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.
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.