Foreword  

"We live in a spineless age", said a neighbour of mine,

so quickly reinsert your spine!

 

'Gentle reader', I am the' Knowledge Engineer' (1.7). I want to put my arms straight up through this page and give you a big, big hug - your culture permitting - whether you are black or white, brown or yellow, rich or poor, washed or unwashed.

            The reason for my overwhelming joy is that I have just broken into the world's most powerful taboo - the taboo on 'demographic entrapment' and am putting its 25 'Demons' to flight. These Demons are the reasons for this taboo.

        This book has been with me 20 years. Ten years ago I came across the problem of communities exceeding the carrying capacities of their local ecosystems, and with nowhere to go, and with not enough exports, and therefore not enough imports for food and other essentials. This I was told is 'demographic entrapment'. It ends in starvation and violence, as in Rwanda, Malawi, and if we are to believe 'Figure X' (29.1), much of the rest of Middle Africa. A community is also trapped, if because its population is growing, it is expected to be in this unhappy predicament before long. Population and 'disentrapment' are entirely my responsibility, not that of the editors.  

            Entrapment forced me to think about population, and especially about the number of children a mother should have. Why have more children than the land will support, if they are only going to stunt and starve? 'Population' starts in Chapter 2 - How many children? But you will have to read about safer sex (4.10), septic abortions (14.6), eclampsia (13.3), and puerperal sepsis (25.6), etc., before you meet the Population Demons in Chapter 29. This starts with an open letter to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, asking him to address the entrapment of Africa.

            It has become clear that entrapment is a real and massive, besides being so intensely taboo that demographers and development economists never discuss it. Demography and development economics must therefore be declared corrupt. There appear to be a number of of countries, nobody knows exactly how many, which, like China, need 1-child families, if they are to escape starvation and violence. Nobody likes 1-child families, so their many problems are Demon 6. Meanwhile, Northern lifestyles destroy the world. The big problem is the climate change caused by our huge fossil fuel consumption.

            If the South has to reduce its fertility, if necessary to 1-child families, we in the North will be expected to reduces our resource consumption and modify our lifestyle - which indeed we should! I argue for the most frugal possible Northern lifestyles see Section 29.8. Nobody in the North likes this, so it is Demon 3. And who would be most worried by it? The United States! It would thus make good political sense for the United States to keep entrapment taboo, and therefore demography corrupt. (Demon 21) The US is well able to do this, because it dominates demography globally, and can set the 'political correctness' (Demon 16) which keeps entrapment taboo among demographers in the rest of the world. For the evidence for this, see Section 29.3. The United States has been so successful that, not only is entrapment universally taboo, but the whole the population debate has never been more silent than it is now. For example, there was no mention of population at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. The US dominates the world, militarily, economically, and culturally, but it could be that its domination of demography, and its stifling of the population debate is the most sinister aspect of the 'soft power' that achieves this domination.

            Demon 3 has a further consequence. It is that any campaign for disentrapment in the South can only take place as part of a campaign for sustainable lifestyles and reduced resource consumption in the North - these are but two sides of the same life-saving coin. Population and global warming are the world's two great linked problems. This book attacks them both in the certainty that it will fire the population debate, so that the resulting 'benign uproar' will drive both Northern resource consumption and Southern fertility downwards, with the result that there will no longer be more people than the land support, and our Northern lifestyle will no longer destroy the Earth.

            This is a political problem, so it needs a political answer. How does one react to the US domination of demography? The first thing is to face it. As a neighbour of mine remarked: "We live in a spineless age". So quickly reinsert your spine. As Virchow said: "Health is politics, politics is health". Here we have both on the largest possible scale. As soon as your spine is securely fastened, turn quickly to Section 29.5 - Genu robustum...!

            Moliere wrote "C'est une folie a nulle autre seconde, de vouloir se meler a corriger le monde" - there is no greater madness than trying to 'save the world'. But, 'gentle reader' - you and I are CERTAINLY going to do it! There is abundant HOPE - but for Heaven's sake get busy immediately, there is not a millisecond to lose

 If you think this is 'over the top', which indeed it is not, so, alas is the problem!!!...