Dear {ToNameFirst},   

On a personal level I wish you the best in the New Year. As director of SKIL I wish you well in your efforts to set humankind on a better course.
Below is SKIL's 2009 Plan.

Human civilization is headed toward a collision with nature's limits. The crash could wipe away much of what we call progress. Rapid population decline (RPD) can prevent the worst injuries and place the human experiment on a course to live within these limits. SKIL's challenge for 2009, your challenge should you join us, is to find ways to help 6 billion people take behaviors that implement RPD.

In the next paragraphs I wish to advance your journey toward a belief that:

Rapid population decline (RPD)
is necessary for the graceful existence of our children.

We know; the loss of cheap energy will reduce human wellbeing; fossil fuel use will change climate; immigration will increase demand for a nation's resources, and a growing human footprint will crush more of the eco system.

People, who see these problems, investigate behavior-changes that: improve economic or political systems, increase carrying capacity, mediate conflict, redistribute wellbeing, limit human consumption and waste, and isolate one area or group from another. Each of these behavior-changes slow progress toward civilization's cataclysm.

If cataclysm is delayed not prevented, one might ask, why we are expending so much time and energy discussing them. Why are we cajoling individuals and agencies to implement them?

Maybe it is because we have great distaste for the behaviors that would avoid the cataclysm. For example, behaviors that would implement rapid population decline. We don't want to be involved in increasing the death-rate or reducing the birth rate enough. Each of us does not want to be involved in causing an individual's death or preventing an individual's birth.

We don't want our group involved in direct genocide -- the killing of people who are competing with us for scarce resources as happened in Germany and Bosnia and 10,000 other places on earth during the last millennia.

Each of us does not want to be involved in indirect genocide. Which happens when a billion people increase the amount of meat in their diets, or alcohol in their gas and these acts take soybeans and corn from the diets of billions of starving people.

For 40 years I have studied the development of a cognition that self limits births enough to create RPD. However, given the limited amount of time we have to implement RPD before civilization collapse I have shifted focus. I now believe we should rely on social control of the birthrate. We should create a majority that thinks RPD is necessary, who through democratic process coerce the entire constituency to limit themselves to one child per family behaviors.


In the New Year ask yourself four questions about the above paragraphs:

     1) "Are they a fair portrayal of the human experiment?"
     2) "Do they truthfully describe the alternative behaviors that address its predicament."
     3) "Do they make clear that our present procreation activities (even if improved so they cause zero population growth) leave us open to scarcity driven indirect-genocide -- followed by 6 billion people involved in anarchic social conflict -- leading to destruction of the natural environment and an unrecoverable dark age?
      4) "Is it clear that the only behaviors powerful enough to avoid this future, are a) social control of the birthrate, or b) autocratic control of the death rate?

When you find answers, I hope they will help you help us implement a benign form of RPD -- the alternatives, including business as usual, are unthinkable.

Jack Alpert
www.skil.org

PS. Each of you is invited to attend or host a SKIL dinner which will bring these ideas into clarity. SKIL Dinner proposal

URL of this note: /Notes/happynewyear2009.html
which you are welcome to send to your friends.