Tribble wrote: ↑2019-02-25 03:51pm
Having no kids is by far the most important. There are over 7 billion of us. There should be less than 10% of that number, if not lower.
citation needed, really.
popualtion control is a contentious thing. There's a strand of altreich recruiters in the green activist movement (Volks and aurochs are not new), and pinning the idea of global damage to child bearing is a convieent stick to beat developing nations and 'inferior, breed like rats' memes.
I'm not saying this is what you are doing, just that's its lurking in background. This is often disengeuous, as I mentioend up thread. A farmer in vietnam having three kids is less damanging then a texan having one, all things staying the same.
So then there's tradeoffs. Does the racist rich westener want to have less brown people to allow the west to continue it's rich exisitnance? Is it fair to say 'all things staying the same' when that farmer in Vietnam sure as hell hopes her children have a more conformtable life then she has had, and is it fair to assume that old equivilnece of more comfort = more energy = more fossil fuels will remain true going into the future?
There's another strand of green popualtion control where it's contentious, and that is that it's out of date. |When I was working out in Bangladesh and India, most young professionals (or sozzled old rich men) I spoke to were contemptuous of their own countries popualtion growth. They are about 25 years out of date Bangladesh has a replacement brithrate, not a growth one, and has had a roughly replacement birth rate for about thirty years now. The popualtion is still growing, but that's becuase the age pyramid is filling out - people are living longer.
The same is true for the world as a whole. We have gone from 3 bill to 7 bill in my life time, but we are looking to peak at around 10 and then start to decline, still in my lifetime. Managing that decline requires a moral decision.
If your enviromentalism is humanistic, and you are worried about climate change becuase of the millions it endagers, and the human suffering it will create, then the decline is also something to worry about. Shrink the popualtion too fast and we might create more suffering then we solve. We cannot have ten old people being supported by a single young person, and China's demographics are already unstable.
If you don't give a shit about your fellow human, then another five decades of overshoot are unaccpetable, and the moral descision isn't just to not have children, it's to kill yourself and take as many resource hogging people out with you as possible. The utlitarian calculus gets a little worrying. It gets doubly bleak when you revisti that 'all things staying the same' assumption, and merely killing every frequent flyer or Suadi Arabian isn't enough, you have to kill enough to ensure that nobody takes over their resource hogging lifestyle. Please don't kill people.
If you are preapred to live yourself, but not have children then you are probably weighing both human suffering and enviromental damage in your moral calculus. We have a large amount of climate breakdown locked in. We have a large amount of stupid ineqaulity and cruel poverty locked in. We need to reshape society to solve that, and to continue a managed population reduction but the answer isn't in fears and rhetoric that date from the cold war.
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