What Is Really Our Right?

Feature, By jimjazz, 10th December, 2007

In Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Judith – Brian’s girlfriend, says, “Suppose we agree that he can’t have babies, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans; but we agree that he does have the right to have babies.”

Even Monty Python had worked out that oppression and child birth go hand in hand way back in 1979.

Neil Shepherd, Director General of DOCS noted in the 2006-07 annual report, “The statistical probability is now that one in every five children in NSW will be reported to DOCS at some point before they turn 18 years of age.”

It would seem that opposition to gay parenting isn’t about whether you are good parents – it’s just about fear of sexual orientation or whatever else self-righteous reason people have to children being raised as decent, fair, generous, loving and honest individuals. It is, apparently, more important where mummy and daddy stick their bits than raising fine, upstanding children, adolescents and young people in a safe environment who will become the next generation and will, whether you like it or not, challenge the way you think.

But I do have to say, after that spat, that I still have a problem with gays wanting children.

We inhabit a planet in a vast universe. At this time, as we measure it in 2007, there are already six billion of us. According to the United Nations report, World Population To 2300, by 2050 there will be almost nine billion people on the planet or put another way: this growth in population will consume as much food in the next fifty years as humans have consumed for the last 10,000.

Notice a problem?

And while we are running around being busy, worried about the bus being on time or if that delivery will arrive at work today for the really important meeting and you’d just die if it failed to turn up, consider this.

At the moment our whole lifestyle, everything we rely on from the food on our table at night when we get home from work, to the computer you switch on in your office in the morning, to the power that drives the lighting rig at your favourite nightclub, relies on oil. Nitrogen for the soil that grows the crops, the bag you freeze to put the kids’ lunch in for school this week, everything that comes to the supermarket by road, sea or air or anywhere for that matter, not to mention the car itself and, oh, the liquid you put in its tank.

So what is the big problem?

We have peaked, are peaking or are about to peak in world oil production. This, in and of itself, is not remarkable because like any limited resource, it tends to follow a production bell curve. In 2007 we are at the top of the quite narrow apex to this curve. It is also known as Hubbert’s Peak, after the American scientist, Dr Marion King Hubbert, who in 1956 correctly predicted that US domestic oil production would peak around 1970 – which it did.

The issue is not whether we are running out of oil, but what will happen to the cost of oil as demand keeps rising and supply begins to slip and then descend into an irreversible decline.

It will mean a collapse. A wholesale, unprecedented, economic collapse, being described as the Second Great Depression, it will make the 1929 event seem like a stroll through a bank vault full of gold.

What about alternative energy? Well, yes, what about it? It’s available, we can produce it but haven’t you noticed car manufacturers selling yet more cars still of the combustion engine variety every day? See many electric cars spinning around or lots of individual windmills in the backyards of people’s homes or several on the roofs of apartment blocks?

Alternative fuels are available but they are not sufficiently developed by way of output to drive the $65 trillion world economy at the rate it currently spins; nor will they be able to fill the void as a cheap resource. Oil has gone from $12 a barrel a decade ago to nearly $100 a barrel today.

The simple fact is that our economy is predicated on the reliable supply of cheap, effective energy. Without it every financial market around the world will convulse and collapse, taking with them many human lives – and I don’t mean to the grave, although that will undoubtedly be an eventual outcome. No, these people will lose something more surprising – their assumption about rights.

Every thing we imagine that we are entitled to will be challenged in a world where you can’t get milk at three in the morning – shit, you won’t be able to even get it at nine in the morning. If you want milk, you’ll have to milk a fucking cow. In a world like this, where human life is brought closer to the prevarications of the natural world, who will we stake our claim for the right to exist? There is no justice so complete, so utterly indisputable as the kind that exposes our true vulnerability to the influence of a natural world.

In this new world will be issues that will slide us down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as aspirational notions of self actualisation are replaced by more basic requirements. Like, where the fuck is my next meal coming from?

The funny thing about this, and I think it’s valuable to hold on to a laugh or two, is that on the other side of vast economic devastation is the very thing we’re already quite aware of – climate change.

Hard on the heels of omniscient oil, is the product of our flagrant abuse of this extraordinarily useful and precious resource. Increasingly erratic weather patterns are making the reliable production of basic food stuffs in the quantities we need, a challenge.

All up I think that’s what you might call a triptych. Whatever you call it, the fact is that adding to the population is not something that should be entered into lightly.

Recently I was at a party at Gretel Pinniger’s, also known as Sydney identity Madam Lash. I met a neighbour of hers who was a profoundly heterosexual, self made, male. He said in response to my statement about not having children, “why not?”
“I’m gay,” I replied defensively.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Well, really,” I began in my most self righteous tone, “I don’t want to add to the planet’s overburdened population.”
He stopped and craned his neck, turning his head to look at me quizzically.
“Let me tell you one thing – we are heading into a future that is going to need a tenacious generation who will be able to face what’s coming. You folk are usually bright, respectful and loving but, significantly, you also know how to survive.”

In light of this, two questions remain – should we be contributing to the world’s population after all? And are there are any lesbians out there looking for an involved father?

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