pollutants arise, there is the pack ice, the Greenland and smaller ice-caps, the permafrost, and Iceland's volcanoes also to consider; and then the rate and routes of air circulation round the planet.

What Scale compared to Other Effects ?

What we who are being subjected to all this alarm want to know, as with the Greenhouse Effect, is the scale of the CFC effect on the Ozone Layer (if it occurs there, and it is safer to assume that it does) in proportion to other natural, and human, effects, both positive and negative. And that, the propagandists cannot tell us because they don't know; though it gives a feeling of power to make a big scare of it.

No one seems to notice that what we are to be scared about is not, in itself, the ozone holes, but their theoretical consequences: more damaging uv radiation at ground level. With these frightful gaps in the ozone, are we getting more of these terrible rays, are they damaging the crops and threatening us all with skin cancer? If so, where is the evidence? At present, crop surpluses are a problem in Europe. With more CO2 and warming they would grow faster, so again, the effect of more uv would be counteractive.

But we are not told that there is any actual increase in uv radiation. Its intensity varies by as much as sevenfold between the Arctic and the tropics, not to mention at different altitudes and from place to place and hour to hour; also it is absorbed by many other substances besides ozone, and this is a range to which the human race has long been accustomed. The only record I have come across, quoted by an Australian writer, David Thompson, from a study by
J. Scotto in Science (USA 12 February 1988) showed a steady decrease in uv reaching ground level in all of 8 monitoring stations between 1974 and 1985. Elsewhere it may be different, but there is no hint of a general increase.

So what about skin-cancer? Is there more of it, unrelated to foolish exposure fashions? Cancer, indeed, is a No. 1 mob-groveller word for terrifying people into submitting to an extension of remote control. It would never do to mention that skin-cancer is the least dangerous form of cancer since it is superficial and can be treated early; still less that it requires prolonged and excessive exposure to uv light; that at levels of exposure which many northerners do not get, more uv is needed for the formation of vitamin D; or that, to quote James Lovelock: "It takes almost no clothing to stop ultra-violet radiation." Also that the skin, if exposed sensibly, protects itself by the formation of melanin, temporarily in pale-skinned people, permamently in the dark-skinned people who mainly live nearer to
the equator, where the radiation is strongest.

To raise a world-wide scare about CFC's by selecting a single item from a tremendously complex situation is a political or commercial, rather than a scientific ploy. Nowadays all gas-containing products, such as fire-extinguishing propellants, have to be described as 'ozone- friendly.' All that means is that they don't contain CFC. One of them, recently, was found to contain a bromine compound even worse as an ozone depleter than a chlorine compound such as CFC. So what are we supposed to believe?

Very Big Business Indeed

One thing is abundantly clear: CFC's are very big business, and their replacement will be even bigger business. David Thompson, and Oliver Tickell (the latter in the New Scientist, 20 October, 1990) have looked into the programmes of the big producers of CFC's, notably du Pont, and more recently ICI, which are both heavily involved
in the production of substitutes. These substitutes are fluorocarbons of the same nature as CFC's containing fluorine (HFC's) or fluorine and chlorine (HCFC's) which are expected to break down below the stratosphere with unknown effects on the lower air, possibly very toxic in the case of HFC's; but of course their production will use masses
of energy and materials, and employ many people and pay these wages, and the companies' profits. All this is now in progress following the international Agreement. What assurance have we that it will not simply add to the pollution problem?

Since these gases have to be stable and inert to carry out their function as heat-exchangers but are said to become harmful when released into the air, obviously, they should not be released, but collected and recycled. But, as with all recycyling, that will mean more trouble and expense, be less profitable in both wages and dividends, or even loss-making and non-credit-worthy, so long as we live in this one-way street of debt, inflation and any-work-for-money.

'Please note that I write about what I experience. I do not experience the ozone layer. I experience a lot of assertions about it designed to alarm me and my fellow citizens, to induce us to buy advertised 'ozone-friendly' products or feel guilty about not doing so (about which we have little choice) and perhaps support taxes or government agreements about CFC's or other industrial products.

I still try to retain an open mind on this subject and not to reject the whole thing as a total hoax. All that we ordinary people have to judge it by is propaganda presenting selected speculations as facts. But whether or not there is a scrap of truth in it, it is certainly being exploited as a means of fear-pressure leading to more remote manipulation of our lives.

The Local World

Part IX

by Geoffrey Dobbs

'The Population Pest'

The Green Movement which I respect and in which I believe that I take part has a definite policy based upon its beliefs. These include decentralisation of power to the individual and to those groupings which are small enough to take actions agreed by their members: (democracy, small is beautiful) and the love, not merely of the Earth or its biosphere in a vague, verbal way, but of the multiplicity and variety of living beings which constitute our planetary home, not excluding our own species and its members.

Even in the simplest and most scientific sense in which the Gaia hypothesis may be taken, it is clear that the subtlety and efficiency of the feedback mechanisms which maintain a viable biospheric condition must depend upon the variety of organisms present. If one may stretch the point to an analogy with the human brain - the intricacy and
multiplicity of the relationships and interchanges between these organisms might be compared with the activity of the neurones in the brain which are associated in some way unknown to us with that property we call 'intelligence.'

If we go no further than to think about the world of the bacteria and viruses, with their continual interchange of DNA, we are confronted with something vastly beyond our poor old, much vaunted, 'grey matter,' complex as it is. Add the whole kingdoms of the fungi, plants and animals, and where are we? I suggest, reduced simply to a state
of awe and humility!

The analogy must not be pressed too far - to the point of describing the Earth as 'intelligent,' a patronising view. That awesome complexity of interchanges must generate some property different from, but well beyond, our intelligence, which is merely a small contribution to it, positive or negative. Most positive and greatest, I suggest, when exercised everywhere by the maximum number of men in close contact and co-operation with the environment in which they live; most negative and destructive when exercised by a handful of men remote from such contact, whose domination over the rest supplants their freedom to bring their intelligence to bear locally, where alone it can be applied to actuality.

The idea that a few remote central 'brains,' be they never so superior in cleverness and knowledge to those of the rest of us, can direct the mass of mankind in their relationship with the earth, is a delusion which is leading, and can only lead, to disaster. The intelligence of everyone is needed, of the stupid, the average, as well as the talented. There are inumerabie sorts of intelligence, and the village 'idiot' with his 'way' with animals, may be the superior, in that
respect, to the Nobel Prize winner. Intelligence has quantity, as well as variety, and the thin, strangling wire of some imposed think-tank of experts suppresses both.

The 'global' idea that 'Man' must now take over the direction of the planet, especially as it usually means that the bosses of mankind should continue to apply their bossy ideas to it on a global scale (whether or not they are called 'conservation') is the recipe for maximum disaster, as it has been hitherto for the monstrous damage they have achieved so far.

But that we humans with our peculiar form of consciousness and intelligence have something valuable to offer wherever we live is manifest in such examples as the best of the English countryside before it has been mangled by the money-culture. There we see the product of generations of human intelligences and skills of all sorts applied to the land and the landscape with loving familiarity as to the detail in every field and locality.

Mutualism - the Practice of Creative Love

For intelligence is but a mechanism, a tool. It needs the creative force we call 'love,' both to power and to guide it to make it constructive; otherwise it is like any machine running loose : destructive. But this creative force is not vague, or general, or abstract. It can act only specifically, in detail. We owe much to Lynn Margulis for showing us that the positive factor in what biologists now call 'evolution' but was for centuries before called 'creation,' is mutualism, fitting in together to mutual benefit, in some cases to the point of symbiosis, actual physical incorporation : and what is that but the practical expression of what in common as well as in religious parlance is called 'love'?

Who knows for how many generations we human beings have had some glimpse of a world beyond that which meets our senses, a world which requires wonder and worship ? At first we saw it only beyond our neighbours : the streams, the trees, the gretaer beasts, the rocks, the mountains, the winds, the sea, the Moon, the Sun and the Earth itself which bears us and the Sky and the stars which arch over us. It is but a flash of geological time since the idea became general that not only we but all these must be the fellow-creatures with us of a Creator who must comprise infinitely more than we are ourselves, including our much-vaunted 'personalities.'

It is an even more miniscule time-flash since men such as Darwin looked in greater detail at the Creation and gathered some crude and partial ideas about how it worked, namely by 'random' changes and elimination of those that could not survive. Hence they substituted the word 'evolution' for 'creation,' eliminated the Creator, so that they could look downwards at a random and automatic process of which they were the Summit, the Top Beings, in effect, the Gods, and all else must be 'inferior' and subject to their will and manipulation.

Not, of course, that I am denying the immense importance of what is called 'natural selection.' How otherwise could Love work if mutuality were totally swamped with the non-viable? It is merely the reverse side of the same coin. This blindness through intellectual pride which can see nothing there but a witless, loveless, sub-human, sub-personal process, is an aberration of the human mind and spirit which has come to dominate the world-wide network of centrally disseminated human thought very recently indeed; but even so, for long enough to cause vast miseries and disasters.

Do We look Up, or Down ?

As I look at to-day's Green Movement I see this confrontation within it, between those who look upward to the Creator and those who look downwards at a man-manipulable Process. The former apply themselves to the reality, which has no existence without detail of time. place and quality. The latter seek to apply at a distance abstractions of their own brains which, even when they take the form of useful generalisations, cannot but ignore and destroy those details which make life. And as I look I see that this confiict is throwing the Movement into confusion and depriving it of most of its effectiveness.

Therefore I feel it necessary to deal, so far as I can, with certain policies, openly declared by leaders of the Green Movement, which seem to me totally opposed to, and contrary to those beliefs which are the core and driving force of that Movement in which I deem myself a participant.

If there is one thing on which pundits, whether green, red or true blue are all agreed it is that 'we' must control the population. Just who 'we' is can be guessed only from some knowledge of the pundit, but it always seems to include governments, and the opinion-forming class of publicist to which the pundit in question belongs.

About 50 years ago their cry was for governments to do something desperate to stem the falling birthrate. It was no use arguing with the statistics (as I did, in ink). In March 1944 a Government Commission on Population was set up to consider the trend (towards depopulation) and what should be done about it. The Net Reproduction Rate
(births over deaths) had been falling continuously ever since the 1870's both in Britain and all over Europe (except during the 1940's War years).

Woe ! Woe ! You can't argue with Statistics !

In a 50 page booklet published for the British Social Hygiene Council in 1945 the Anticipated Population for England and Wales was estimated to fall from the then 41 million to 31 million by 1975 and by 2035 to 4 and a half million. A less alarming estimate by D. V. Glass was a fall to 33 million by 1990, and 301 million by 2000. (It is now over 50 million). Anyway, doom was upon us unless 'we' could somehow stimulate a large increase in the birth-rate.
To quote the booklet: " Unless. therefore, the situation is drastically changed we are well on the way to race suicide." This, moreover, was the general view among the opinionated classes. Among titles of books given as references were: The Economics of a Declining Population; The Menace of British Depopulation: Race Suicide. Woe! Woe! It was all inevitable. You can't argue with statistics!

Then, following the terrible Bang of the Atom Bombs, and subsequent H-Bomb tests, came a generation that cowered under the Nuclear Doom. Woe! Woe! it was no use arguing. It was inevitable! inevitable! Statistics showed that 'we' had a capacity to destroy the Earth X times over, and some time it was bound to be used. The Science Fictionists took it up in a big way. Perhaps a few two-headed pith-brained mutants might survive on an almost sterile Earth, or more likely the human race would be replaced by another species. Anyway, even more appalling depopulation was the Doom!

When, after thirty years or so this began to weaken a bit (though it is still there) came the Great Population Explosion, the Eco-doom of the planet, with the pullulating Pest of Mankind multiplying fast on the inevitably non-viable nuclear-sterilized globe until we all die of starvation. Either way or both, it will get you! You can't argue
with statistics! Grovel, you pestilential undermen. You shouldn't be here. Eliminate yourselves!

Perhaps that puts it a little crudely, but indeed it is no joke; and it is sad to see those who are trying to live and to promote a closer understanding and co-operation with nature falling for such wholly un-natural propaganda.

To begin with - statistics is something remote from nature, wholly political in its origin. I wonder how many of our modern statisticians are even dimly aware that 'statistics' arose out of 'Statism.' I quote from the O.E.D., Sir J. Sinclair, 1798: "In 1786, I found, that in Germany they were engaged in a species of political inquiry, to which
they had given the name Statistics." 1786 was the year of the death of Frederick II of Prussia, known as The Great, who was notably skilled in the sort of statistics known as logistics, concerned with the numbers, arms, moving, lodging and supplying of troops in war.

Later, the term was applied to the collection of numerical data, to the data so collected, and to data on any subject analogous to those concerning the powers of the State, and nowadays it means quantitative data affected by a multiplicity of causes beyond the reach of simple observation as to cause. Hence the practice of statistics today is mainly a form of numerical speculation, based upon mathematical theory which is understood only by a few pure mathematicians, and very rarely indeed by those who quote and use statistics. Nowadays reliance on the computer puts the whole thing into the field of blind faith in magic for ordinary people. This may seem a long way from Frederick the Great and his armies, but it amuses me to see that modern statistical population ecologists are fond of using military terms such as logistics, strategy and tactics.

The Politics of People as Units

The one thing we can all understand about statistics is that it is entirely based upon a whole series of assumptions which are very rarely stated and may or may not be true. The first assumption in all numbering is that we are dealing with units, equal and identical in nature. If we are not, the numbers are meaningless to the extent that there are qualitative differences, except as a means of handling the material as if it consists of units. We can see where this is leading as it is applied to people.

Statistical treatment of people is a form of politics which increasingly requires them to be equal and identical in nature, behaviour, race, sex, ability, belief, everything, so that they can be handled in bulk by remote control. But since we are not so, the whole tendency is to disparage the differences which make us ourselves, to deplore and
discourage discrimination (the very essence of civilisation and the aim of all real education) and to merge us as far as possible into statisticable masses in which those differences are lost.

What is so dreadful to see is that this anti-nature, anti-life, anti-human attitude is being swallowed whole by all the most vocal, scribal and publicised leaders of the Green Movement; though it is scarcelysurprising or blameworthy for the younger ones since their generation has been subjected to the most continuous, repetitive, unrelenting, mechanical, brain-battering on this and related subjects in the history of mankind.

It was in 1970 that I found myself, after disagreeing for years with those who wanted governments to interfere to raise people's reproduction rate with breeding-bribes, in a minority of 1 in a room full of 80 ecologists who wanted even more passionately to interfere in the opposite direction. The immediate cause seems to have been Dr. Paul R.
Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb first published in 1968 but running through numerous reprintings since. He was a population biologist at Stanford University; that is, he dealt with living things as units, and obviously took his statistics with deadly seriousness.

'The Population Bomb'

The book is an emotionally effective, passionate blare of fear-propaganda. On the cover of my copy (which I bought while at Stanford, though I did not meet him) are these words in red: "While you are reading these words five people, mostly children, have died of starvation - and forty more babies have been born."

There are no world statistics of 'death from starvation,' so this is no more than propagandist 'blah' ; nor can the statistics of births and deaths in much of the Third World be relied upon; nor yet have the numbers of child deaths from one alleged cause any significant relationship to total births in the same time (say 10 seconds). Such a specious approach throws doubt on the whole numerical basis of the alleged population 'explosion.'

This is not statistics but politics - the manipulation of people under cover of academic prestige-an all too prominent feature of our times. Anyone can make propaganda with any figures they like, and it is very doubtful whether statistics has ever been used honestly in politics its function is quite different.

In his prologue Dr. Ehrlich writes:
"Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." Nor is this attitude unique; it appears to be gaining ground, especially following the periodic disasters in Africa and Bangladesh: voices are now raised saying that aid should be stopped; it only helps people to survive and breed. Birth, not death, is the problem! This is the language of inhuman dictatorship, of statistical imperialism, and it is borne out by Ehrlich's book and much that has followed it. As always, freedom is to be surrendered in the face of crisis, and to the very powers who, very largely, brought about the crisis.

He terrifies us with a series of speculative doubling-times for populations of the world, and of different countries, and then goes on to a fantasy of the entire planet covered layers deep with humanity. An analogy is made with cancer (a favourite word, too, of Julian Huxley's for the human race) and we are told:
"The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.'

Suicide for Fear of Dying

The main argument seems to be that if governments, starting with that of the USA, but then moving on to the UN and ultimately a World Government, do not take these 'brutal' decisions (e.g. population control as the price of food aid), nature will apply the solution in the form of death.

Well, of course ! Death is, and always has been, the natural control of life's tendency to outgrow its limits. So, shall we not be allowed birth because we have to die? In small, fairly homogeneous, communities in close touch with nature, a practical and inherited culture grows up which has come to terms with both birth and death and has developed the knowledge, the wisdom and the social customs which usually avoid the worst catastrophes; though even here there must always be natural catastrophes which cannot be avoided: earthquakes, eruptions, storms, hurricanes, cyclones, floods and droughts.

But so long as Man retains his adventurous nature, without which the race would long ago have died out, he will take risks and face death as well as taking sensible precautions against these known dangers, such as storing food against the next drought. But how can people save food or anything else when they are in debt, which is an imposed
robbery of future work and wealth?

To be sure, Ehrlich's predicted famines are now taking place, especially in Africa. The severe droughts are blamed, but these famines have been vastly increased by the crippling impact of external powers. Most of Africa's debt is unrepayable and extracts a net transfer of resources towards the 'developed' world, whose World Bank and IMF impose conditions which benefit the central politicians who oppress the people. Many African currencies are now effectively worthless, and the 'collapse' of commodity prices in the 1980's meant a gross deterioration in the terms of trade.

Add to all this, bitter warfare armed from abroad and flogged up by foreign ideologues in Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Angola, Liberia, Uganda, Chad, driving people off the land as refugees. It becomes a mad idea that what Africans need is more foreign control of their breeding habits because there are too many people for what foreign interference has left to them, even with an AIDS epidemic which threatens depopulation by attacking the sexually, and therefore productively, active.

Debt-driven Disaster

Africa may be the worst case, but the same centralised power is operating throughout the world and with similar effects, in South America, in Asia and Polynesia. In the 'developed' world, mainly in the Northern hemisphere with its offshoots in the South, the effect is at present different: the gross multiplication of a 'wealth' much of which is non-wealth, thrust upon the people by ever more remote powers, with ever greater waste and pollution of the Earth's resources and energies.
The fuel which drives this disaster-machine is always debt, with its inbuilt inflation and demand for constant 'growth' to provide money-incomes for the people. Debt-money has the same inhumanity as other forms of statistics.

The predictions of disaster so long as this world-wide despotism persists and grows in power, are logical enough. The remedy which prominent ecologists have been persuaded to promote is the precise opposite of what is needed. They have everything upside-down. It is global interference that brings global catastrophes. The biosphere is not an homogenous mass, nor is Man an homogenous species of manipulable units, but 'both possess infinite variety, and their mutualism is intrinsically local. Only in so far as that exists can a global co-operation be restored.

These self-styled 'ecologists' seem to be obsessed with the idea of Man as the cancer or pest of the planet, of humanity as the only species which (unless centrally forced by governments under pressure from themselves) lacks any capacity to adapt its population to its environment. Every new birth is 'another mouth to be fed.' Who by? By 'WE,' by the super-clever, power-wielding, opinion-forming, status-holding, statistical-symbol-worshipping boss-persons who know best what is needed. On no account must a new life be thought of as a positive, which might even feed itself and more, if given a chance before its native land is detroyed. It must always be a negative - a burden. Are these the sort of no-hopers whose ideas we can afford to follow?

Birth as a Burden on Bosses

The Population Bomb contains the spores of most of the corruptions into which, not only the Green Movement, but Western Society in general, has further descended during the two decades since it was first published; the orientation towards the 'rationality' of the intellectual as the guiding force to be centrally imposed upon the 'population,' handled as a mass of identical units; the merging of differences, the 'logical' aim of controlling life and, if possible, slowing the postponment of death so as to stabilise the population at a boss-calculated comfortable number : 'it would be nice to get it down to I billion, but too much to hope!'.

The reproductive function of sex must be de-emphasised and the failing sway of sexual repression welcomed, also the 'liberation' of women from motherhood into the power-struggle of the world of money and politics. Equality, contraceptives and abortion are the great goods which are looked to to rid us from the horrors of divorce, illegal abor-
tion, venereal disease and the psychological pressures of a repressed society! The fact that all these have shockingly increased as these 'remedies' have been applied, is not likely to influence a 'rational' opinion, based upon ratiocination with little contact outside the verbal/numerical/cerebral roundabout. Notoriously, it is invulnerable to facts.

Of course, traditional Christianity is blamed for most of to-day's evils, including the arrogant domination of nature. This in fact came in with the Enlightenment and the abandonment of the idea of a Creative God above us, whose incarnation on Earth sanctified all nature, for that of a witless, impersonal process below us, culminating in Man, the Boss of all, so that unlimited power must lie with the Rulers of Mankind. It is only since Science has followed this path that it has become the slave of money and politics and has increasingly explored the means of destruction and pollution.

Hence also the inversion of the whole Christian policy towards life : the idea of 'courage' and 'nobility' in inflicting suffering on others as the sole means of salvation; the cults of death versus birth, of sterility, contra-conception, abortion, homosexuality, of divorce, of anti-marriage, of one-parent, fatherless 'families,' of casual body-fluid-mixing
'sex' divorced from reproduction, of drugs and of every form of corruption which will reduce the natural, settled family and bearing and bringing up of the young. The AIDS epidemic is indeed a gift from the intellectual class of writers and broadcasters and 'opinion-formers' who have promoted these attitudes for several generations: a natural
expression of their religion. But of all these the greatest offence against nature is the ever more remote control of ever-growing tonnages of bulked humanity, with its constant interference with detail of the lives of its members.

Pesticides for People

It is this dominant religion of centralising power which naturally sees humanly as a 'cancer' or a 'pest' of the planet, and the growth of population due to the recent lengthening of life, as a threat to the comfortable existence of the self-appointed elite This is implicit in the inversion of the order: there are too many people for the 'supplies' 'we' must provide to keep them alive. It is a one-way street. 'We' have calculated that death-rates are 'bound to fall and birth-rates rise until global disaster intervenes unless 'we' intervene to supply the required 'disaster' by applying the necessary pesticides to the human pest.

The only difference from the sort of chemical and biological treatment of non-human pests deplored by the Green Movement, is that bulk-psychological treatment is available through the 'media' so that the pesticides are self-adminisered; with a 'social' effect, much as social insects drag pesticides into the nest The method of course is to interfere with the life-cycle of the pest with chemicals produced by the major chemical corporations. Contraceptives, especially 'the pill' are just that, and by encouraging promiscuous intercourse, also help to spread pesticidal diseases. The condom, government-promoted as 'safe' (but in fact far from it) helps to overcome the fear barrier.
The use of human males sterilised by vasectomy was urged by Ehrlich in his book and its futile attempted application by compulsion in India is now history. This use of sterile males is copied from its common application to insect pests.

Have the Greens learnt nothing from the history of pest control? What they are doing is replacing natural selection with un-natural selection. Why is it not obvious to them that the result will be the opposite of that supposed? They are selecting the most resistant and rapid-breeding strains to increase the population, as well as those which at present are 'beyond the reach, psychologically or physically, of their pesticidal efforts.

Incidentally, they are working for the differential reduction of what they deem to be intelligent and educated, especially themselves, and their replacement by the illiterate, the uncivilised and the philo-progenitive. This might solve the problem in the end by removing the interfering clever-guys and their more gillible victims, but it will take a long time, and agreta sacrifice of that part of our cultural inheritance which has not been corrupted. Indeed, thye may be on the way to justifyimng the mfears of depopulation of the native Europeans voiced in the 1940's. Floods, earthquakes and hurricanes are at least non-selective.

The Artificial Monster

All this is by no means an attempt to deny the insane and abominable overcrowding of humanity which is prevalent in all the great conurbations scattered all over the planet; in which huge tonnages of manflesh are artificially concentrated, sucking people, water and nutrient out of the land, and pouring forth what is not used to make further
tons of human matter, as pollution of the rivers, the sea and the soil. This is not 'overpopulation' but overcentralisation. Cities, indeed, are a natural, historical development; the regional centres of religion, of government, of commerce, industry and the arts, of education and culture; in a word, of civilisation, as the word implies. But there is an optimum to their size beyond which they become monstrous power-centres; parasites bleeding the earth itself of more than it can sustain, and spreading their greedy tentacles in a network over the planet.

There are indeed cities and conurbations which, or parts of which, are partially self-supporting, which contain not only green patches, parks and woodlands, but gardens, allotments, even city farms; and this is where the genuine Green Movement has done noble work in recent years. But whether we are thinking of the crowds sleeping and
dying in the streets of Calcutta, or the towering vertical hutches that house people in Manhattan and its imitators all over the world, and the daily floods of human matter that pour in and pour out of every great city from the whole region around, we are up against an artificial monster which is now beyond any human control but which bears the
seeds of its own decline, if not destruction.

The usual mental technique for evading the facts is to invent some abstractions and blame everything on them. The favourite at present is 'consumerism,' which by implication blames it all on human greed and acquisitiveness: vices which undoubtedly have long existed in humanity at large, so we are left to assume that, short of converting mankind en masse to virtue, there is nothing we can do about it.

So-called 'consumerism' may be summed up as a mixture of producer-dominance with employmentism; and both of these are the result of remote control by money, that is credit-power. It cannot be repeated too often that credit-money has no natural limits. We now deal in billions instead of millions and no doubt soon it will be trillions. There is no shortage of 0's. The land, the soil, and human aggregations into towns and cities, have natural limits; but once these
become the centres of financial monopoly, of over-centralised power and wealth, of employment, careers, consumer goods and even of food, of course they know no limit in sucking the earth dry of men as well as of fertility.

How to stifle Human Adaptability

Finance is one statistical method of control over the will and purposes of men; the reduction of 'democracy' to a purely numericaL count of the feed-back to rival propagandas for activating the same financially dictated policy is another. It reduces men and women to equal and entirely characteriess units, manipulable en masse, and the more so the greater the numbers involved. Population statistics designed to frighten people into submission to still more gross interference with their personal lives, is a third.

It assumes the continuation of present trends towards world centralisation, the equal, indistinguishable, helpless, passive nature of the units of population, the indefinite lengthening of the human life-span (i.e. the absence of any natural limit to it and the unique absence from mankind among living species of any ability to adapt to its environment.

To gather statistics of the worldwide productivity of soil assumes also that it is inorganic, and 'economic' (i.e. debt-repaying) irrespective of the organisms it bears, including Man. It ignores the fact that the greatest production and fertility exists in .the small plot, lovingly cultivated, e.g. the kitchen garden or allotment, with, say, two or more men (man and wife) to a tenth of an acre-totally 'uneconomic' in money terms but satisfying in human terms, and sustainable only where there is energy to spare from money-getting.

Indeed, it seems very clear that the only way the doom prophesied by the population-doomsters can be achieved is by the carrying through of the policies of world-wide interference with human freedom to adapt to their real environment, which they are urging both upon people and upon governments. To be continued....