Cockburn on Malthus

* I can just hear the fax machines ringing as neo-Malthusians in the environmental movement scramble to justify themselves (“Bringing Malthus Up to Date,” Column Left, March 29). Alexander Cockburn actually scores more hits than misses in demonstrating that individual reproductive responsibility, as important as it is to our species’ survival, is integrally connected to societal responsibility for equitable economic structures and ethical social relations. Those who decry the “population explosion,” but fail to be at least as alarmed about the underlying “injustice explosion” that detonated when Eurocentrism began to dominate the planet, are perpetuating the notion that privileged people urge universal contraceptive access to protect their own advantages, rather than to work toward a sustainable future for all.

As the world’s attention is drawn to these complex issues at the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo this September, religious groups across the country are helping to redefine the population growth dilemma as more of a symptom than a cause of poverty. One of the most effective ways to begin the healing is to support the global “50 Years Is Enough” campaign in its efforts to reform the manifestly unfair economic and environmental practices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

CAROL BENSON HOLST

Program Director

Ministry for Justice in Population Concerns

Burbank

* Cockburn shows how the far left can be at odds with the goals of mainstream liberalism. Cockburn is proud of disconcerting the Population Committee of the Sierra Club in California by discounting the menace of overpopulation.

Cockburn goes on to speak approvingly of single teen-agers who intentionally choose to bear children. He wants society to have to support its “surplus poor.” I do, too, but within rational limits. Does Cockburn see no boundary to the drain on our finite resources by a potentially unlimited number of people clamoring for services? Are those of us who are particularly concerned about the delivery of contraceptive services to teen-agers all to be classified as racists? Does Cockburn really think it is beneficial to society for 14-year-olds to bear large numbers of children at public expense?

Before Cockburn so self-righteously rejects concerns about overpopulation, he should look at the squalor and human degradation of places like Calcutta, India.

EDWARD TABASH

Beverly Hills

* Obsession--a fixation that clouds the mind and makes rational discourse almost impossible. Lest anyone question whether or not Cockburn has a virulent obsession with Jews and Israel, they need only read “Bringing Malthus Up to Date.” In a column which otherwise focuses on the philosophy of the 19th Century economist, Cockburn’s first two paragraphs gratuitously deal with the controversy between Louis Farrakhan and American Jews. “The whole uproar is fraudulent,” Cockburn writes, “rearing a vast mountain out of a tiny molehill; just another way of hyping Israeli bond drives.”

Excuse me? Cockburn has never missed an opportunity to attack Israel, but this latest effort is truly bizarre. How in the world is the Jewish community’s anger over the anti-Semitic and racist sentiments of Farrakhan pertinent in a column focusing on capitalism, welfare reform and the poor? Cockburn’s obsession is becoming, in the words of Lewis Carroll, “curiouser and curiouser.”

CHERYL CUTLER AZAIR

Associate Director, ADL

Los Angeles