Posted by
Ed
13 yrs ago
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/09/120409crbo_books_kolbert
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selda
13 yrs ago
i think it's totally selfish and irresponsible to have more than 2 kids.
Those who choose not to breed at all should receive a medal and the title "Planet Steward" for services rendered to the planet and to other people.
Your kids may have a future because of those who responsibly avoid breeding. Parents should be grateful to non-parents.
The single, most effective way of avoiding an environmental catastrophe is to have fewer children.
Yes, a childless person can jet around the world, eat meat, drive a stupid SUV and his/her carbon footprint will still be lower than the carbon footprint of someone who has a couple of kids and doesn't fly, doesn't drive, doesn't eat meat.
I like kids, but what kind of world are they going to inherit from us?? Do i want my kids to go to war over scarce resources, deal with climate change and the forced migration that it will cause, drink polluted water, breath polluted air, live in hyper-dense cities and be a lot poorer than me because most jobs are being replaced by machines and the competition over remaining jobs will be fierce?
Unless we manage to sort out existing environmental problems (and we are not doing a good job at it!) we should at least avoid putting more strain on the planet resources by limiting population growth.
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@ selda
can you justify your "2 kid is ok" opinion, why 2 kid is OK but 3 or 4 is not ok ?
please dont tell me "i think" or "according to me"
give me some logical reason which can be understood universally and justify the number.
we will discuss rest of your opinions in the next step.
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selda
13 yrs ago
2 kids should be the limit for those who do want to have kids. They may argue that having one child only would put him/her at risk of developing the little emperor syndrome, and affect his/her socialization. Also, parents may be overprotective of their only child and become too anxious. These are arguments often used by parents.
I have friends who had a biological child and then decided to adopt their second child, which is a great idea.
My partner and i haven't got children, nor we plan to have them in the future. We can offset the environmental cost of people who have two children by not having any ourselves.
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selda
13 yrs ago
Instead of offering incentives to have more children, we should offer incentives to NOT have more children. The world is overpopulated with humans, pushing every other species into oblivion.
Once again, people intelligent and literate enough to grasp the importance of this fact limit their reproduction while others refuse to or, in some cases, cannot because family planning services are unavailable–as funding for same has been cut due to interference by, once again, religious conservatives.
Sex education, birth control and, yes, the right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy legally and safely, need to be available for us to survive as a species. The largest irony, of course, is that those who insist on procreating apparently care little for the declining quality of life their offspring will ultimately face.
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you have spoken about everything except for what i asked
how do you decide 2 is OK but 3 or 4 is not OK
how do you reach this number logically or are you telling us that it is YOUR choice only at best ?
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Ed
13 yrs ago
Might I suggest that 2 is too many never mind 4 or more...
If every couple has two children the global population will continue to expand dramatically... unless you create a law that forces countries to execute grandparents...
If the concern is overpopulation then I think one child would be your ideal number.
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selda
13 yrs ago
Syed_Skorpion,
i have seen the world population more than double in my lifetime. It is shocking and totally unsustainable.
Unless you have found another planet to colonize, what is your problem with limiting population growth?
People are living longer, child mortality is low, if we had more than one per person or two children per couple, the world population would continue to grow out of control.
Nobody is going to deprive you of your right to procreate and even give a sibling to your child, but anything more than two children per couple (the replacement rate!) smacks of selfishness and greed, because by having 3 or 4 children you would make this planet a lot less livable not only for your own offspring but for others' as well.
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i have no children, though i would have liked to have at least one. I agree with Ed and Selda that we need to curb fertility by all means. Not only we live longer, we consume a lot more than previous generations. Resources are finite, global warming is a fact, not an opinion. If we want the human race to continue existing, we must be more responsible in both the way we consume finite resources, distribute wealth, and reproduce.
We can't even feed, educate, give shelter to existing people, or provide enough jobs for them. Adding more and more people is immoral!
If we are so concerned about aging populations and pensions, there is a simple and sustainable way of addressing the problem: countries with a low fertility rate should open their doors to immigrants from poorer countries instead of offering tax rebates to persuade their citizens to have more children.
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@selda
it seems you have not understood my question at all which i have repeated twice,
i will leave it here.
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selda
13 yrs ago
three people answered your question in this thread. Both question and answers seem pretty clear to me.
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selda
13 yrs ago
if you want numbers,
here you go
Based on data from the UN Long-Range World Population Projections, 1991, here is an estimate of the growth of the world population from now until 2150, assuming that Total Fertility Rates decline from the 1991 value of 3.4 to the values shown.
A value of 2.06 will produce a population of about 11.5 billion
A value of 1.96 will cause the population to drop back to close to 6.1 billion while
a value of 2.17 would produce a population of over 20 billion and still rising.
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Ken A
13 yrs ago
Yes 2 is clearly way too many. If over the entire history of the world people had only listened to that idea we would rid of a number of people in the world. People like Shakespeare, Ghandi, Mother Teresa. If only their parents had stopped at none or one or even two.
How about instead of focusing on the number of children people decide to have, people instead look at the true culprits? Too much money is being spent by the wrong people keeping the wrong industries in profit. Is it not strange that in an era that has seen us go from hardly anybody having computers to people walking around with tablets, one of the biggest pollution contributing object (vehicles) have hardly improved at all? Why has it taken so long for alternative energy to even become what it is today (which is still mostly pitiful) yet I have a very old watch that requires no battery for its lifetime?
In response to Ed.... All people die eventually. So 2 parents having 2 children would in the long run keep the equation balanced, assuming that everybody in the world got together with a partner.
Sure China has allegedly solved some of its problems with the one child policy, but what other problems has it caused? There are already a number of countries with low fertility rates that are seeing potential problems with an aging population, which includes Hong Kong.
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Ed
13 yrs ago
Just finished watching this documentary... well worth the 34 minutes of your time...
The implications are enormous ... are we in for a massive culling of the global population?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg
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selda
13 yrs ago
thanks Ed!
Things are going to get very very ugly. Our only salvation would be human intelligence, but given that human beings cannot even curb their fertility and consumption in the face of overwhelming evidence that neither are sustainable, i am not a believer in human intelligence. More nuclear and natural disasters, more epidemics, more wars will cull the world population because we are too stupid to hit the brakes while we can ...this is what future generations will inherit from us.
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well to state the obvious the white world of peole are declining in population so the intelligence there is obvious as is the tax rates and high wages...as for the asian's and all then the obvious thing is stated again as alluded to by others above. save the planet, huh, since when do the chinese for example care...or indians to name a few. whites do. just my observation and all things read.
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Ed
13 yrs ago
birdman... I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because your grammar, syntax and just about everything else in that sorta of paragraph is garbled...
But are you turning this into a race issue?
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selda
13 yrs ago
castingasparagii,
if discussing the demographic bomb is tantamount as "claiming the high moral ground", than yes, somebody needs to take the moral high ground and tell people that the human species is characterized by its ability to think in abstract terms and control natural instincts. You can't stop a dog from breeding unless you intervene surgically, but you can help a human being make an informed choice about family size by making contraception available and free, fine them if they have more than than one or two children, explain the consequences of large families on everybody's quality of life.
What is the next logical step to solve the problem of finite resources vis a vis a booming world population? Where are we going to send those billions of people that will be born between now and 2050? To another planet???
Or maybe we should just wait for climate change to claim the lives of the less fortunate ones that live in areas where natural disasters will wreck havoc? Or maybe they will just die of war and starvation because nobody is willing to take the high moral ground?
Have you been to countries where people have a lot of children? Have you looked at their unemployment and emigration rate? Do they look like nice places to live?
Try Manila, Dhaka or Lagos.
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selda
13 yrs ago
is advocating mass suicide the best thing your intelligence can come up with?
I would argue that contraception is a far more humane solution, as it doesn't harm anyone.
The issue for humanity is whether we are clever enough to slow population by design, or if we simply let nature dictate the terms, which may not be pleasant for your children and grandchildren. Nature, in all her beauty and glory, is not sentimental. When nature steps in to stop growth, it does not offer niceties, as we may witness in the poorest, most ecologically degraded regions of our world, where 25,000 people starve to death every day.
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and most of those deaths happen because western nations abuse the resources available on the earth and have no sense of responsibility towards anything at all, and then they come up and tell the world that we need fewer people around.
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selda
13 yrs ago
well, unless you have a magical wand and can stop globalization and consumerism right now, i don't see how you can justify having more children. Agriculture is mechanized, industrial production is mechanised, because of technological progress we need fewer people to perform the same tasks. Which jobs are these billions of people going to find? How are they going to feed their large families???
Continuous growth in a finite system is not possible, ask any physicist.
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Ed
13 yrs ago
A marine biologist offered me the following metaphor..
Build a barn in the middle of a desert and fill it with grain. Introduce half a dozen male and female rats...
They will gorge and multiple... then all the grain will be consumed then they will all die because they have consumed their entire food supply and because they are hundreds of miles into a barren dry wasteland, they are unable to find more food.
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selda
13 yrs ago
Ed, good metaphor. I have also heard a doctor say that when a body reaches maturity, growth is not desirable because it either means obesity or tumor. Our global population has already grown beyond its natural limits.
We can't embrace science just to extend the life span, bring down child and maternal mortality rates, and then refuse to embrace science when it comes to fertility rates. This is a recipe for disaster.
You either let nature take its course (no food aid, no technology, no hospitals, no medicines, no sanitation, no vaccination, no contraception and see how big that population gets) or you improve living standards and offer free contraception.
You can't just have vaccination programs in developing countries, bring down overall mortality rates but then refuse to talk about family planning.
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Ed
13 yrs ago
That ties into my medical metaphor... it has to do with metastisizing cancer...
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Ed
13 yrs ago
You might think the title of this video is hyperbole... it ain't in the slightest...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
I recently finished this book... it is well written and well argued... and it left me feeling very uncomfortable about the current economic crisis... (which the author states is a symptom of something far bigger...)
http://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/the-end-of-growth-book
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Brilliant video, Ed.
Facts and simple math as opposed to BS rhetoric from people with agenda.
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True progress is not only possible but preferable without growth.
True progress is not measure by GDP.
Those who keep pushing for growth have definitely got an agenda:
organised religions (competing with one another for power, the more babies are born into one faith, the more power they get, poorer people tend to be less educated and more willing to have large families)
real estate developers and speculators (more people need more houses, zero growth would make house prices go down, we would all be able to enjoy better living conditions (no more partitioned flats, shoe-box flats, which is good news for those who buy a house to live in it, not to speculate)
The 1% that accumulates wealth to the detriment of the 99%.
Fewer people mean lower unemployment rates, which would give workers more bargaining power, and higher salaries. Wealth would be redistributed automatically, as labour would finally have more power than capital.
We would all enjoy a better environment, less pollution, less waste, lower urban density, better education (smaller class sizes) and a lot of resources could be redirected to better health care rather than infrastructures.
Just imagine if our taxes went to providing more parks instead of incinerators and landfills, cycling lanes instead of more roads, better teaching for our kids, better hospitals instead of a third airport runway, a government-run pension fund (people with higher education and better paid jobs would contribute more to a pension fund than millions of HK people who are too poor to even pay taxes)
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Ed
13 yrs ago
"Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth Boulding, 1910-1993.
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selda
13 yrs ago
Juliette,
yesterday i had an interesting chat with a friend about zero growth, both in terms of zero population growth (then easing into a reduction) and zero economic growth.
We were discussing possible scenarios, with me playing devil's advocate for discussion's sake (we both agree on the desirability of both!)
We are familiar with some theorists of degrowth such as Serge Latouche, but they are better at picturing the unsustainability of the present model of capitalist accumulation and its ideology of growth than at offering workable solutions. Yes, they call for localization, community based economies, small is beautiful, direct democracy, etc. but the transition from a globalized economy to a small-scale, self-sufficient, community-based economy could result into chaos and poverty for millions of people that have no safety net.
The growth ideology has simply been used to justify the market economy and its dynamics ―which inevitably led to the capitalist growth economy.
A society based on economic contraction simply cannot exist under capitalism.
The implication is that the main issue today cannot be reduced to just a matter of changing our values, as some Green Parties naively argue, or even condemning economic growth per se. The crucial issue today is how we may create a new society where institutionalised domination of human being over human being and the consequent idea of dominating nature are ruled out. The search for such a system will lead us to the conclusion that it is not just growth ideology, which has to be abandoned, but the market economy itself.
As valuable as the degrowth concept is in an ecological sense, it can only take on genuine meaning as part of a critique of capital accumulation, and part of the transition to a sustainable, egalitarian, communal order – one in which the associated producers govern the metabolic relation between nature and society in the interest of successive generations and the earth itself (communism as Marx defined it).
This planet has seen Socialism, and its discontent, but personally i have not seen or heard of any truly Communist society. It's a sort of Utopia that i would love to find, but it's not shown on any map. Hence we must invent it. We must liberate some creative intelligence from wage labour to come up with a road map to Communism (nothing to do with existing Communist parties, by the way, as they just manage a sort of State capitalism)
What is needed is a ‘co-revolutionary movement’, to adopt David Harvey’s term, that will bring together the traditional working-class critique of capital, the critique of imperialism, the critiques of patriarchy and racism, and the critique of ecologically destructive growth (along with the respective mass movements).
Maybe chaos can be averted with a sort of Green New Deal, high taxation of environmentally destructive economic activities, tax breaks for environmentally virtuous behaviors, the creation of new green jobs, etc.
But eventually a new system has to replace capitalism.
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Ed
13 yrs ago
I agree... the system will have to change... when it does, I think it will be a forced change i.e. the current system fails because it no longer functions or there are not enough low cost resources to keep it going...
I suspect both of these factors are at play right now and the symptoms of them are the Medusa-like global crisis we are experiencing... the reason I believe this is that in spite of the trillions printing... the problems persist - and are worsening...
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Back to the Rat metaphor, its total rubbish.
Humans would realise that food stocks were getting low and be resourceful enough to something about it. Unfortunately, the introduction of sacrificial crops that are genetically modified to yield only one harvest puts that one to bed.
So what is killing our planet and us? Simple, GREED. However, I’m sure your idea of halting procreation would benefit the world if it was enforced in say the USA. That would be one or two generations of gun toting, world policing, Hollywood believing warmongers the world could do without (not designed to insult, its just what I believe).
This aside, something makes me believe that our planet a “reboot” switch and every now and again mother nature gets upset with what’s going on, hits the reboot and hey presto we get an ice age or we get hit by a meteor. Will it happen in our lifetime, who knows?
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Ed
13 yrs ago
Rats in a Barn... disagree - it's a very good metaphor...
Like the grain in a barn the earth's ability to support life is limited... sure technology has been able to increase the number of animals the earth can support but we live in a finite world... by definition we will run out of resources at some point... it may be 50 years from now... or 100... but guaranteed, just as the barn empties so too will the world...
Consider this... our ability to sustain 7 billion people is based on the use of pesticides and fertilizers that are primarily petroleum based... without them the farmed soils of the world would be dead i.e. emptied of nutrition that supports plant growth...
Same as the rats in the barn... we've artificially been able to support a massive increase in population by being able to provide plentiful food... but if the ability to replenish the food supply to support this dramatically larger population is interrupted... we meet the same fate as the rats...
Sure we might come up with new technology to grow more food... but that only delays the inevitable... we live in a world of finite resources... they will run out.
And therefore eternal population growth is unsustainable.
There are plenty examples of societies that destroyed themselves through resource depletion... islanders who cut down the very last tree on their islands even though it meant they could not longer built boats to fish....
Who's to say with any certainty that we won't do the same thing - but on a much larger scale?
Pulitzer Prize Winner Jared Diamond has written an outstanding book on this subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
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Last year, Oregon State University released a study showing that going childless is a better way help the environment than recycling, driving an energy-efficient car, or using compact fluorescent bulbs. It’s 20 times more effective, in fact. Raising a kid in the United States can tack an extra 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to a person’s carbon legacy. By having a single child, one individual’s environmental impact will increase almost six-fold.
Just to give you the example of my sister. When her child was born she moved to a bigger flat (higher electricity, gas, water consumption, more cleaning products, heating and aircon required), ditched her bike for a city car, she uses washable nappies (which need to be washed!) , her child has now a room full of plastic toys, little clothes, little shoes, etc. she has become a consumer even before she is old enough to speak. Her needs can only grow exponentially as she grows up and goes to school. Luckily my sister is stopping at one child because she is already over 40. My sister is a vegetarian, but her daughter isn't because her pediatrician is too concerned about the little one not getting enough nutrients. So, even a very environmentally-conscious person has to make compromises when she becomes a parent.
Why would you have more than one child? Adopt your second child, if you fear your first child may become too spoilt. Mining and colonising other planets??? You can't be serious. Are you going to tell your future children to go and live on Mars?
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Is procreation immoral? No, it is natural. However it's being targeted as a modern way of solving a modern problem.
Certainly in the developed world birth rates have fallen to less than 2 children per couple. In the undeveloped world it's still higher, but it has always been natures way to repopulate and keep the gene pool going. Modern medicine certainly can take as much blame as anything else.
Years ago viruses, bacteria and epidemics would put population back on it's rightful path. If you had children you never expected that they'd all survive. You wouldn't expect to survive much past 30 or 40. That was life. Modern medicine has changed all that. Even illnesses such as cancer, TB, etc that used to be a death sentence are no longer. Bubonic Plague killed 30-60% of the European population back in the 14th century. Spanish Flu killed 3-8% of the entire world population in 1918.
Compare that with modern times. AIDS, SARS, bird and swine flue. Contained and people live on. Cancer patients cured. Heart attack patients bought back to health. TB, smallpox literally eradicated and contained at breakout. That is actually unnatural and leads us to where we are now.
Would those who advocate controlling birthrate also condone non treatment for cancer patients? Would they allow modern diseases and outbreaks to go unchecked? Would they deny the aid sent to third world countries so nature works unhindered? These are very, very real questions that need to be debated. These are the root cause of the problems of population growth in the modern world and you cannot have an informed and intelligent debate without including every reason for population growth however uncomfortable it may make you feel.
So a little bit more to it than calling procreation immoral. Without meaningful debate the question itself is meaningless.
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Yes there is a difference madtown, one is natural the other is not. We have created an unnatural world and are trying to solve problems with unnatural means. So it's debatable which is immoral.
Laying the blame at the feet of parents is to blank out the past. Creative solutions need to be found but to do that the whole reason why we are where we are has to be debated rather than a band aid applied.
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I figure that having a child is the most selfish thing we do as human beings - creating another being (which has no say in the matter) that must endure the human condition, solely for the gratification of the parents.
I am not saying having kids is a bad thing - it is what we are genetically programmed to do after all - but it is the ultimate selfish act. But then again everything, including love, is selfish..
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