Do efforts to save out natural heritage from bushfires hinder the promotion of birth control?

This 'article' was made up from a few somewhat off-topic comments concerning contraception in a discussion in response to the article of 23 Feb 09.

The discussion was started when someone wrote, "ONLY contraception can save the environment so ALL government environmental funds must go to contraception. Any diversion to relatively ineffective band aid environmental projects will destroy the planet!". This drew (so far) two responses.

" id="why">Why must it be one or the other?

On February 28th, 2009 James Sinnamon says:

As contraception is very cheap in comparison to most other things that government money is spent on these days, I don't see why it need be one or the other. Industrial nations could spend vastly more sums of money on fixing the environment as well as easily make contraception available to anyone in the world who wanted it, if they got their priorities right.

In any case, even if we entirely succeeded in preventing any further human reproduction from this day forward, which, in any case, is a goal sought by very few even amongst population reduction advocates, an enormous amount of more environmental damage could still be done for many years to come by humans failing to act, for example, against bushfires, as this article, and by Tigerquoll show.

Eventually, when the global human population reaches level which are sustainable, we can hope that the environment will largely be able to take care of itself, but in the meantime, humankind can't expect the environment including Australia's bushland to look after itself, given its present parlous state.

" id="SimpleSolution">A simple solution to a complex problem?

On February 28th, 2009 greg (not verified) says:

People need a reason and/or purpose to use contraception. In itself it is not a compelling or convenient activity.
Awareness of the cost of not employing effective contraception is vital to the will and the choice to do so. Unless of course one wants to submit to an authoritarian path, such as the one China has proven the many shortcomings of.

Real and convincing costs include direct un-affordability of extra dependents, and, more broadly, quality of life generally as arbitrated by myriad resource limits, especially of land and water.

To call the promotion of discussion and action on these natural resource issues to be diversionary is to not understand the actual dynamics of the population problem and the social factors which determine it.

To quote HL Mencken, 'to every complex problem there is a simple answer... and it is wrong."

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