Population Politics: The Choices That Shape Our Future

ISBN-13: 9780765806031 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 396 str.

Virginia Abernethy; Garrett Hardin

Opis

International efforts to regulate fertility rates so that populations do not grow beyond the earth's capacity have included technical assistance and capital; improved health care conditions to lower the risk of infant mortality; increased opportunities to develop literacy; the democratization of governments; and several decades of liberal immigration and refugee policies favoring third world nations. The persistence of high fertility despite international efforts confounds demographers. Population Politics brilliantly dissects the paradigm responsible for the counterproductive efforts of nations and international agencies. Abernethy, a renowned anthropologist, shows why policies hamper the shift to lower fertility. Ireland, Indonesia, Cuba, China, Turkey and Egypt are but a few of the countries Abernethy examines, showing how economic, sociocultural, and agricultural factors that have caused population growth can be harnessed to stabilize population size. Population Politics is a provocative examination of the influence of aid and liberal immigration policies on world population growth, and often counterproductive to the role of the United States as an industrial power. This volume's uniquely interdisciplinary perspective will enlighten the lay reader, as well as demographers and epidemiologists, conservationists, reproduction and family specialists, agricultural economists, and public health personnel. Virginia D. Abernethy is professor emeritus of psychiatry (anthropology) at Vanderbilt Medical School and was for 11 years the editor of the scholarly journal Population and Environment. Garrett Hardin is emeritus professor of human ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Spis treści

I: Framing the Issues; 1: Growth; 2: A Global Dilemma; II: Why Growth Flies out of Control; 3: Belief as Part of the Problem; 4: Cultural Brakes; 5: Where to Look for Balance; 6: Which Incentives?; 7: Development Alone May Spur Population Growth; 8: Culture: Make or Break; III: The Big Picture; 9: One-World; 10: Potlatching Twentieth-Century Style; 11: Helping While Not Harming; 12: Conservation, Incentives, and Ethics; 13: Limiting Factors; IV: America; 14: Kissing the Blarney Stone and Other Tales; 15: History Does Not Stop; 16: The Path to Poverty; 17: All Our People; 18: The Carrying Capacity of the United States; 19: And Away We Go; 20: Let Freedom Ring; 21: Taking Hold

O autorze

Virginia Abernethy, Garrett Hardin