WEDESDAY, March 7, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
WaterShed0AF5
For population management
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: GOOD LIFE, FROM THE WIRES, SUSTAINABLE PROSPERITY
Abstract: WS0AF5 focuses on population management without depending on technology and their success proved instructive, benefiting other watersheds in developing their management policies.
TUCSON (A-P) — Management details that are not of special interest will be omitted to focus attention on WS0AF5's population management policies which are applicable to other WS designs that may vary in other details. All watershed management units need to have a population control policy (for pets, livestock, people) that could work. The plan to "let naturally forthcoming negative Malthusian feedback loops reduce the population" is not a Federation approved policy even though it does work, as the policy merely enables the watershed management planners to avoid the painful process of thinking about population management. If a population management plan for managing the number of pets, livestock, and humans is accepted, but a watershed is failing to support a biophysical economy of enough, then at the first indications of scarcity a watershed may request FAER (Federation Academy of Evidence and Reason) advice about what changes in policy are most likely to work.
If the Federation scientists' best guess policy to bring human demands on environmental resources into balance is implemented by the watershed's residents, yet the watershed citizens, despite full compliance, fail to feed their children, then the Federation Senate would organize an interwatershed intervention plan to provide temporary aid if possible. If the residents ignore Federation advice and fail to prevent starvation among their children, then the watershed would be declared a failed state, and the children considered refugees to be protected from parental mismanagement. A failed watershed may reapply for admission to the Federation if their proposed management plan is accepted provisionally until shown to work upon proof of practice. The global "rule of the game" that makes overpopulation a local issue is that unilateral emigration to another watershed is not allowed and enforcement is understood to be necessary as failure to limit emigration is an existential threat to the SYSTEM. The right of citizens to emigrate from their watershed of birth to a watershed that has accepted their petition to immigrate is in the constitution which includes the right to travel through intervening watersheds. In effect, no watershed can manage their pet, livestock, or human overpopulation problem secondary to local mismanagement by exporting population to other watersheds unwilling to accept them. In a would of 20,000 watershed management units within which on average perhaps 10,000 people live in a hundred communities of less than 150 people, no uninvited immigrate would go unnoticed.
In watersheds unable to provide baseline health care, medical and dental, such as those whose eco-nomy is hunter-gatherer perhaps with some low intensity agriculture, the care is provided at clinics within the Federation Embassy. Family planning is considered health care and is provided upon request. WS0AF5 is based on low intensity agriculture (slash'n burn), but technology is minimized as their policy is to avoid dependency on imports/intervention, whether free or not. Some technology, such as metal cooking pots, knifes, solar cookers, hoes, and Fed Lites were valued.
The residents valued what worked within their environment with minimal inputs from other watersheds as their watershed had few resources to export in exchange for imports. They accepted information and medical and dental care (and especially valued Federation protection from outsiders), but did not consider birth control a medical issue, but a condition of normal life, and so opted to manage their population without the use of freely provided Federation birth control technology. They looked to follow 'Nature's Way' and harmonize human nature with the Mother.
Their social system was de facto matriarchy as the consensus of the mothers, though questionable, was understood to be the most likely best understanding of Nature's Way. The mothers were aware of whether all were living the prosperous life of enough, and if signs that environmental productivity was increasing became apparent as evidenced by the people having too much, then the mothers would increase the number of annually allowed BBM (blessed by the mothers) births. Of those women wanting to have a first child, or more children, one or a few more might be blessed than had been in the recent past such that the birth rate temporarily exceeded death rate. Conversely, at the earliest signs of scarcity, the number of blessed births was reduced to adjust the total population of the watershed to match the productivity of the human's twenty percent.
As environmental resources are limiting (as always everywhere) the mothers sought to maximize the human population by minimizing the inequitable distribution of food and other needed resources, such as solar cookers, metal pots, and personal lighting technology provided by Fed Lites, as the energy embedded in Fed Lites, for example, was far less than in the number of candles that would otherwise be used, (and they provided instant and high quality LED light as needed) which was valued.
From early childhood, boys were taught that as men they could father children (and how). They were told that under no circumstance could they lose their "seed" in or on a woman's vagina who had not been blessed by the mothers to bare a child. With onset of puberty, details were provided. The possibility of a man forcing himself upon a woman, however, was barely mentioned in the same breath as capital punishment as doing so, while possible, was considered unthinkable/intolerable. WS0AF5 law provided capital punishment for only one crime: rape, including of a wife by her husband.
From early childhood, girls were taught that as women they could bare a child if and when blessed by the mothers, and that they, unless raped, were responsible to not become pregnant. With onset of puberty, details were provided, such as that a man must not ejaculate in, on, or near her vagina such that one of his tiny seeds could not fertilize her much larger seed until she has been blessed, and that should she become pregnant prior to being blessed, that abortion was an option. In practice heterosexual behavior resembled that of their gay brothers and sisters who provided essential sex education to young people, and was not considered limiting. If it was a womans first pregnancy and unblessed, she could risk abortion or childbirth. If she gave birth she could request infanticide, or ask that she be allowed to raise the child or allow it to be adopted should another woman agree to adopt. The mothers have final say, and may allow the child to be raised or adopted, but only with the understanding that the child would be the woman's last (the Federation clinic could make it so) and that a second "mistake" would be terminated. Federation scientists noted that this policy, together with the execution of rapists, would select against failure and so work in the long-run across the millennia.
