Population activists have been frequently accused of taking a simplistic approach to our environmental crisis. We are told that it is not just about human numbers, but how we choose to live. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is the environmental movement that is guilty of over-simplification. If they concede that population growth is a worthy concern, it is usually an afterthought, and typically framed as a global problem that afflicts distant continents. Their maniacal obsession with per capita consumption invites a countervailing stress on over-population.

Religion comes in many guises. Orthodox or established belief systems have no monopoly in delusional thinking. In fact, it is my contention that such thinking is central to our makeup, and that efforts to eradicate it, however well merited, are futile. That is why we are doomed. We need comfort as well as truth, and are programmed to ignore or deny long-term threats. Delusional thinking gets us through the night, but it will not get us through this century.

Canada needs a new anthem, suitable to contemporary trends. I offer this as our national poem, and I would suggest that our national symbol, the beaver, should be changed to something more appropriate---the bulldozer

See also "The Sounds of Media Silence----With Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel" of 28 Feb 10.

If only Simon and Garfunkel were Malthusians. Maybe then the lyrics of some of their memorable songs could be brought to bear in our current struggle to force action to limit population growth.

It sometimes becomes medically necessary to expel toxic growthist propaganda before it is fully absorbed in the bloodstream leading to a brain seizure. Exposure to growthist buzzwords can induce the nausea required to induce vomiting. Here is a tentative list that can serve as a quick reference when immediate relief is called for.

(Ed. The subject of this article may seem hackneyed, but it is well worth reading.) The word "sustainable" or "sustainability" has been rendered meaningless and oxymoronic by its attachment to the most invasive development proposals and economic activity. But authentic sustainability does not lend itself to semantic pluralism. It can only mean the viablility of the whole, not its constituent parts. There is really only one kind of sustainability.

This not, repeat, NOT, an argument for or against AGW theory. It is about green hypocrisy and double-standards. If we are to follow the corporate money trail, we must follow it wherever it leads, even if it leads to the door of a CBC-annointed demi-god so beloved internationally by those who know him even less than Canadians do.

The question is, do you want to prolong the system or bring it to a quick end? Do want to make growth work or make it impossible?

It doesn't take much guts to be a soft-green environmentalist. Trying taking on hard taboo targets.

There is no need to send out a search party for the Growth Lobby. It lives in your neighbourhood and in your home town.

See also by Tim Murray: "What is a racist?" of 3 Jan 10, "The Green Badge of Courage" of 3 Jan 10 and "It is socially responsible to be socially irresponsible" of 4 Jan 10.

The accusation of "racism" can more properly be hurled back at the accusers.

Judeo-Christian injunctions to be fruitful, go forth and multiply are in blatant contradiction to the demand that we be good stewards of planet earth. More than that though, those religious leaders who assume the mantle of morality while promoting large traditional families violate a fundamental moral maxim.

The growth lobby appears in new guises every day, constantly trying to make itself out to be the good guy. Now a new alliance of religious groups pretends we can go on growing indefinitely, the same way that the Citizens Electoral Lobby, the Australian Property Council, and the Prime Minister of Australia do. But Tim Murray asks, "If each one of God’s 214,000 miracles born each day is precious, what of the tens or hundreds of thousands of non human life forms that are murdered that day by our expansion? Yes, 100 species are lost each day. But many more life forms are killed than that each day. How many? Who knows? Each and every day we are breeding our life support system into the ground."

"Agent Provocateur" asks, "What is the definition of a racist?" I will give him a North American definition.

It is a common assertion, even among those who oppose global overpopulation, that immigration, or the migration of people between regions and nations, is irrelevant to the issue. As one blogger here put it, it is really just a question of "shuffling people around." This is dead wrong. Not only does emigration stimulate fertility and typically multiply ecological footprints, it is enormously destabilizing in its impact. In effect, migration lowers our global carrying capacity.

Penny Wong has started a trend in dieting in Canada, of all places. They call it, "Smart Gluttony". Using Penny Wong's approach to growing population and production whilst simultaneously reducing carbon gas emissions, Tim Murray expects to lose weight by eating more ice-cream, even though his doctor has predicted that his weight will increase by 65% just if he continues with his current one tub a day.

A cluster of mainly grey-haired, predominately female members of the local chapter of the Sierra Club gathered in front of one of the two local stores in my small island community to form a vigil to plead for action on global warming to synchronize with the summit in Copenhagen. While I do not contest the hypothesis that man-made climate change poses a serious threat, I do question their priorities and their focus. That alone makes me a hated heretic.

The author responds to news of some so-called 'Green groups' preventing discussion of population numbers as a factor in carbon emissions. "Women should have the right not to have children. But they have no right, in the context of overshoot, to have as many children as they or their husbands want. The “right to choose” cannot be the right to abuse. Even the most jealously guarded right must be measured against equally fundamental rights, most especially the right of our species, and others, to live."

This comment, by Canadian Tim Murray, was originally posted to the ABC Background Briefing program, 'Housing for Millions'. In response to statements by a planner which implied that the doubling of Vancouver's population in 15 years had been accomplished without pain, he writes, "Vancouver is a success story only if compared to other major urban failures."

Our primary concern should not be about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon.

To argue that we can flood an ecologically sensitive area with tourists, and protect it, is delusional and contradictory.

Also published on Online Opinion on 11 May 2009, Sinking Lifeboat on 25 Feb 09.

January 19 is Martin Luther King day. It has been my tradition to trot out one of his most unknown speeches. Circulate it widely, please. I was a teenager when he appeared on so many talk shows. Apart from his captivating and stirring speeches, his calm reason and supreme intelligence---on so many issues---still impresses me. He was a giant. And he was more literate than Obama on the ecological facts of life, obviously. But then, so many more were in the late sixties too.

The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. ... That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research.

Canada's Green Party is the quintessential Green Party. Still my nominee for the world's most idiotic of parties. So what ever you do, don't accuse me of being ethnocentric. New Zealand Green Party, would you please send missionaries to the frozen north and teach our Greens some holistic thinking please? A simple incantation of IPAT, IPAT, IPAT might do the trick to deprogramme our Greenies from their Monbiotist trance.

Dr. David Suzuki consistently fails to identify stopping population growth in Canada as a necessary part of achieving sustainability. His emphasis on green living habits and renewable technology alternatives are the classic politically correct dodge. In this devastating critique of the man, his organization, and his lifestyle, Brishen Hoff demonstrates that Suzuki does not deserve our adulation or our money. Somebody kick him off that pedestal please.

Perish the thought. Green peacniks running government in the face of an imminent threat of invasion. If the invasion materialised overnight, the people would rebel and take matters into their own hands with fish boats and hand made weapons. But the invasion is incremental and the pace is less dramatic but relentless.

Soft-green and centre-left organizations inundate Canadians with unsolicitated emails and dinner time phone calls that can't be terminated by repeated pleadings. Yet when the individuals who belong to these organizations are in turn subject to our emails, demanding answers or presenting counter-arguments to theirs, they scream that their privacy rights have been abused. Such was the case on November 9/08 when Brishen Hoff of Biodiversity First sent our material to a CBC mailing list of soft green supporters.

Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First, makes a simple point. Per capita GNP is fast becoming inversely correlated with a growing GDP, which in Anglophone countries is being fed by immigration. Stop immigration, reduce births, shrink population, and individual shares of wealth increase. Common sense. Sorry. If it was common every one would have it.

While Ecological Footprint Analysis was a groundbreaking attempt to assess the impact of the combination of human populations with given consumption levels, intuitively I thought something was amiss. The Global Footprint Network assessment of Canada's carrying capacity seemed wildly overstated and not consistent with the observations of Canadians on the frontline of ecological damage. Well it appears our misgivings are right. There is a new kid on the block. "Societal Overextension Analysis" offers a more comprehensive picture of overshoot than EFA.

Does the election of a pro-immigration candidate to President of the United States mean that North America is doomed to have its current record rate of population growth continue indefinitely until its ecology is destroyed?

See also: "An immigration policy bought and paid for?" of 24 Feb 08.