Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

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	August 28, 2003

CAUTION: CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS AHEAD Regular readers of How to Save the World have noticed -- and expressed some dismay -- that I've proffered some fairly controversial opinions here in recent weeks, and also that I've blogged more about environmental philosophy and less about business innovation, technology and metablogging (the subjects that attract the most hits to this site). The honeymoon for this blog is clearly over, and the number of blogs inbound to How to Save the World has dropped this month for the first time. With a great sigh, I remain unrepentant. The controversial opinions were deliberate trial balloons to see whether some of the ideas in my work-in-process novel The World That Could Be are going to turn off readers and defeat the second objective of the book (presenting a prescription for creating a new, utopian world). And time does not permit me to write more than what I'm producing now on this blog without seriously diluting its quality and originality. The three (somewhat interrelated) premises that have upset my readers the most are: That significant improvement to our planet's health, and human quality of life, is only possible with a significant reduction in human population; That humans are not meant to live in cities or other crowded habitats, and that any utopian society must allow and encourage people to spread out and live in close contact with the rest of nature; That part of the problem with this world is that we are producing too much human food (there's enough today, if distributed efficiently, to generously feed 10 billion humans, and Worldwatch reports there are now more overweight humans on Earth than underweight ones, a consequence of which is that millions of acres are being converted to agriculture, and overharvested, needlessly). These are not arguments, alas, that can be made effectively in a simple 300-500 word blog post. So I need to know, dear reader: (a) do you find these three premises as intuitively obvious as I do, or not? and (b) if not, if you picked my book up in a bookstore, would you suspend disbelief in these premises long enough to read the book, or drop the book like a hot potato? 8:22:20 AM  trackback []  comment []

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