David Attenborough's Malthusian Trap

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

Just a spur of the moment thing as I was reading an article about David Attenborough. I get a little pissed off with these environmentalists like Attenborough.

David Attenborough and other environmental activists who are constantly talking about how the planet cannot continue to maintain human society and how we live, knowingly or not, refuses to point a finger at the culprit. Environmental catastrophe and the potential for an end of life as we know it on this planet, is a product of system crisis, of the failure of capitalism. This cannot be halted within the framework of capitalism. By ignoring this, Attenborough and others like him are blaming the victims rather than the cause of the problem. His failure to see democratic Socialism as the only answer and the working class as the only force that can bring that about, leads him to this Malthusian trap where the world's poor, and overwhelmingly women, are in the line of fire. It is how we produce the necessities of life that is the problem. Not Ethiopian or Indian birth rates.

In the article I read and I think it was a report of him speaking to the Radio Times in the UK. He says, "We are a plague on the Earth. It's coming home to roost aver the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; It's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now."

This man who's backward thinking doesn't allow him the capacity to reject a title that ensures he is called "Sir" David Attenborough, offer as a solution to what is a global capitalist crisis of catastrophic proportions, sex education and "other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries.". So he's not talking about the Rotterdam area which has quite a high population density but India and Ethiopia and what he calls "developing countries" that cannot and will not develop because capitalism cannot develop them.

Attenborough talks about Ethiopia and how they cannot support themselves and that there's "Too many people there.".  As I point out in the video, there are two adults living on plots of land in my community, and I'm one of them, and this space could probably feed five or more families in India or Ethiopia.  It is typical of first world intellectuals to find solutions to capitalist crisis on the backs of the world's poor. Attenborough attacking the poor in the former colonial world  has to be condemned.

Reviewed here

I'll end here, I say my short piece in the video above. If you want to read a good book on this subject  check out Ian Angus' book, Too Many People.