The articles themselves are great; people speaking plainly about the risks and responsibilities of reproduction and over-reproduction. However, what's been even more interesting to me is to follow the online commentary for these articles. I've been watching online articles about population control for about a year now, and have also read many articles published online in past years.
What I'm noticing is that there is a greater percentage of people who agree with the author responding than I've seen before. In the past articles, and even articles as recent as half a year ago, by far most of the commentary was negative. I thought I saw more positive responses to these two articles, and to check on that, printed all the commentary out and tallied it up.
The Porrit article had 438 comments on the day I collected my data; out of those 438, 113 were in agreement with the author. That is more than 25%. One out of every four responders agreed that overpopulation was a problem that should be directly addressed.
This is encouraging, I think. I take it as a sign that the Hardinian Taboo may be easing!
As I scanned through the responses to the Porrit article, I began to notice that the nature of the opposing commentary was predictable. Almost all of it fell into the following categories, which I've coded for myself.
I plan to go back through the commentary and find out which category is the most prevalent - and maybe develop a letter to the editor that directly addresses that particular objection. Here are the categories (which, by the way, correlate somewhat with King's Demon List, and my list of Objections.)
- Spectre of Totalitarianism/Communism: “1984” =TOT
- Distrust of ‘experts’, be they scientists, politicians, or anyone but themselves…=EXP
- Overpop/global warming is fake and a conspiracy = FAKE
- Cornucopian argument (there’s plenty of room) =CORN
- Overconsumption, not overpopulation, is the problem =CONS
- Limiting children not necessary in X nation, which is at/below replacement =LOW
- Immigration is the problem = IMM
- Ever-growing population necessary for social systems = PONZ
- Children are a gift from God, not to be interfered with = GOD
- Having children is human nature and shouldn’t be controlled = NAT
- My large family is not the problem, we recycle! = NOT-US
- Overpopulation is only a problem in 3rd World countries =3WOR
- "Idiocracy factor"; if only the yahoos reproduce, we'll only have yahoos =IDIO
- Referring to the work of Malthus as a failed theory, and grouping all overpopulation discussion to those theories =MALT
- Belief that technology will save us =TECH
- And last but not least, Unclassifiable responses - flippant, referring to space aliens, and so on. =UNCL
