Bindi Irwin, Hilary Clinton and over-population

Bindi, daughter of Australia’s most famous wildlife tourism personality, the late ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin, and quite a personality in her own right, has been very disappointed recently that having been asked to write a 1000-word essay for Hilary Clinton’s e-Journal about her decision to devote her life to wildlife conservation, her effort was severely edited, taking out most of the points she had made about over-population, which she sees as the cause of most of the pressures on our planet’s wildlife.

You can read both versions (Bindi’s and the edited one) here:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/blogs/article/-/15955568/bindi-irwins-essay-original-and-edited/

Bindi asked if she could have another go at writing the piece but this was refused, so she has requested that the edited version, which is not conveying the messages she intended, not be published in the e-journal. She avows she still has great admiration fir Hilary Clinton but is very disappointed her editors chose to cut out all her points about over-population.

It does at times seem to be a topic people don’t want to touch.  I recall a local meeting about the expected population rise in the Scenic Rim.  I suggested to the Chair that we should look at how many the region could reasonably cope with before making further plans. While addressing the chair I turned to a cattle farmer sitting next to me and asked if she would just decide on a random (and large) number of cows to buy and then start thinking about what she was going to do with them, or whether she would first assess how much pasture and water supply was available and from this arrive at a reasonable number to bring into the property. She assured me it would be the latter, but the chair seemed quite offended that I was comparing people to cows.  Well, as an ecologist I don’t see a great difference in the problems faced.  Cows use resources and they produce waste.  Humans use resources, which have to come from somewhere, and they produce waste, which has to go somewhere.  Actually humans are more complicated – cows don’t get a lot of choice in their resources, having to put up with whatever is offered them, whereas an ever-increasing human population demands a variety of resources,some having a much bigger carbon footprint than others, and produce quite a variety of waste.

Some accuse anyone talking about overpopulation as though they want to see mass tragedy to decrease today’s population, and I think this is one of the misconceptions that  stops a lot of people talking about it.  But the reverse is true for most of us who are concerned about the problem – we see that there will be more and more mass tragedies if more is not done to prevent further over-population in the future. It is hardly as though there were no one already in the world starving or badly malnourished, or fighting over land and other resources, and yes, distribution has a lot to do with it, but there is an upper limit to the resources that can go around with people able to enjoy their lives instead of living in constant hardship and misery. Wars and famine are certainly not what is needed to protect the wildlife of the world – these are the situations under which it is impossible to protect threatened species from starving families or hungry soldiers, plus the effects of bombs, fires, defoliators etc.. No, it is only through facing up to the problems of future population pressures and helping the women of the world to limit their family sizes (including looking after the children they already have) that we can avoid many of the potential disasters for both humans and the wildlife we share the planet with.