Budge it

How ethical is my baby?

'So what I want to know is whether it is ethical to have had little Elsa at all'

Well there's a question. Do you want the 'that's all we have time for' answer, the 'unleash the hounds of blogdom' answer, or maybe the 'let's pussyfoot around a dodgy topic 'til it passes' answer?

There are probably more. I sure as heck don't have it... them. She is well cute, though. Not sure I'd use my two in the same way, but then I'm not in media. Or likely ever to be a celebrity with all the access and accolades that confers.

But you have, indeed, done the maths. As have I.

Finite land area to live on... and off. Expanding population, much of which is hell bent of making stuff to get richer or prove they are, or visit the rest before it gets lost thanks to them visiting it... because they can.

I have to say that there would look to be a 'point' (doubtless with a nifty name) in there somewhere, and it begs certain questions, the solutions to which mostly dare not speak their name. Lebensraum was an ugly word, if from a while ago.

Oddly, most in the environmental arena seems to work on the notion that Mother Nature has it sorted, and mankind is messing her up.

This is at first hard to reconcile with 'survival of the fittest', at least in a finite space, unless you pop ethics in. Because what you get in nature is a balance, pretty much sorted out by violent death and culling of the weak. Plus a bit of resources-driven restraint at the predator end as well, felis a felis, thanks to competition, famine, etc.

Mano a mano, is... different.

Because what used to happen seems to have been thrown a curve a tad by civilisation and compassion. On top of pollution, waste, etc, etc, regulation of numbers of any kind, much less by self, is not only abhorred, but even when Gaia gets her Gatling out actively countered at every and all opportunities. War, pestilence, disease. Everything she throws at us we have an answer at the UN (well...), a tsunami warning outpost or the CDC.

Your point in offsetting the food fight with carbon-based productivity is well taken.

I am just not so sure this Peter is so optimistic about the petering out. Especially now I have hit 50. Soylent Green anyone?

Life's too short, and sweet, for me to get into the bunfight you'd like some poor courageous soul to institute, so I will do the same and idly pass the time asking... 'what if?'

So let me end with these: 'What if Hugo Drax was real?' and 'What if the Douglas Adams had allowed the telephone sanitisers to join the other ship'?

Passes a Friday and fills a column, eh?