WHICH SPECIES IS ENDANGERED?

[Barbara Branden]

THE DAILY MAIL, 11.21/07

Meet the women who won't have babies - because they're not eco friendly

By NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH and MORAG TURNER -

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet....

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

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To read further, go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/fema...in_page_id=1879

[Barbara Branden]

For a response to the above article, see "Environmentalism's Outer Limits," Investor's Business Daily, November 23 .

"Enviro-fanatics are sterilizing themselves to reduce their 'carbon footprint.' We dread where their nihilistic ideology—that mankind is an evil planetary force—will lead next….

"The late economist Julian Simon, that prophetic debunker of Malthusian overpopulation theory, proved that people are no drain on our precious planet's natural resources. Rather, they are the solution to scarcities, thanks to the increasing ingenuity of successive generations….

"Simon showed that 'the ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the rest of us as well.'"

For the full article, go to http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.a...280712378570824

Barbara

[BaalChatzaf]

THE DAILY MAIL, 11.21/07

Meet the women who won't have babies - because they're not eco friendly

By NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH and MORAG TURNER -

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet....

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

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To read further, go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/fema...in_page_id=1879

These people are volantarily removing themselves from our midst, which is fine by my. All the more oxygen for me and mine to breath. These folks are pests and their genetic suicide saves us the trouble of making them go away.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Chris Grieb]

Barbara; Thank you for the link to the Julian Simon article.

Simon was one of the great people of our age.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

I posted this a few days ago under a different name. Here is my starting post (and one even goofier that followed).

This issue kind of says it all, doesn't it?

btw - I enjoyed the article from Investor's Business Daily. I have not read Julian Simon yet, but he sounds interesting.

Michael

Meet the women who won't have babies - because they're not eco friendly

By NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH and MORAG TURNER

21st November 2007

Daily Mail

Heh. The quips are biting at my tongue, but I shall refrain.

From the article:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

. . .

Most young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping the environment - and as she agonised over the perils of climate change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child.

"I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet - and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do."

I have no problem with the personal choice these people made, but I do have a problem with the following belief system (including that boneheaded idea about having children would "pollute the planet"):

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision [to pursue sterilisation after her abortion] with an almost religious zeal.

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

. . .

Mark adds: "Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don't have a car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly.

"We recycle, use low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food.

"In short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all this would be undone if we had a child.

"That's why I had a vasectomy. It would be morally wrong for me to add to climate change and the destruction of Earth.

We Objectivists at least can take comfort in the fact that Ayn Rand did not leave a devastating carbon footprint behind in the form of a planet-polluting brat. She did her fair share for saving Mother Earth.

Michael

Forget about mankind destroying the planet so we should stop reproducing. How about upping the stakes?

Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'

By Roger Highfield

21/11/2007

Telegraph

From the article:

Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.

But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.

They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means with boggling mind experiments, notably Schrodinger's cat in which, thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries on living, or dies. That is, by one interpetation (by another, the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead one.)

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

For the eco-warrior goofballs, no nookie is good unless you sterilize yourself. Now some scientists say if you look, you destroy the universe. Tonight our sterile soldiers shall sleep the sleep of the righteous.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

The lady sounds like Catherine Halsey with the environmental movement filling in for Toohey. She still has delusions of happiness, not understanding that's selfish too.

--Brant

[Chris Grieb]

Brant;

You are on target. There is more than a little resemblance between this woman and Katherine. There's a Toohey lurking around.

[pbmaltzman]

Personally I was never enthusiastic about having children, but it had more to do with personal involvement in the living hell that was my parents' marriage than anything else. Back then, marriage and children seemed (to me) like a trap which would leave a woman helpless, without job skills, and high and dry if the man decided to dump her. Among other things, I resolved never to be without job skills, so that I wouldn't end up as a middle-aged woman who had to work at a fast-food restaurant because I had no more lucrative skills.

In high school, I knew girls who definitely wanted kids, and their main goal in life was to find the right man to sire them. I also knew one girl who--at the ripe age of 16 years old--was adamant that she never, ever wanted children, and she was highly indignant that no physician would tie off her tubes until she was a certain age.

I can respect someone's personal decision to have or not to have kids, but not for the stupid reasons of "saving the planet." That makes me want to barf.

I spent a couple of years in Colorado (left over a decade ago). I briefly worked at a hospital there which had pretty decent cafeteria food (especially the mushroom soup and the desserts). One night, they served me some kind of entree on paper instead of styrofoam (because they had run out of styrofoam plates, probably). As I was in line to pay, the blue-eyed, blonde-haired bimbo of a cashier told me I was "saving the planet" because my food was on paper rather than plastic.

She was so pretty, and such a waste of protoplasm... I imagined that I could almost hear her pea-brain rattling around in her empty head as she nodded her head from side to side. . The whole encounter made me want to barf.

Oh, yes, and Colorado was the place where I first heard the saying "Humans are a cancer on the face of the earth," uttered by a wacko. Colorado State University is infested with people like that, and I hear that Boulder is even worse.

Edited November 28, 2007 by Pam Maltzman

[Chris Grieb]

Pam;

It seems so easy. Why don't you tell they don't have to stay around.

[pbmaltzman]

But, but, Chris--the ones who are going around talking like that are almost NEVER the ones who choose to save the planet by offing themselves, because of course they are the elite who get to tell the rest of us benighted humans what to do with ourselves.

Pam;

It seems so easy. Why don't you tell they don't have to stay around.

[Chris Grieb]

Pam; Sort of the do as I say not do as I do syndrome. You're of course right.

Edited November 28, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[Wrighty]

With no family to look after them as they grow older, what will these saddoes do then.....will they expect the state to care for them?

Presumably they will be tended by the vile offspring of hordes of selfish contemporaries?! And when they die, how are we to dispose of their bodies - for then and only then will we discover the true nature of their footprints!

At what point in their own existence did they metamorphose from polluting babies <disgusting creatures so they are> into responsible adults?

Unfortunately benign fanatics (as we shall call them) often beget ones far more malignant.......

As with all problem children, I blame the parents!!