"SEX AND WAR" AND GLOBAL POPULATION SPEAKOUT by Jane Roberts: 14/02/2009 (MaximsNews Network)  

       UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 14 February 2009 -- February is the month for the Global Population Speakout organized by John C. Feeney. Signers of the original letter which went out in October 2008 and pledgers since then constitute an impressive list of American and international scientists, the majority of whom are in the environmental field. They lament the inattention to issues of population in the media and on the global agenda and they promise to speak out this month.

In SEX and WAR, How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden state: "In 1994, women’s groups (especially in the United States) were successful in drawing attention to the many needs of the forgotten half of the world’s population at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo. But in the process, they inadvertently made it politically incorrect to even talk about population growth."

The language of the Cairo Programme of Action promised universal access to the highest standard of reproductive health and to information about and access to voluntary family planning by 2015. 

It also had a strong educational component realizing that educating all young people, but particularly girls, was an essential component for alleviating poverty and promoting development. But "population" in and of itself was pretty much off the table.  

Andrew Revkin, in his Charles Darwin DOT EARTH blog (New York Times) states: When Darwin was on his voyage of biological discovery there were fewer than 1 billion people on earth. Now there are 1 billion teenagers.” Revkin also wrote about the grassroots movement 34 Million Friends of UNFPA.

Frankly I don't see a conflict between ICPD and GPSO. The prospect of over 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 is frightening. The United Nations will become nothing more than a crisis response, crisis management organization.  We humans will live on a greatly impoverished planet. Human beings are a rapacious species and we are eating up what sustains us.  

I believe that fulfilling CAIRO and committing to the Millennium Development Goals are the only acceptable answers to the population conundrum. I am also a champion of women’s equality in all realms; a prerequisite of this equality is to be educated, to be healthy, and to have the ability to control one’s fertility.   

So back to SEX and WAR. Darwin is relevant -- the DNA of chimps and humans varies very little. Jane Goodall who recommends that people read SEX and WAR, admits she was a bit shocked by the "dark side" of chimp behavior and realized they could be "brutal, just like us, especially the males."  

That is the theme of Sex and War, that aggressive behavior is in the DNA of the human species, particularly of the men. That brutalizing the "other" is part and parcel of human evolution. That spreading one's seed and promoting fertility is in the male DNA. That male dominated religions further this tendency. That it is no accident that the vilest, most cruel dictators of the twentieth century: Stalin, Hitler, Ceausescu, and Amin "all took steps to restrict access to family planning and safe abortion."  

The book contains these fascinating statistics: "Ebonya Washington, a Yale economist, has shown that members of the U.S. Congress who have a daughter are more likely to vote in favor of safe abortion. Moreover, the more daughters a Congressional father has, the more liberal a Congressman’s voting record tends to be. The trend carries over to the voting public. In the U.S., 37 percent of parents who have only girls register as Democrats, compared to 31 percent of parents with only boys—a small but statistically significant difference." 

And here’s a tidbit from the book. "When the PLO was offered observer status at the UN, Yasser Arafat needed to reign in Black September, the killers of the Israeli athletes at the Munich 1972 Olympic Games. How did he do it? He offered them marriage to an attractive single Palestinian woman, $3,000, an apartment, a gas stove, a TV, long-term employment, along with another $5000 if they fathered a child. Violent, high-risk actions no longer made emotional, economic, or evolutionary sense."  

Perhaps if we offered all young, single, poor, uneducated, unemployed young men afoot on the planet today something similar, a little terrorism and war might disappear. 

Potts and Hayden have recipe for how to make peace break out: Brains over brutality.   

They do end on a message of hope -- Population and the fate of the women and girls of the world is crucial. But we ignore both at our peril.

Labels: United Nations, U.N.,  Global Population Speakout, John C. Feeney, SEX and WAR, How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Malcolm Potts, Thomas Hayden, Population, Andrew Revkin, Charles Darwin,  International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Jane Roberts, 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), MaximsNews Network,

 

Advertisement

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MaximsNews Network   NEWS NETWORK FOR THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

MaximsNews Network is a Global News Network that is read worldwide, in 201 countries and territories. MaximsNews Network is associated with MediaChannel.org and Globalvision News Network, global news and media information services with more than 350 news affiliates in 135 countries. 

Established in 1999, MaximsNews Network now publishes in the six UN working languages: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.  

SEE:  About MaximsNews Network

The views expressed are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of MaximsNews Network.

REACH THE WORLD'S MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE  

SEE: Advertise with MaximsNews Network | MaximsNews MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS with MaximsNews Network      

MaximsNews Network | CONTACT MaximsNews Network  | Please contact us about Republishing: ©Copyrights 1999 - 2008, MaximsNewsNetwork. All rights reserved.