Population, climate change, and global justice: A moral framework for debate

This paper outlines a moral framework for the debate on global population policy. Questions of population, climate justice and global justice are morally inseparable and failure to address them as such has dangerous implications. Considerations of population lend additional urgency to existing collective duties to act on global poverty and climate change. Choice-providing procreative policies are a key part of that. However, even were we collectively to fulfil these duties, we would face morally hard choices over whether to introduce incentive-changing procreative policies. Thus, there is now no possible collective course of action which is not morally problematic

Provisioning Johannesburg, 1886-1906

The rapidity of Johannesburg’s growth after the discovery of payable gold in 1886 created a provisioning challenge. Lacking water transport it was dependent on animal-drawn transport until the railways arrived from coastal ports. The local near-subsistence agricultural economy was supplemented by imported foodstuffs, readily available following the industrialisation of food production, processing and distribution in the Atlantic world and the transformation of transport and communication systems by steam, steel and electricity. Improvements in food preservation techniques: canning, refrigeration and freezing also contributed. From 1895 natural disasters ˗ droughts, locust attacks, rinderpest, East Coast fever ˗ and the man-made disaster of the South African War, reduced local supplies and by the time the ZAR became a British colony in 1902 almost all food had to be imported. By 1906, though still an import economy, meat and grain supplies had recovered, and commercial agriculture was responding to the market.HistoryM.A (History