Population and food supply
Despite accusations that Filipino president-elect Rodrigo Duterte is a dictator in the making (27 May), he has done something worthy. He has attacked the Catholic church for its opposition to contraception; he says, “we have to do something with our overpopulation”.
Many Filipinos are mired in poverty, a legacy of failing to constrain population growth in past decades. Compare the history of its near neighbour, Thailand. Here, where the much-loved Dr Mechai Viravaidya (“Mr Condom”) has promoted family planning since the 1970s, the average number of children has fallen drastically.
Because of this, Thailand will likely be more resilient as extreme weather events associated with climate change play havoc with food production. In the same issue, you reported that 50 million Africans face hunger after crops failed. You attributed the two-year drought to El Niño, though scientists would argue it was worsened by climate change. The situation in Ethiopia, southern Sudan and Yemen, three countries in most need of food, is not helped by rampant population growth, a result of high fertility.
In many countries, climate change and increasing demand (much of it from population growth) are now a threat to the water supply and, in turn, food production.
It is critical that we minimise this future demand, and that means stabilising populations everywhere.
Jenny Goldie
Michelago, NSW, Australia
Downside to our digital age
I’m troubled by some omissions in Suzanne Moore’s enjoyably feisty article on living online (20 May). First, those of us who don’t particularly like the internet find ourselves increasingly force-fed with it. Second, there’s a huge environmental downside to the digital age. The raw materials for our endlessly proliferating, continually outdated then trashed gadgetry have heavy ecological impacts on their place of origin, often countries with minimal protection for the environment.
The digital revolution, like its industrial counterpart, is a house built on sand, on lies. On the one hand it has transformed communication; on the other, it embodies a massive communication failure, since it externalises its ecocidal costs.
The digital age, which simultaneously bypasses and destroys the biosphere, may be smart but is it wise? Ecologist Eugene Odum wrote: “There is more information of a higher order of sophistication and complexity stored in a few square yards of forest than in all the libraries of mankind … information that has been flowing for millions of years.”
Is this why I opt out of the internet, and into my garden, this small patch of earth I tend in its wild, wise, weedy, evolving, intricate, blooming glory?
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Post-truth politicians
Well done, Jonathan Freedland, for pointing out in his excellent piece (20 May) what we all knew but didn’t know we knew. The worst drug pushers in our society are the persuasive advertisers, and no one knows this better and uses it to more devastating effect than the post-truth politician.
The idea of democracy has inherent within it a free dissemination of the unspun facts among those who will be doing the voting. The conclusion one must inevitably come to is that the post-truth guys have no interest in representative opinion or the advancement of their constituency; their interest is rather in ego and power, whether actual or imagined.
Looking at politicians currently in office, in the western world at least, one could be forgiven for concluding that a necessary requirement for a politician is a personality imbalance paired with a silken tongue and a nice appreciation of the fact that there’s no lie so false as the truth told cleverly.
Which is why newspapers like this one are so important for holding the fraudsters to account, even though they may be a weak cry among the tabloid masses.
Mike Scott
Takaka, New Zealand
When there is no going back
The Muirfield Golf Club required a two-thirds majority to allow female membership and lost (27 May). Like many others I feel their decision was inappropriate, but the requirement for a two-thirds majority seems a very sensible option for what would no doubt be a no-turning-back decision. I think the same should have applied for Scottish independence and now for whether the UK should leave the European Union.
If we leave the EU now we won’t easily be able to re-join and certainly not on the same terms; but if we remain we will always have the option of leaving later. Requiring a two-thirds majority would a cautious arrangement but would perhaps avoid the influence of temporary economic and migration factors, and voters rebelling against the status quo, thinking anything must be better than our present lot.
Keith Hitchcock
Sutton Coldfield, UK
We must protect the BBC
I was very surprised to learn that the UK Treasury has obliged the BBC to take on the cost of providing over-75s free TV licences. The cost, quoted by Lord Alli as £650m ($935m), is of course a considerable sum.
However, as Lord Alli points out in your article The danger to the BBC is hardly over (20 May), as the culture secretary was very quick, too quick, to denigrate the BBC. How ironic when the BBC is an internationally respected institution.
I would willingly pay for a TV licence, as I am sure would others, if it helped to sustain the BBC in its commitment to “inform, educate and entertain”, keeping the inanity of most TV advertising off our screens. “Well you can always record and zap through.” Precisely. The implications of recording need no further comment.
Edward Watson
Telford, UK
Literary loves and richness
I loved the article by Edna O’Brien on stories and writing and writers (27 May). Like her, I frequently read out loud, sometimes repeating sentences or paragraphs just to hear the music of the words, and their rhythm. Among the many writers and books I have enjoyed this way were Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Okri’s The Famished Road, DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and others.
Some I have read many times over, and each time, wonderfully, I have new experiences. There is a kind of collaboration that occurs between writer and reader.
Inevitably writers build on the past, lived and written. The richness of that heritage shapes and enhances the newly born creation, but like every newborn child, is never an exact replica of what went before. It is the combination of individuality together with connection to our literary heritage that makes possible the unique contributions that emerge out of the writer’s imagination, that third component that seemingly comes out of nowhere.
The richness of this heritage, and the endless possibility of creating something new, is what makes us the beings we are.
Lavinia Moore
Aldgate, South Australia
Briefly
• Reading Gaby Hinsliff’s account of how the end is nigh for joyous motoring (27 May), I cannot help wishing that, like Mr Toad, the world’s drivers would find themselves carless rather than being driven by smart cars. Car pollution is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide and vehicles have destroyed the beauty and tranquillity of city centres, residential streets and the countryside.
If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we must give up cars, lorries, short-haul flights and the monster ships mentioned in Lucy Siegle’s Ethical living. Oh, to return to horse-drawn caravans, sailing ships and relatively low-polluting trains: “The real way to travel! The only way to travel!”
Angela Smith
Norwich, UK
• In his review of the book Pinpoint by Greg Milner (27 May), Will Self makes a common mistake in stating that the Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers we use for navigation act as transmitters which send a signal to GPS satellites in orbit. In fact, the GPS satellites act only as beacons that send out signals and do not receive anything from our terrestrial devices. The time it takes for signals from a number of satellites to reach our devices is used to determine our position. Nothing is needed to be sent skyward.
Dave Robson
Ngunnawal, ACT, Australia
• Don DeLillo describes the wonderful celestial sight of the setting sun perfectly framed along Manhattan’s east-west streets at the time of the equinoxes (27 May). Another grand view, rarer, is of the rising full moon over the Chrysler Building.
Norbert Hirschhorn
London, UK
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