Well, one of the problems with the above "the West will destroy itself" scenario, is that it could be rendered completely null and void, if one of those disease epidemics in Africa turns into a pandemic. At which point, Western consumption won't matter a jot.
Here's a little scenario that has those in the know shitting themselves when they think about it.
We already know that certain, shall we say,
interesting viruses are capable of jumping species to humans, and have done on occasions with frightening results. The candidate I have in mind for a particularly nasty pandemic centres upon filoviruses, because [1] they have already demonstrated a capability to jump species to humans, and [2] when they do, they exhibit a level of mortality that leads to them being called 'slate wipers'. The problem with filoviruses is that they take up to 7 days to reach the point where their activities lead to the emergence of symptoms, and by then, it's usually too late. Now at the moment, the method of transmission limits their potential for pandemic activity, because they need to be transmitted by contact with infected body fluids. But all it takes is for one of these viruses to acquire the relevant mutations, and become transmissible via the airborne route, and quite literally, all hell breaks loose.
The problem here being, that it will take time for scientists to alight upon the fact that any new strain is transmissible by being carried on air droplets in breath. While they're busy finding that out, the virus could spread from its initial emergence point very easily. All that would be required, for example, would be for a UN aid worker to be rotated out of the area, having inhaled the virus before its new capability was recognised, and board transportation to an airport, say, Lagos in Nigeria. From there, the now infected aid worker travels to Cairo, say, and then to Frankfurt, en route to a reunion with family in the USA or the UK. Once he passes through Frankfurt International Airport, he dumps his own virus load into the air there, which is then duly circulated around the air conditioning system, and infects thousands of other people. Who all then duly board planes for a range of destinations, from London through New York to places as far afield as Brisbane, Auckland and Tokyo. Whereupon these new, sub-clinical infectious cases dump their virus load into the air conditioning systems of airports in those cities, and this set the stage for the virus to spread, effectively, right around the globe in around 36 hours.
Suddenly, the virus starts erupting in clinical fashion, with florid symptoms, in people in all of these places. At this point, the shit really has hit the fan. You now have in place all the ingredients for a Hollywood nightmare movie made real. If the virus in question happens to be Ebola Zaire, or a related serotype, that nightmare becomes a particularly intense one, because this serotype , last time it struck, had a 90% mortality rate. The combination of 7 day incubation period before clinical symptoms manifest themselves properly, airborne transmissibility of a mutant strain, and extremely high lethality, makes an air-transmissible filovirus the stuff that keeps some people awake long into the night.
Now, if you have a population explosion in places such as Nigeria, Uganda and other sub-Saharan African nations, you're creating a nice little reservoir of juicy cell cultures for species jumping viruses to hijack. As those expanding populations start putting intolerable pressure on native ecosystems, and resort to such unsavoury practices as bushmeat hunting to stave off starvation, then they'll be setting themselves up as sitting targets for any sufficiently opportunist virus, to take advantage of an extremely abundant source of brand new and susceptible cells to press into service. These people will, in time, be effectively advertising themselves to such a virus with a 50 foot neon sign, saying "Please Infect Me". The absence of decent healthcare infrastructure in these countries, and the ever-decreasing likelihood of this ever appearing as the population grows, will mean that those people will be right in the front line. Bushmeat transmission is, after all, regarded within the scientific consensus as being the means by which HIV jumped ship from chimpanzees to humans, and we all know where that led.
At the moment, Western civilisation is the only civilisation that stands a chance of catching such viruses before they become a real, as opposed to potential, threat. But our politicians are too busy spending the money on ever more ingenious ways of killing foreigners, or trying to cosy up to multinational corporations driven by myopia and avarice, to get together and sort out the relevant problems
properly. Scientists can only do so much with finite funds, and when you have idiotic attempts to curtail scientific research funding thrown into the mix, the issue simply becomes more critical. As a consequence, it's in our long term interests not only to spend money making sure that species jumping viruses don't turn into pandemics, it's also in our long term interest to try and put the brakes on that reservoir of cell cultures growing to the point where the opportunities are there for the taking. If that means a less than delicate level of interference in local cultures, then at some point, that's a bullet we have to bite, not only to ensure that we are saved from the threat, but that the sub-Saharan Africans themselves are saved from the threat.
Which, of course, ignores the fact that idiot politicians
are already interfering in these places. What's more, that interference is of a sort that frankly makes me shudder. Such as
Scott Lively, who openly brags about having persuaded Ugandans to kill gay people (who, incidentally, aren't usually regarded as being contributors to the population explosion). You can read more about that
here, with his nasty little boast about "dropping a nuclear bomb" on the so-called "gay agenda", and his peddling of lies leading to Uganda implementing hate legislation (for example, Lively claimed that the Rwandan genocide was caused by gays). He's not the only Christofascist thug meddling in Africa - others, aided and abetted by certain personages in the Catholic Church, are peddling lies about contraception and stoking a large fire under the cauldron of demographic nitroglycerine. Yet others are peddling yet more lies, aimed at pushing Uganda further and further into becoming a theocracy. And we all know what happens to reason, scientific progress and constructive social policies in a theocracy. It's not as if American Christofascists are reticent about their aims for the USA, let alone other parts of the world, you only have to listen to the likes of Rick Santorum, who regards contraception not as a useful public service, but as an evil to be destroyed. When you have powerful politicians peddling
that mindset in the
developed world, the developing world is basically fucked. Unless those of us who value the future of the human species start taking on these malevolent influences head-on.
by 
Perhaps. The funny thing is that your views align in a way with @
