Population

I remember reading years ago about privatisation of water in Bolivia. In the end the people revolted and kicked the companies out of their country. The companies involved were Becthe and Suezl who were part of six water companies who have increased six-fold over a 12-year period. Apparently in 1990 up to 51 million people received their water from private companies. The figure has risen now to more than three hundred with operations spanning fifty six countries and two territories.

Scary thinking about it!!!

Can't say I've enjoyed the tv Big Brother but the other offshoot - Room 101 - has amused me!

absentgrana - I quite agree - water is crucially important - and is often overlooked.
It is interesting that 'water' is seen as something different from all the other humanitarian needs. In fact I see it as the most pivitol influence for future health and progress in countries that have difficulties .............. regardless of the political dynamics that exists.

Ariadne; it was a long time ago that I read them..after having the children I had to change the sort of book I read; however, books like Clergyman's Daughter and Germinal moulded me into the sort of person I became [and hope I still am].I read all of Orwells' books [I think].

Butternut Sorry – I'm typing in chords again.

Butternuyt Water is political too. I have lost track of the number of times the US has vetoed a UN resolution to include access to clean water as a human right.

Ah! Thanks, ariadne.

Crimson - I loved Orwell's other novels too - did you read "Coming up for Air"? And I was in a situation where I had to teach the essays too; it was so good for me because I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to read them. Glad I did!

The "educate a girl...." bit.

I watched the first few series of Big Brother; partly because my kids were teenagers at the time and it gave us another thing to talk about. It went downhill over the years, but I do think youngsters learned a lot about interacting with people [needed even more in the facebook/twitter age]. I loved George Orwell books. One of my favourites was A Clergyman's Daughter which showed how easily one can get into a downward spiral out of which it's difficult to emerge. As relevant today as it was then when we see people sleeping in the streets. Joan; have you heard of an Australian folk family called The Fagans? We went to a concert last night and their son was one of the support acts. He sings with his partner, Nancy Kerr. Last night his parents performed with them as they were over here on babysitting duties, a second grandchild having been born recently. They sang a capella and it was lovely to see and hear. I thought what a wonderful life their two boys were going to have, being brought up surrounded by beautiful music. Their music is an unusual mix of traditional british folk and antipodean [is that the right word?] stuff; but it works beautifully [no didgeridoos, though]. Sorry; going off at tangents again....

That's OK, joan . I've never watched Big Brother on TV either, nor have any wish to. Having read Orwell's book at least a decade before 1984, I was also puzzled by the title of the TV programme when I first encountered it. Still am, but not enough to investigate, as it doesn't look tempting enough. Sometimes I think we need a Yawn! emoticon.

1984 is the book that is REALLY depressing. I remember the film too: John Hurt made a wonderful Winston Smith.

The catchphrase derived from the story was 'Big Brother is Watching You'. I remember a few years ago when i was doing a late-in-life degree in German and French. We were reading a German article about Big Brother in the modern TV sense, but I had not encountered the genre and never watch crud like that anyway. I was totally confused by the article, and thought I was misunderstanding the German, because I was looking for references to George Orwell and 1984!! When the lecturer asked why i was looking so upset, I told him I could not find any references to George Orwell, and did not understand what the whole thing as on about..

I got laughed at by the young 'uns. Most embarrassing, but when they explained the telly programs to me, all i could ask was 'why'? I still don't understand why the genre exists!!

And sorry - I waffled off the subject.

Although aware of the concept, I was in the 70's, unaware of the practicalities. I became even more aware while undergoing treatments for infertility, and the birth of the first 'test-tube' baby happened soon after my first adoption. When, as a student, I first read Brave New World, I was not thinking about it as a way of providing me with a family!

Human beings have been practising genetic engineering since the dawn of agriculture when we started to 'genetically engineer' by keeping the strongest seed strains and re-sowing them for the next crop. Likewise with domesticating animals from the wild. Think wolves ——> all modern dog breeds. They just didn't call it genetic engineering, but that's what it was, and still is. Test tubes and petri dishes are not really scary and genetic engineering is not new.

We went to a talk given by one of the people who pioneered IVF and he was very much in fear of his life when he was doing it [I'm sure he told us he'd had death threats]. So many things that we just take for granted in life now; IVF, cloning, genetic engineering etc.

Brave New World has an extra dimension of scariness now- more than when I first read it as we hadn't at that time envisaged in vitro fertilisation!!

Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World [have to admit to not having read the latter..] all coming back from what was the future but is now the past to haunt us in the present. Two legs good etc. Cried last time I saw Animal Farm at the theatre!

World Food Day - 16th October

There is enough food in the world for everyone to have enough to eat, but it is unevenly distributed.

Can you imagine North America 'giving' surplus food to North Korea, for instance?

Like oil, food is political - and some countries are seen as more deserving than others.

Beginning to sound like George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Yes, crimson, I do find it frustrating that our efforts to help people who need it are frustrated by power-hungry, power-holding political greedy gutses in developing countries. But.... globally the population growth rate is falling and should continue to fall as living standards slowly but surely rise.

Most people are not evil or wicked, but in general they find it difficult to see the bigger picture. Their instinct is to look after first their own family, then their immediate friends and neighbours, then their own local area, their nation and finally the whole world.
Wider concerns need publicity to remind people of their existence, and organisational ability to make changes where they are necessary. These can seem ( and often are!) like "political interference) to those on the receiving end.

But don't you find it frustrating that if we used our pooled knowledge and finances we could do so much? Someone splits the atom and we use it to kill people etc. I wish I could look at things from the glass half full perspective.

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree that "humans can't be trusted". What a pessimistic, misanthropic view of our species! However, even if it is true (just for argument's sake) that we, as a species, are untrustworthy, greedy, nasty, resources-grabbing, and planet-wrecking, I still don't think that gives an elite a powerful and rich few the right to tell the rest of us how to behave as if they were gods. That way madness — not to mention cruelty, more greed, more untrustworthiness, etc., etc. — lies.

Yes, that's true. I think what I'm trying to say [albeit very badly] is that our ideas on birth control have been clouded by some very very evil people. In the natural world poplulation control is regulated by lack of suitable food but, as human beings that doesn't happen in the same way [except for the aformentioned third world countries]. We are responsible for that control but, sadly, as in with other issues humans can't be trusted to do so without abusing it in some way. We live in such a beautiful world with so much going for us and yet we constantly mess it up by our own greed and lack of compassion for others.

crimson Not shooting down in flames, but, just for the record, not all birth control pioneers were concerned with giving women more freedom. Marie Stopes, in particular, was much more concerned about stopping people she considered poor quality material from breeding. Not that this adds anything useful to this thread.

I undertstand the reasoning about having large families in third world countries, especially as the mortality rate with young children is still high, but what about in other countires where people churn out children without being able to support them without the help of the state? Did the way that the Nazis abuse any ideas we have about birth control [which earlier pioneers developed as a way of giving women more freedom etc] cloud our reasoning about population control? Please don't shoot me for saying this; it's difficult sometimes to put an idea across on the internet without it sounding wrong. I'm just playing devil's advocate. Over population worries me terribly and seeing people have child after child without the means to support them concerns me. Every child that's born should have the help of the state to achieve it's highest potential, but that help isn't infinite.