Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem thinks coercing women to have children they don’t want is the fundamental cause of climate change.
…
People argue that climate change and other issues are also feminist issues. What do we lose by broadening the meaning of the term?
“Are you kidding me? Listen, what causes climate deprivation is population. If we had not been systematically forcing women to have children they don’t want or can’t care for over the 500 years of patriarchy, we wouldn’t have the climate problems that we have. That’s the fundamental cause of climate change. Even if the Vatican doesn’t tell us that. In addition to that, because women are the major agricultural workers in the world, and also the carriers of water and the feeders of families and so on, it’s a disproportionate burden.”
…
Climate advocates are often (though not always) population control advocates. Unborn children are an easy target for the population control freaks – they can’t defend themselves.
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Wow, Steinem answers the question of “how much anger, hatred, misinformation and stupidity can reside in one person”. A lot, apparently. She must be a joy to be around.
Many more than 500 years although every so often there’s some reaction.
“don’t weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man”.
http://painting-history.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/moors-last-sigh.html
I wonder how she determined that “patriarchy” began only 500 years ago.
In fact, that’s about the time that Europe started getting female rulers, ie Calvinist John Knox’ “monstrous regiment of women” (1558), attacking Catholic female monarchs in Scotland and England, arguing that rule by women is contrary to the Bible. They were preceded by Isabella of Castile, with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, co-Reconquistadora of M@slim Granada and Columbus’ co-sponsor in 1492.
Does Ms. Steinem imagine that before c. AD 1500 the Goddess Gaia and her human maidservants ruled the planet?
When I married my “water carrier” nobody told me she would be constantly pestering me to fix the plumbing.
Maybe you should teach her to stop breaking it !! :o)
Things started to go downhill with the invention of indoor plumbing. Life was better with just a shed ‘down yonder’ (provided it wasn’t too near the well).
Yeah, what did the Romans ever do for us?
>>
Things started to go downhill with the invention of indoor plumbing.
<<
You’re not too far wrong with respect to Roman plumbing. The term “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead: PLUMBUM. Lead was their metal of choice for plumbing indoor fixtures. They even used lead pipes for their siphons. Ever wonder why the Roman aristocracy was so Looney Tunes? Maybe it was their lead plumbing.
Jim
Lead was also used in cosmetics from classical times all the way up to the 16th century, for its tint-erasing properties. If you ever wondered why portraits of Queen Elizabeth I always have her looking white as a sheet, that’s the reason.
And common plates and cups in those times would often be fashioned from pewter, a lead alloy. Juices from acidic foods like tomatoes and other fruits, as well as alcohol, would gradually leech lead out of the pewter.
Your pre-modern life on lead poisoning.
Hence the great Spanish expression, “Plata o plomo”.
lifetime long I fixed their plumberings.
Mommy, daddy, brother, sisters .
Their unpaid electricity bills, rentals and funerals.
TOA TOEU.
Except her. Like all women in the developed world. Which is developed because of fossil fuel use.
Population explosion is over for more than 2 decades. Since 1995 world population under 15 is stable, slightly below 2 billion. Population still keeps increasing thou, because of increasing life expectancy. Which is wrong how?
No one can produce more than one old fart by ageing, so it can never lead to explosion.
By the way, to decrease fertility rate, two preconditions should be met, independent of cultural background:
1. Decrease infant mortality
2. Provide proper schooling for girls
Both preconditions are humane, neither patriarchy nor forced child care is mentioned, and both need stable energy supply.
What glass ceiling? (No, she didn’t refer to one directly).
My wife is head of department in a university, with 50 or 60 senior academics reporting to her. The large majority are women. Her boss is a woman with the responsibility of several hundred academics.
Not one of those staff, to our knowledge, has “unwanted children”. Indeed, some (including close friends of ours) engage in fostering and adoption of children.
Not one of those children is unwanted, they are just badly looked after, or subject to tragic circumstances. Most of the fostered children go one to have good relationships with their parents once they have been shown kindness, discipline and encouraged to engage in education.
So what unwanted children is this eejit talking about?
The mask slips off and the face revealed is monstrous.
Ignoring the over charged rhetoric of Ms. Steinem’s quote, it is unfortunate, in my opinion that the human population load on the planet did not stabilize at 2 billion as opposed to the 10+/- billion projected for the year 2100. A stable human population of 2 billion living at first world standards would be a much better planet, with significant wild areas left to maintain a healthy biosphere. Africa is projected to go from 1 billion now, to 2 to 4 billion people over the next 80 years. The current refugee crisis is a ripple compared to the Tsunami ahead.
There are still significant wild areas on the planet.
There is still a healthy biosphere.
Africa has just about peaked in terms of population and like the rest of the world, it’s population will then start falling.
According to a map in the 2015 CIA World Facts Book, the birth rates for sub-Saharan African countries, excluding S. Africa currently range from 3 to 7 children per woman. The current population of 1 billion is projected to grow to between 3.5 to 5 billion, by 2100. The expected 3 billion increase in world population by 2100 is essentially going to happen in Africa. No one is talking about this issue and its likely effect on future human happiness and environmental degradation.
“… population will then start falling ”
Russia is now in this stage — with big issues ahead as others do the same.
Japan has had that problem for at least a decade, as do other advanced countries.
The only reason why the population isn’t falling in the US is because immigration.
(Both because immigration itself increases numbers and because 1st generation immigrants tend to have birth rates similar to that of their home country. 2nd generation tends to split the difference between country of origin and the US. By third generation birth rates are virtually identical to the rest of the US.)
Leo, those birth rates are falling fast.
PS: I love the way you just assume more people is a bad thing.
Thanks, Leo!
Besides the fact that 10 billion people are not a burden on the planet, there is one fundamental issue to be worked out: let’s hear your plans regarding how “we” decide who gets to reproduce, and who doesn’t.
Europe, amongst others should be actively promoting and paying for family planning programs in those African countries with birth rates in excess of 3 children per woman. They can tie these programs to preferential access to the EU market and contract worker programs. Or conversely we can let nature take its course and let civil war and famine break out. As for 10 billion people not being a burden….look at former versus present distribution ranges for the wolf, the lion, the bison. I have heard that humans, their pets and their food animals account for 90% of terrestrial mammals on the planet, larger than a rat. Last year was the first year that more farmed fish were landed than wild fish from the oceans.
I love it when leftists go out of their way to control the live of others.
10 billion is not a burden.
Bison herds are expanding. The reason they were slaughtered had nothing to do with population growth.
Wolves, lions, etc were killed off because they attacked animals that humans were trying to herd. This would still be a problem if the world’s population were a tenth what it is today.
As to your claim that humans, our pets and food animals are 90% of mammals, that has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
Let me guess, you live in a large city, don’t you.
Leo,
Do seals and other marine mammals which breed on land or fast ice count as terrestrial mammals?
The range of coyotes has expanded since Europeans colonized the Americas. Recently the first one was spotted across the Panama Canal. IMO raccoons have also benefited from more humans, as have whitetail deer. Rats certainly have, but you exclude them.
Family planning programs and the like only work if the people accept them and use the recommended methods and provided materials. People in developed countries who “know better” still do not “wrap it up” because it “feels better” without a condom. Even in countries with the highest HIV infection rates, getting people to use (free) condoms is an uphill battle. Preventing pregnancy? A lot of men would not care about getting a woman pregnant, because they do not necessarily have to take responsibility. Women do not get a say about condom use in many developing countries.
The pill only works if consistently taken, and who knows how well it works if a person is malnourished and/or not getting enough to eat. Women who are uneducated do not necessarily understand how it works, so even if they are told to how take it properly, they may not do so*. When they get pregnant, they think the pills don’t work.
None of this matters at all if people have no interest in reducing pregnancy and/or have a whole lot of problems that seem more immediate/serious.
*Plenty of educated people do not take it properly either.
Humans populate 3% of the planet or 10% of the land mass. The Earth can handle another 10 or 20 billion I would think…
Bellamy made similar comments years ago and was ridiculed for it. Of course he is right, the Earth can support more people.
Butch, I too am a glass half full kind of person. The loss of the legendary cod fishery off of eastern Canada, the dramatic recent and ongoing loss of paleo-ground water resources due to accelerated agricultural irrigations in India, Pakistan, Iran and California?, Mexico? … the growing oceanic dead zones in the worlds major deltas as highly elevated fertilizer levels locally promote algal blooms and suck the oxygen out of the water column, the growing regions of agricultural mono-cultures…and associated chemical baths of herbicides/pesticides…reducing plant variety and foods for the Monarch butterfly migration and the wasp/bee populations…..Hey, lets double up the human load to 20 billion, because we can and reduce the non-human biosphere even more. I know we will persevere. I am optimistic. I saw a news story a few years ago about a Japanese scientist who has been working diligently to extract proteins from human excrement and create a meat substitute with it. Soilant Brown perhaps. Like bacteria, I can see from the many ” we’re OK Jack” comments in this response column that humanity, for all of its apparent intelligence, will like all other life forms on this planet, eat its way to the edge of the nutrient medium it lives in, until it becomes so bad, it does something else. Personally, setting a target population on us a species is a good thing for us. I suggested 2 billion as a hypothetical goal for the human population. How many people do you really need to have fun mate?
Leo Leclair
I suggest that you begin by forced sterilization. Of yourself, your friends, and your parents. Your children, if any are so unfortunate as to be born already. That will not go far in killing the 5 billion innocents you demand be killed, but it is the right start.
The Monarch butterflies will thank you. (Actually, that is false. They will ignore you too. But perhaps the plants growing as they take in the extra CO2 released by your decaying remnants will find some use in your brief passage here on earth. )
“Humans populate 3% of the planet or 10% of the land mass.”
So what? 1/2 the earth’s land mass is used for food production, that is what matters. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html
A stable human population of 2 billion living at first world standards would be a much better planet
======
there is no justification for saying 2 billion is any better than any other number. why not 1 billion or 3 billion?
the simple fact is that with 7 billion people today, we are doing a lot better job of feeding, clothing and educating the planet than we were with 2 billion.
as to “first world standard”, that is sort of a nonsense idea. that is like saying the world would be much better off if there weren’t any poor people. The Bible dealt with this question 2000 years ago: “The poor you will always have with you.”
“the simple fact is that with 7 billion people today, we are doing a lot better job of feeding, clothing and educating the planet than we were with 2 billion.”
The fact that we are doing a better job today is not because we have 7B and not 2B people, it is because of advances in science and technology. So the population number is irrelevant to the advances. And a planet with 1/3 the population would have far less issues with overfishing, denuded land, polluted water and plastic in the oceans.
“Leo Leclair May 19, 2017 at 6:35 am
A stable human population of 2 billion living at first world standards…”
I don’t think you understand the origin of the term “first world” or “second” or “third” for that matter. It is certainly not about poor or population.
You are right Patrick about my use of the expression “first world standards”, sensu strictu it arose from the cold war, I was using it in the sense of First tier = highly developed countries, versus second tier moderately developed, and third tier under developed. What I was saying is that I think all humans should live as well as we do in the highly developed world. Those living in first tier countries have a higher per capita consumption rate and larger environmental foot print than those in poorer countries. So what human load living at high consumption rates with our present technology might be sustainable, and leave large parts of the world as natural, untouched ecosystems? Pick a number.
I have heard the statement made that 90% of the land mammals larger than a rat are humans+our pets+our food. I did a quick check for some USA numbers in millions. People (321) Cats (95) Dogs (90) Horses/Donkeys (10) Pigs (128 = 115 annual slaughter, 7 breeding, 6 feral) Cattle (90) Sheep (6) = Total 740 million. Now the wild mammals in millions: Deer (30) Beaver (<4) Moose (0.3) I could not find numbers for wild Antelope, Elk, Bison, Big Horn Sheep, Raccoons, Porcupine, Coyote (there are about 0.5 killed each year), Fox, Wolf, Bear, Mountain Lion, Lynx, Bobcat…others? I would be surprised if the ones with no numbers would add up to 40 million to make it to 10% of our 740 million. Thoughts?
I WEAR THE PANTS IN MY FAMILY!!!
(when the missus allows it)
And I can have sex anytime
[that you want it]
Just how close have you and SMC become?
WAAAAAY too much info for me !! LOL
ferdberple and I taint that close. We do seem to have similar experiences with our respective ladies, though.
What I say goes around here
[right out the window]
Odd….
Back in the 60s, when our country was conscripting us male teenagers to fight a foreign war, I don’t recall Ms Steinem demanding the right to register for the draft.
She was already registered as daft.
{Up early, I see. Greetings.}
Good one. I should have thought of that.
: > )
I’ve never heard of a person, whether first or third world, deprived of a climate.
Ahh, Yes.
Gloria Steinem.
The woman who famously informed us that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Then, at age 56, she got married. For the first time.
(A little late to the party, but who am I to judge.)
Cynics suggested that she married English South African, environmental and animal rights activist David Bale (father of actor Christian) to keep him in the US after he overstayed his visa.
She says she wed then because the marriage laws had become more equal for women than when she was in her 20s.
Bale died three years later. No known connection with proximity to Steinem.
TOA, TOEU –
Tired Of America, Tired Of EU.
Deprivation: Definition: ‘the lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity’
Ms. Steinem uses the made up irrational phrase ‘climate deprivation’ as opposed to the politically correct ‘climate change’ to avoid being asked obvious tricky questions:
If population (humans, people, little rug rats, and so on) is the primary cause of ‘climate change’ what should be done to reduce population?
Comment: Solar cycle changes caused the majority of the warming in the last 150 years, not population growth or anthropogenic emission of CO2, but what the heck, let’s stay in the irrational politically correct paradigm that CO2 is the knob that controls climate.
How many people can the earth support without causing climate change? 500 million? What should we do with the other 7 billion?
Ms. Steinem, are you suggesting that the majority of women do not want to have children?
Are you suggesting that the majority of the women and men in the world do not love their children?
Ms. Steinem, have you ever seen a family where there is joy and love, from birth to death?
Yep . If it weren’t for men forcing women to get pregnant this human cancer would have never been inflicted on the planet .
Damn , this is the second day of severe climate deprivation around here . Just wish I hadn’t put out the red potted cactus a week or two ago .
http://cosy.com/y17/ClimateDeprivation170519_800_a.jpg
Where…?
On the chair to the right….! LOL
http://cosy.com/y17/ClimateDeprivation170519_CactusCrop_800.jpg
Yeah, “climate deprivation” is a new one. Word-smithing by the regressives is an art-form.
Oh, but it’s so easy:
Step 1: Take a word involving any type of human endeavor.
Step 2: Put the word “climate in front of it.
Bingo.
also works well if you replace your first step with
Step 1:Take a word describing any type of human affliction
Step 2: Put the words “Climate induced” in fromt of it
Climate induced Colds
Climate induced Fevers
Climate induced Flu
Climate induced Cancer
Beautiful picture of the snow.
Woke up to a little more this morning .
39.038681° -105.079070° 2500m
Semi Semites are the worst kind. They’ve got something to prove.
The patriarchy forcing women to have children? Funny how even historically and in illiterate parts of the world as soon as infant mortality has gone down so has the birth rate. Women want children, unless they are feminists. They also want children who survive. It is deep in the genes.
‘Women want children, unless they are feminists’. A very sweeping and unscientific statement. I’m a guy, and I know lots of women who don’t want kids, and these women are NOT feminists. I also know lots of women who feel compelled to have children because their partners want them. My sister didn’t want kids, and her boyfriend, his parents and friends gave her a really hard time. They said she wasn’t a real women, and that there was obviously something wrong with her. They bascially made her feel like shit just because she didn’t want a baby. Fortunately for her, she came to her senses and left the guy. So lets have less hysteria on this thread. It’s pathetic. Some of you are as bad as the warmists. 🙂
An idiot goes in, yep, idiots come out !
Steinem is providing proof that old age does affect your logical abilities. I’d say that population growth has occurred since the first homo sapien and existed for very practical reasons – the additional labor to work the land producing food, which is what the vast majority of the population was involved in. As recently as 1910, a major advanced country (the U.S.) employed fully half of its populatioin in providing food. And how does Gloria imagine that technological and medical advancement would have occurred if the population was still the size it was 500 years ago? You need people, (lots of people) to produce folks capable of advanced thinking and inventions. I only remember two electrical geniuses of note at the time of the electrical revolution. With Gloria’s reduced population, there would hardly have been one, much less two of them around. Gloria’s advanced standard of living, far beyond that which would have been achieved in her “cave man society”, is completely dependent upon our planet’s population size. Even if climate were controlled mainly by greenhouse gases, we have the technology to eliminate a large proportion of them, what with molten salt reactors, light water reactors and electric cars. Instead of pushing for actual, practical “solutions” to her imaginary problem, Gloria uses the opportunity to spread more anti-male BS. Gloria is almost indescribably ignorant. I won’t say “dumb broad,” not wanting to
lead folks to think I believe that woman are dumb. Gloria missed the boat when it came to mental abilities.
“Steinem is providing proof that old age does affect your logical abilities.”
Hardly, she’s always been this daft.
Go outside. Look up. See what looks like a bright light? That’s the sun – a gigantic ball of nuclear fire nearby in space. I think that that has more impact that the kid walking around the mall.
Is this maybe some inbuilt suicidal instinct of certain people due to population density, that they think that all problems can only be resolved by dramatically reducing the population?
And I notice she didn’t volunteer to be part of the reduction, for the sake of the Earth.
The goal of modern leftists is to make sure that everyone else lives up to their standards.
lol Have you ever been to the UK?
Global warming has gone missing again here this Spring. Global clouding and global raining, but good for re-seeding the lawn.
“Climate advocates are often (though not always) population control advocates.”
The fundamental thesis of all “environmentalism” is that the world has too many brown babies. This is not new. It goes back many years.
The “eugenics” movement was very influential before WWII. President Wilson, who segregated Federal offices, was a proponent. “Eugenics” was a key part of the “progressive” movement. (read “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era” by Thomas C. Leonard. esp. Ch. 7 “Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform).
A popular 1916 book: “The Passing of the Great Race” by Madison Grant made the connection between Eugenics and Racism explicit. In “The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan says that he reading the book and: “”Everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” Yup, a scientific consensus.
After WWII, and the Civil Rights movement, the thesis could no longer be propounded in public. The genius of the “environmental” movement is that it took the basic idea of the eugenics movement: too many brown babies, and recast it as a problem with natural resources, an idea that harkens back to Malthus*. But, the emotional basis of the movement has always been fear of brown babies.
This why I say that “environmentalism” is the last socially acceptable form of racism.
*The intellectual genealogy of “Eugenics” is Mathus to Darwin to Galton. This one reason why leftists make Darwin a touchstone of “scientific” thinking.
Walter – thanks. I will look up those readings.
After Hilter was exposed, the Progressives, who, yes, have been harping on Population Control strongly, since Darwin / Galton, had to disguise their love of top-down control of the population, and trying to form humanity in their image.
Thy had to hide the fact that Hilter was yet another Progressive. Desiring a government that engineered things from the top down, including who should reproduce and who should not.
So, they painted Hilter as an arch-conservative. They did this by ignoring the Progressivism, and noting the nationalism and the strong military. And so, Progressives rewrote Hilter as an arch-conservative, rather than an arch-progressive.
Hitler’s party was the National Socialists. The conservative party was in opposition.
Well the conservatives were in opposition, until Hitler decided things would run a lot more smoothly if there was no opposition party. Sort of like China, with the large number of Progressive Western leaders heaping praise on how smoothly things run in China because they have only one party.
Stalin was a strong nationalist and advocated a strong military.
Proof positive that communism is a right wing conspiracy.
Darwin was remarkably non-racist at a time when some human groups were considered subhuman and hunted by Europeans.
Galton, a relative of Darwin’s, made important contributions to statistical analysis, but did indeed also promote eugenics, to include naming it. From biographical studies he conducted, Galton concluded that desirable human traits were hereditary, ie from “nature, not nurture”. Darwin strongly disagreed with this hypothesis. Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, after Darwin’s death,
Damn you greedy men! Stop depriving women of their climate! Seriously, where did you hide it?
So what’s the consensus among the eggsperts? should we be blowing up the women or the school-kiddies?
Can even one member of the party of SCIENCE explain to me how listening to her is any more informative than listening to, say, Cher?
Margaret Sanger invented the rhetoric of the woe-is-me tale of women being forced to have babies.
The Feminist angle is that there is opposition to abortion, and they say women when pregnant should have the choice to either carry the baby to term, or kill it – legally, and in an abortion funded by tax-payer dollars.
There is a huge Feminism angle they strongly neglect: rape.
A woman either gets pregnant by actions she is involved with willingly, or unwillingly. If unwilling, then it is rape.
So, here is where the Feminists are at.
Life begins at conception, per scientific consensus and the scientific definition of life (this is all readily supported with the interweb, and with what we all learned in middle school – there is no “spontaneous generation,” and there is no biology/developmental term for some mysterious stage of the life cycle between fertilization and when life begins for that product of conception – this is nowhere in any embryology or developmental biology textbook).
Feminists believe that, if a woman is raped and a pregnancy results, that there is no need to pay attention to the rapist and his evil deed – or that would be their big issue; instead, with the three parties involved – rapist father, raped impregnated mother, and innocent developing child, the Feminists prefer we lean on – get this – the least powerful of the three parties involved.
I thought progressives were fighting FOR the down-trodden, the voiceless, the oppressed? Those with no political voice, with no access ot the courts? -Guess not.
The really sick thing is that the original feminists like Susan B. Anthony HATED abortionists (their word). They saw people who advocated for abortion and extreme “family planning” as trying to degrade one of the defining feminine characteristics/abilities. They also (accurately) saw abortion as enabling unscrupulous men to exploit women without having to take responsibility for their actions. Early feminists would have loathed Steinem and her ilk.
The “modern” feminist movement does not value femininity, and does not want to believe that many/most women want to have children. From what I hear, men are actually much more likely to be ambivalent about having kids, and the ones usually pushing for offspring are women. This desire persists despite decades of being fed garbage about household drudgery, the patriarchy, blah blah blah.
Funny how the same people who spend so much time talking about choice do not actually want anyone to have one. I suppose that is why “feminists” and “environmentalists” get along so well. And now they are combining forces, heaven help us all.
This “coercion” could explain the Roman and Medieval warm periods but what about all those changes before men and women evolved from apes? Really have to wonder. 🙂