Mark writes:

>  Seriously though, I can see where
>  your evolutionary views (competition, etc) would get you in trouble with
>  much of the collegiate intelligentsia.

It's not so much that as my views on wealth. It's common, or at least it was
more common a few years ago, at places such as Stanford's Center for
Conservation Biology to engage in bouts of self-flaggelation concerning the
wealth of the highly industrialized nations, noting that the US, with only 5%
of the world's population, consumes more than a quarter of its natural
resources. The follow-on comment almost always takes note of the ecological
disaster that would occur if the rest of the world should rise to our levels
of consumption.

My argument for the last 20 years has been exactly the opposite: wealthy,
highly educated populations actually leave a much smaller footprint on the
land than do poor societies. It's the poor of Madagascar who are denuding the
island of its forests (that, and a large, amoral German logging firm). In
contrast, wealthy societies tend to become highly urbanized and could, if
they wanted, relatively quickly move off of a fossil fuel, forest-clearing,
meat-eating economy. Regardless of whether the wealthy societies ever
actually do, those options are never available to poor populations.

But even more importantly, when populations become wealthy and liberal,
educational and economic opportunities intrinsically open up for women,
opportunities that are never afforded poor, rural women, and as a consequence
birth rates decline precipitously in the industrialized societies. At the
time of the Pharoahs, Alexander and Pericles, the world's population was
estimated to be only one or two hundred million people, something on the
order of half the current population of the United States, but spread over
the entire surface of the earth.

In a world where everyone is well-educated and prosperous, we don't need any
more than a few hundred million people in order to continue to enjoy the
extraordinary rate of development that we're experiencing now. As an Indian
friend of mine who works at Monsanto's Madras facility said, "If India only
had one-tenth its current population, it would be a paradise."

Further, my argument has been for 20 years now that if we want to preserve
the last bit of biodiversity on the planet in whatever state of pristineness
it still exists, we need to work to make the world equally prosperous and
educated. Well-educated populations intrinsically tend to protect their
environment in a manner that backward ones cannot. Not only is universal
wealth the more moral of the two choices, I believe that it is the only
practical solution.

Wirt Atmar

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