What if they’re actually dumb and we need other other strategies? Something to think about before banning the pill.
As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile. I don’t want to go into it here, I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of work one could do besides blocking a certain gender from equal access to birth control pills.
>Something to think about before banning the pill.
Regardless whether the strategies are bad or not, banning contraceptives should never be on the table.
>As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile.
It might be child-hostile, but is how child-hostile the environment is actually a consideration? The situation for having children has never been better, but birthrates are some of the lowest they have ever been.
The rough transition aside, would it be so bad to return to lower population levels? The only thing I'm sad about is that I won't live to see the population decline rather than increase.
As a species on the planet? No, there's nothing bad about it. But it's going to be bad politically. It will shake up the power of countries when population numbers change and no country wants to give to power.
Yes — it’s absolutely psychotic to hope for a mass loss of human life and the decline of our species.
There’s no reason to think it would make things better — and many to think a massive population decline would come with a technology regression and stall of our advancement.
I think such ideas are a form of mental illness, often stemming from delusions about the world.
Not a decline but a stabilisation. That's really what's needed to make our planet sustainable.
Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as a westerner.
And we're not hoping for loss of life. Just a more balanced population in the long term.
We can't keep growing until every square meter of this planet is covered with people, I'm sure that's clear. Eventually resources will be constrained too much and massive wars over control of the scraps will be inevitable. Which will solve the problem of overpopulation, sure. But it'll be better to gradually reduce population growth to zero and finally reach a balance with our environment.
America amd Europe should not see falling population and declining economys to compensate for other countries' massively high birth rates. I should still get my 2 kids and will not change because somebody else had 8.
There's also the colossal millitary risk of being a nation with bad demographics fighting one with good ones. Which I am not willing to take.
African kids don't cause as much pollution as Europeans and Americans do. By orders of magnitude.
However yes in the long term we should not keep growing our world population as a whole. I do understand the need for Africans to have more kids though. For two reasons: A lot more of them die due to poor living conditions, and they serve as a "pension" for the parents.
Obviously these concerns will be solved by better living conditions.
There’s no reason to think the carrying capacity is down around what we have now, and historically growing population has been the engine through which we’ve solved those problems.
Thinking that we need to “stabilize” at the current population is a delusion leading to insane policy recommendations.
Also — yes, lots of your peers in “sustainability” are talking about massive population declines.
We need to be really careful that in our haste to make progress in environmental protection and gender equality, we don't find ourselves heading down the dark path towards eugenics or self-extinction.
Or to not have children that you don't want, which is what the discussion is about.
We don't avoid killing ourselves or others because of its effects on the environment, which are great. We avoid killing ourselves and others due to other considerations. I bet you can name some so I don't have to.
The "if we don't have many kids the bad guys become a bigger group" is precisely the attitude with which we will never solve these problems.
We have to stop this thinking of it being a race where we have to keep ahead of others. We have to work together or we will never solve our environmental issues.
And the thing about a kid emitting 1 ton CO2 per year is nonsense. Just bringing your kid on one international roundtrip flight already emits that much. Not to mention choices made in their name "I have to protect my kids so I have to drive an SUV tank" that I've heard many Irish parents claim. One ton is peanuts.
This was barely coherent and mostly doesn't touch on what the article purports.
The growth rate in your western country is pegged, as a matter of policy. It's met through immigration. Whether you have kids or not is neither here nor there; they will meet their target (note that carbon footprints are high in the West, and low in 3rd world countries, to the extent that marginal differences in growth in the 3rd world are irrelevant). This will subside when the global growth rate falters, which is already projected to happen. This can be accelerated by a) improving universal access to contraceptives, and b) improving 3rd world economies through trade and just regulation. In the interim we still need to improve efficiencies in the short-run to curb carbon emissions immediately. Obviously, not having kids has zero impact on this either. Innovations like renewables, seaweed-infused animal feed, etc are entering the market and will help bridge the gap, made possible through political will and investment from the financial sector in the order of trillions.
Don't have kids if you don't want them, surely. But don't pretend it makes a dent in the environmental crusade, and by extension, don't judge parents for a natural desire to start a family.
You have a delusion we’ve hit some kind of cap, and your belief we need to stop breeding will lead to bad outcomes relative to groups who don’t share that maladaptive belief.
Surely you can see where the issue is, don’t you? How can a westerner having a baby be any worse than an immigrant making their way to a western country, from a carbon footprint perspective? To me you can’t logically say that westerners having babies is a problem and still be OK with any amount of immigration, at least if the environment is your argument.
This planet cannot naturally sustain billions of humans. It takes all our industrial capacity and cutting nutritional corners just to feed us, and now one war in one country is to cut our supplies and put millions at risk.
Not to mention how most people don't have serious, productive jobs like doctors or lawyers. Most people have dead-end office jobs, ones that fuel global consumerism. Is that the technology you talk about losing? iPhones and videogames? And even so, unemployment is still an unsolvable problem.
You should drop your fairy tale expectations of living happily forever after. Mathematical models predict population growth and decline in nature. It is completely expected that when the average westerner is satiated emotionally and physically, they are not instinctively pushed to reproduce - why would they, there's nothing serious to work towards.
As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile. I don’t want to go into it here, I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of work one could do besides blocking a certain gender from equal access to birth control pills.