The national treasure and naturalist, David Attenborough, has been pronouncing, yet again, on the subject of world population growth. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph he opined that the famines in Ethiopia are about too many people competing for too little land and in the circumstances it’s ‘barmy’ to address the problem by sending them bags of flour. The great thing about being 87 is that you can stop worrying what people think but Sir David seems unusually alert to the ‘huge, huge sensitivities’ about his opinions. And one is that:
‘When you talk about world population … the areas we are talking about are Africa and Asia. To have a European telling Africans that they shan’t have children is not the way to go about things.’
It’s a useful admission. Because almost all the people who obsess about population – the Lib Dem conference was, I expect, full of them – and the environmentalists who sound off about big families, belong to the class – white, middle class, anguished liberals – who are themselves least likely to have children to excess or to have children at all.
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