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strong>Feb. 22, p. 6

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), Indonesia’s population has doubled within 40 years from 119.2 million in 1971 to 237.6 million in 2010. In another 40 years from now, our population will exceed 450 million, resulting in the increased extraction of natural resources and increasing pollution.

All environmental scientists and activists must be alarmed about this high population growth.

But some Indonesian Muslims are not worried. For them, fears of a human population exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity means a lack of faith in God. They strongly believe that God will provide every creature with the necessary resources to live.

Your comments:

It is a properly written, clear and well-founded article.

The only dissonant is paragraph three where the author refers to faith in God to provide for humanity and the entire existence of the planet.

Being a nonbeliever or humanist gives me the conviction that it is too easy to leave everything to a higher power and look after every detail on this planet.

It will only make humanity lazy, complacent and inactive, etc., good examples are to be seen all around us.

If a God exists, people have received brains to further themselves and be responsible keepers of this planet instead of sitting and waiting for divine interference.

Jorith Arbier

I thought it was a duty not to start a family unless you have the means.

Surely that ethos is extensible.

It is “win-win” for the “hardliners”, until everyone starves they may get more followers and then when the misery starts then surely that’s just further evidence of western imperialism!

John

If you look at the entire world, you will see that areas with less education have more children and areas with less children have more education.

Nate

A century ago, most great powers (Britain, Germany, France, Japan, etc.) were afraid that their rivals would outnumber them, and blamed women and the youth for not conceiving more children.

Mixing up their understanding of Darwin, Malthus and national thinkers, they thought that more babies equalled more survival chances for their race.

These days some Muslims and Christians also believe that breeding is a part of the global religious
war. Evangelical Christians say that the lapse of Christianity in Europe (i.e., Europeans do not have a lot of children) and the high rate of migration from Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East will make Europe a Muslim continent.

On the other hand, some Muslims in Southeast Asia believe strongly in this breeding-is-war view, like the article complains.

Even in early 1980s, some radicals blamed Muslim youth for “bringing down the ratio of Muslim Indonesians under 90 percent”.

Islamists in Malaysia are hoping that high emigration rate and low birth rate among Chinese-
Malaysians will lead to the supremacy of Islam and Malays. The unspoken part of the population debate in Singapore is steady birth rate among Muslim Singaporeans against extremely low birth rate among the Chinese.

The Earth is overcrowded. Indonesia is overcrowded. What lets me down is that poor people refuse contraception, despite knowing they cannot support the child (while condom and pill cannot be more expensive than cigarette and phone credit). Worse, rich politicians and clerics believe that they are doing their part for a war that does not exist.

Mario Rustan