Misplaced pathogens

We have all read about the Ehrlich's of this world describing the human population as a 'virus' and the Suzuki's of the world describing us as 'maggots defecating on the earth'  and other Gaia enthusiasts advising that the best means of environmental protectionism should be the 'culling' of the 'human herd'.
Implicit within all of these misanthropic utterances is the belief that those who make such egregious  pronouncements are somehow removed from, or better yet morally above this herd and are therefore not to be included in the fate meted out to the common person.

“…even if there were a population explosion, it would still be inhuman to say that there are too many humans on the planet. You can say there are too many people in a lift (‘eight persons max’) but not on Earth. To wish to reduce the number of living, breathing humans on this planet is an obscenity.”

Exactly. Because if there are too many people on Earth, then presumably some people are in the “too many” category. And who do you think those people are? The one child family in London consuming massive amounts of resources in a Western standard of living? Or the family with eight children living in a shanty town consuming so few resources that they are under-nourished in some poor country that is difficult to locate on a map and somewhere overthere? Generally, the overpopulation drum-beaters are worried about too many people being born in poor overseas countries. The implicit racism in such a view has been canvassed before. After all, we in the enlightened West are not the problem, we’ve reached the state of perfection of small families that do not naturally replace our population. Newman draws a parallel to early twentieth century England:

“Today's overpopulation hysteria is not a patch on what it was a hundred years ago, however, when mainstream intellectuals such as HG Wells, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were proposing not just sterilisation but actual extermination. Back then, there were fewer people in Britain, of course, but many more of them were homeless. It was thought that homelessness came from there being too many people. It was a population problem. Simple as that. But then voters – as opposed to intellectuals – realised that homelessness was caused not by too many people crowding too small a country, but by too few people owning too much land.
 

If there truly is a pathogenic virus at loose upon this earth it is the intellectual vanity that has become de rigueur amongst the higher educational facilites of the western world, particularly within the humanities departments.