Say Anything Blog

This was previously written here.

A View Askew

The recent issue of “The Dakota Beacon” has two articles on the “myth” of overpopulation.  Both stories use examples of consolidating the entire world population into the American States, Texas and Kansas with each person having 1269 feet^2 and 642 feet^2 respectively, with the rest of the entire planet being empty.  I am not sure what both of the exercises are supposed to prove.  1269 square feet is enough room to move around in, but it definitely cannot support the needs of the one human life that occupies it. 

There are several questions that were not asked or answered in the articles pertaining the amount of square footage the average American (the standard of living that the Republicans and religious right feel is there duty to spread worldwide) needs to sustain themselves.

How much food does the average American eat in one year?


How much land is required to grow or produce that food?


How much land is required to produce the other necessities of life, including water, sources of energy, wood for homes, metals for cars, cell phone components etc?


And how much land is required to store the amount of waste the average American produces in one year?

A Lesson from Easter Island

Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean around the middle of the second millennium A.D. as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders faced hardships, there was nowhere they could run, or to anyone they could turn for help. Nor shall the inhabitants of earth have recourse elsewhere if the hardships continue trending on the course they are currently on.  If the globe as a whole falls short of food production for the world populations, there is nowhere we can import it from.  We can learn from Easter Island.

The Rapanui (natives of Easter Island) had a South Pacific island home covered with a subtropical forest.  The native trees were the source of everything the Rapanui relied on to sustain themselves. The trees produced the fruit they ate and housed the islands bird populations.  They constructed their homes from the trees and fashioned bark-cloth clothing. They heated their homes with firewood (which on Easter Island can drop as low as 50°F), and used it to cook their meals. They constructed oceangoing canoes and crafted harpoons to spear dolphins and tuna.

A main consumer of wood was used by the ruling to produce the statues that have made Easter Island famous. The wood was used for log rollers, sleds, and/or levers, along with rope made from tree fibers, to transport and erect the hundreds of statues that once occupied the island.

Even as the forests dwindled, the Rapanui ruling class intensified food production, eager to create surpluses to support the carving of ever-larger statues. But that practice stressed an already fragile agricultural system, and the expanding population put other food sources under extraordinary pressure too.  Easter Island was stripped of every single tree, making them extinct. Six species of birds were hunted to extinction, and the regional fishing was destroyed. The culture fell into a civil war and population decreased to 111 members.

Can Easter Island be seen as a microcosm of our planet today? Should we regard its shocking collapse as a cautionary tale of the utmost gravity? We are over-consuming our resources as if there were no tomorrow, or future generations.  The only difference is the scale—from a little island to the whole planet.”

I did the Math


Easter Island is 63 miles^2 or 1,756,339,200 ft^2. Easter Islands population peaked at 20,000 which equates to 87,817 ft^2/person.  Quite a big more than 1269 feet^2 proposed by the authors in the Dakota Beacon. 87,000 feet^2 is what they reached before the annihilation of their island.

How does the earth compare today to the height of Easter Island?  The Earth has 12,000,000 miles^2 of arable land or 334,540,800,000,000 ft^2 of arable land and the Earth has 6,525,170,264 (July 2006 est.) people. This gives us a physiological population density of 543 people/mile^2 or 51,269 ft^2/person.

The Rapanui had 87,817 ft^2/person, and today every inhabitant of the earth has 40% less land to sustain our needs.

This is an excerpt found here.

“...the number of women who die
from unsafe abortions every year—estimated minimally
at 70,000 by the World Health Organization—will soar
due to Bush’s policies. Making abortion illegal, or difficult
to obtain, does not stop abortion from happening.

In the Philippines, an overwhelmingly Catholic nation
where abortions are completely illegal, ... estimates
there are half a million a year. Many of them take place
in unsafe, unsanitary conditions.

At just one hospital in
Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia – another country
where abortion is illegal—a study found that half of all
female deaths were from botched back-street abortions.

Half the women in country die from bad abortions? WOW.  Abortion needs to remain accessible to women.

This past weekend I viewed the documentary “Goldwater Mr. Conservative” and found it to be very enjoyable. The documentary profiles the life of Barry Goldwater starting with his early youth, and the lives of his parents.

It moves on to his election as a Senator and the release of his bestselling novel “The Conscience of a Conservative” which according to the documentary launched Mr. Goldwater political career and the modern conservative movement.

What I found most interesting were the positions of Barry Goldwater.  He was first elected in the 1950’s and took on unions and big labor citing the influence and power they had in American politics.  He fought for reduced spending, and limited government etc. However by the late 70’s and early 1980’s Mr. Goldwater opposed the growing influence and power that religion and religious groups were gaining in the Republican Party.  Mr. Goldwater viewed the platforms of these groups as not related to issues of politics and government.  They were issues of the Bible and not the US constitution. Barry Goldwater was Pro-Choice and supported gays in the military. 

In closing, no matter what your politics, I feel anyone who views this documentary will take something positive from it as it is a unique view into the political spectrum of the United State from 1958 to 1986 give or take a few years.