Forget all the pessimism and misanthropy. It's never going to solve our problems. Instead, focus on making things that make people more efficient. We won't ever be able to guilt-trip and shame our way out of climate change, but we just might be able to engineer our way out instead.
And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.
I used to be strongly opposed to this mindset, but living next door to neighbours with land rovers, a mountain of turf cut from a "protected" bog for heating (hey, it's free, and you get to destroy wetland habitate _and_ emit more than coal!), and _SEVENTEEN KIDS_ (because God made them or something). I really am doubting if the few people who actually give a shit having _fewer_ kids is the answer. We need to outcompete people like quiverfull.
How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.
This misanthropy is self-defeating and accomplishes nothing besides making the holder feel smug and superior.
Be honest: the entire species isn’t going to be persuaded to stop reproducing to save kelp forests. You know this is true as well as I do. Nor is everyone going to get rid of all their possessions and return to preindustrial life. Only a few people want to do this, and since it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work.
Fifty years of this moral pleading to reduce consumption and reproduction has done jack shit to help the environment. Eight billion people want a developed-world affluent lifestyle and each and every one of them will personally guillotine you if you try to deny it to them. Preventing this desire is a lost cause.
Given that humanity stubbornly will not listen to you, and given that your odds of establishing a totalitarian state to force them to do so are long, it is time to look for other solutions. If humans are going to be here and are going to demand affluence, we desperately need to find ways to deliver that without destroying the biosphere. And having fewer kids will not help with that—in fact it’ll hurt. The more minds we can focus on the problem, the better.
It will not be easy and there is no promise of success, but it is better than a cause that is already lost.
When things go extinct without human presence, it’s a morally neutral event. It’s just something that happens. No one cries for the trilobites.
When you say the source of earth’s problems are because of humans, I believe you’re right but not for the reason you think. Earth doesn’t have problems. Earth simply abides. Humans on earth, they have belief systems that consider certain changes to the planet problems. In that sense humans are the cause of the problems. Without humans to care about it, it’s just a change, not a problem.
Yeah, that struck me as odd too. The biggest thing anyone can do to reduce their future carbon footprint is usually to have fewer or no children.
That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.
It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.
>It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children?
Earth has produced a grand total of one species that even has the potential to be effective stewards. That's us. Earth is already on the far backside of how much longer it will be habitable due to the Sun. And I see no reason to think that any other intelligence that did evolve here wouldn't be beset by the same problems we have now.
So (IMO) intelligent, conscientious people having fewer children helps nothing. We (humans) are the best thing our biosphere has got, by a long shot, in terms of long-term preservation of life, which is something that I personally think is of great importance.
But is it? I thought it was because of peoples and more to the point corporations and government "excessive" consumption of resources....? I'd argue kids actually (can) diminish use of resources by combining 2 (a couple) individuals in a smaller (spatial)unit sharing meals, going out/traveling less,
... also the happiness, anger,sadness and whole other spectrum of emotions one is directly confronted with when having kids helps with entertaining empathy...
And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.