I’ve got a friend who works for a family-student housing complex at a college. Her boss told her that we should be encouraging people not to have any children, or if they really must pass on their genes, to limit their progeny to one because anything more just wasn’t “sustainable.”
Environmentalists may be right that there’s a problem, but I think they’re putting the blame in the wrong place. You know what I think isn’t sustainable? It’s our ridiculous consumer lifestyle.
According to this Science Daily article, in countries like Malawi, the average per capita carbon footprint is 1 ton of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. Here in the fat, U.S.A. it’s all the way up at 30. (For a striking visual comparison, check out this great map on Wikipedia showing per capita carbon footprints by country.)
The problem is not that we have too many children. The problem is that we have too many grown-ups who think they need to (or don’t have any choice but to) own two cars, commute forty minutes each way to work, heat (and air condition!) 3000 square foot McMansions, and consume truckloads of factory-produced goods, and who then, rather than putting their great ingenuity to work at finding ways to curb society’s gluttonous rate consumption of non-renewable resources, decide that the solution to our environmental problems is to deny as many people as possible the chance to enjoy life on this beautiful planet. Better that other people just shouldn’t be born than that we should have to share our resources. (Mrs. Anna T. made a similar complaint very eloquently in her post here.)
So then we have this dream world where people get to greedily consume endless stuff just so long as they don’t have any children to follow in their over-indulgent footsteps. The human population shrinks by roughly half every generation. (This is what happens when every couple only produces one child.) And we and the earth all live happily ever after.
Except perhaps not so happily because you know what else is unsustainable? Population decline.
When a population is in decline there are far more elderly people needing things like nursing care and pensions, medicine, and social security than there are young workers to provide these things. We get a false sense of security from government programs to provide for the elderly, but let’s not forget that government programs are funded by working age people paying taxes. If everyone only has one child, then every young worker is responsible for the tax revenue to support the social security and medicare of four retirees. A crushing tax burden. And that’s even before we pay for stuff like national defense and the EPA.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Q&A on the Demographic Winter website quotes economist Harry S. Dent as saying that 70% of the Gross National Product in the U.S. is consumer driven. Imagine what would happen in every industry if the number of consumers went down every year as the large elderly population died off and was not replaced by new people. As demand consistently failed to keep up with supply, revenues would plummet, taking the Gross National Product with them, leading to recession and even depression, which in turn would dry up funds for things like environmental research and development of greener energy and manufacturing options. In fact, it would dry up funds for just about everything else, too, from road maintenance to universities.
Now, someone is going to say, “Well, that all sounds terribly apocalyptic, but the world’s population is going up, so no problem, right?”
Wrong.
The reason that the global population is going up is that life expectancy is going up. Life expectancy at birth has nearly doubled since 1850 (see this chart). Medical advancements like chemotherapy, antibiotics, synthetic insulin, and heart surgery have extended countless lives. In other words, the issue is not how many people are being born but how many are not dying. If we want to know what’s going to happen to populations long term, especially working-age populations, we have to look at birth rates. And birth rates have fallen off a cliff. According to this article, the UN reported in 2005 that global birthrates had dropped to an all-time low (2.9, down from 6 in 1970) and were projected to drop below replacement rate by the end of the 21st century. Pushing them down even further would have serious economic and societal consequences, causing people to be way too busy surviving to worry about stuff like global warming and carbon footprints.
The solution to our environmental woes does not lie in changed birth rates, but in changed lifestyles. Obviously, nobody (even most environmentalists) in the West wants to give up everything about our lifestyles and live like the people in Malawi, but it is simplistic to think we can fix our over-consumption problems simply by having fewer consumers. When we limit people, we limit capital, both financial capital and human capital. We lose out on the money, the brain-power, and the work-force to tackle society’s problems.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Well said.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
So true! Thanks for sharing this.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Amen and amen! Sometimes I kind of feel like saying to these people who use children as the scape goat of their argument “So if I saw you dying on the side of the road should I stand by and do nothing so as to decrease the surplus population?” Such a foolish argument.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Standing ovation! Thank you.
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 am
So true! The answer does not lie in limiting the number of babies coming into the world but in training those babies to respect God’s creation and exercise self control in the consumption of it.
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 pm
You are exactly right! Great article.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Wow! 30 tons compared to 1 ton. We are doing something wrong here, and it’s not the solution to have less kids. I know that bigger families are more likely to buy used things, instead of new, which helps out a lot. I am committed to trying to keep myself out of retail stores (except for things I can not find used) in order to reduce the waste! It’s time to stop being a throw-away society and a consumer society. I always love it when you’re on a rant! Ooo-weee, it’s fun to chime in. I can tell you right now that the families that I know personally who decided to “stop at two” spend a lot more on consumer goods than we do with five kids. The math doesn’t work to say that bigger families will automatically consume more things just because they are big. I have noticed it works like this: Family with two children buys EACH child a little motorized car to race around in. Families with 3 kids will buy one motorized car and make them share. Families with four kids will say, Let’s get a wagon.. More than four will say, “Huh? jump in the car. Now that’s going for a ride. ” More than five: buy a big school bus or large van..You get the point. The mentality changes. There’s got to be a way to quantify this. You’re smart. Maybe you should start your own research firm..?
October 4th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Actually, it’s all part of the whole, isn’t it? I’m one of those people who chose to limit my family size partly due to environmental concerns, so not to tax the world’s resources (for other reasons, too, but that was certainly among them). My family happens to live in a huge city (Tokyo), and I believe having another baby would indeed have made one of those ghastly carbon footprints. My husband was unwilling to consider adoption for cultural reasons, so our family size will in all likelihood stay small, even though it means my husband will forever pine for all those unborn babies he longed to hold in his arms.
The birth rate in Japan has fallen to less than two children per couple — and less than one per couple in Tokyo. I always say that Japan can solve this problem by letting in more immigrants, but so many Japanese people say that no, too many non-Japanese people would destroy their precious culture (and pollute their gene pool, a few have even said to me). I’m afraid that argument has absolutely no impact on (non-Japanese) me!
Anyway, it’s exactly as you say: It’s not the sheer number of kids per family that makes a difference. I know a few families with six and seven kids who are truly able to minimize their environmental impact, and probably have a much smaller carbon footprint than many single people I know!
October 4th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I love this article! I totally agree with you, we are having far fewer children than ever, it is our consumerism and lifestyle choices that effect environmental change more than any other factor.
October 5th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I wouldn’t worry too much; with people like you, who don’t believe on birth control, on the rise, and like us Muslims and even Jewish multiplying at the rate we are, i think we are going to fill in the gap for the one-child and no-child couples.
In the end, the environmentalists are just depriving themselves of passing on their genes, I think this is one of the only things they are achieving with their approach.
On the other hand, and sort of off topic, has anybody heard of the not so orthodox theory of global warming taking place as a natural phenomenon and not due to our influence? And what the people who claim we are causing it really want to achieve is complete control of our lives, things like where we can live, where we can drive, the children we can have, etc. It takes one to really think out of the box to even contemplate the thought for a second.
October 5th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I agree with what you are saying. Everytime I hear this argument, my response is, that if population control was the answer, then China would have a decreasing carbon footprint, as they have been legislating population control for a few decades now. However, that is not the case.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Hear, Hear!!!
I have five girls and have encouraged all of them to have as many children as God will allow. What Organizing Mommy said is true. The more children we had, the less stuff we bought for each one and the less we went out. Once we upgraded to a 15 passenger van several people thought that even with 5 kids that size van was overkill and a waste of money (and gas), but you should try to fit 3 car seats, 1 LARGE diaper bag, 1 emergency bag, at least one stroller and your husband’s wheelchair in a mini van – impossible, and that’s not even on grocery day!! But, by the time we got it we weren’t running around as much either, so we weren’t using any more gas or spending any more money. On top of that, we don’t own a single game that requires an outlet; no game boys, Xboxes, playstations; nothing that requires them to vegitate in front of the TV. Also, they don’t have TVs or computers in their rooms. They have to play the old fashioned way, and outside as much as possible.
As far as what NP says, I have also read research, and seen a documentary that expresses the view that global warming is a natural process, driven by activity on the sun. Makes much more sense seeing as how the world has expirienced hot and cold peaks before that couldn’t possibly be explained by internal combustion engines and large manufacturing plants.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Nice stuff.
October 8th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Every word is true and thanks for linking to me!
October 9th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
This gave me chills and thrills to read
Very well said in addressing some really frustrating viewpoints. Bravo!
October 11th, 2009 at 12:12 am
I feel very sorry for people who genuinely think having more children will increase the global footprint. It seeems to me that climate control is a continual debate with no foregone conclusion, tho’ we must be good stewards of course. Unfortunately socialism wants you to have less kids so your teenagers become peer dependant, less respectful of adults and less family dependant. so that they can get them while their young and when they’ve screwed up their lives with humanism its too late, they’re too late and their kids won’t listen to them either. Once you’re screwed up money etc fill the void- great! Japan had an isolationist policy for years to protect them from the problems of their asian neighbours, unfortunetely they’ve bought into western capitalism/humanism with gusto, to their detriment they took the good not the bad.Don’t let your kids become peer dependant, give them a loving supportive family,God will take care of the footprints. From Linda
January 9th, 2010 at 12:20 am
Wow!!! Amen sister