From the department of absurd comes this article with examples of women who make themselves sterile and ”save the planet” by not having babies. Being asked to eat kangaroos for a similar cause is nothing compared to this:
At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.
Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.
“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.
Luckily these people make themselves a dying breed. Their ideas aren’t viral, they have nobody to pass them on to :)
Think globally, act locally.
I remember back in the 1950’s hearing about the population explosion and visiting a museum in high school in the late 60’s that showed tens of thousands of starving children and even though I was only 17, I decided not to have children because there were so many needy children in the world I couldn’t imagine making more plus I did the math and could see that the human population, with the increasing use of resources could just continue to explode without limit.
There’s nothing wrong with realizing that 3 billion, 6 billion, 9 billion…it doesn’t computer. Not with higher percentages using cars, electricity, etc. The planet can’t support it.
Easter Island’s story is a microcosm of the whole planet. It’s natural to want to children. People have 5 to 12 kids, well, that might be a bit selfish. It’s hard for many not to have any. I wanted kids. I just knew couldn’t ignore the numbers.
What can I say, I am very sorry you’ve been deluded into thinking that things in the future move linearly compared to how they are today or in the past.
We’ve been told that we would all run out of food by now and more than 100% of the population would have to be farmers. We were also told about a 100 years ago that if most people used horses for transport our streets would be filled with piles of horse crap so high nobody could do anything. Those two things did not happen, we found ways around issues. Needless to say wars also have an effect, and wars aren’t going away unfortunately just yet.
Pollution is our biggest problem in my personal opinion out of all such things (which I don’t regard as the same thing as global warming). I do believe and hope that we’ll find ways of cleaning things up, it’s too bad you don’t have kids who’d try to accomplish this.
Here are more things which fear mongering doesn’t get - quoted from the article here:
http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/departed/76.html
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Environmentalist doomsayers still don’t understand why their past predictions failed to come true.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, the Club Of Rome, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups, and their millions of fans and followers, said that as the world’s population doubled from 3 billion to 6 billion, the world would run out of food, water, trees, energy, metals, landfill space, and other things.
They were wrong.
The reason they were wrong is because they viewed people as consumers, instead of as producers and consumers.
The truth is that science, technology, innovation, private property, prices, markets, incentives, and other things have caused resources to become more abundant, not less.
Switching from collective farming to private farming brought an end to China’s famine, and now China has a growing obesity problem. In countries that respect private property and have at least relatively free markets, famine has been abolished. The only famine left is in countries like North Korea and Zimbabwe, and the problem there is political, not lack of physical resources.
Israel’s newest desalination plant provides people with clean water at only 1/5 penny per gallon. 70% of the world’s surface is covered in water, to an average depth of 2 miles. And water can be recycled again and again and again. It’s impossible for us to run out of water.
In the U.S., paper and lumber companies plant more trees than they cut down. We can’t run out of trees.
For $80 a barrel, we can manufacture as much oil as we want, out of garbage, sewage, farm waste, etc.
There’s enough uranium in the earth to give us all the energy we could ever need.
The U.S. fills up less than 10 square miles of landfill space each year. And those landfills often get turned into parks and golf courses. There is no landfill crises.
Metals can be recycled again and again and again, and the free market will always do this whenever genuine scarcity causes prices to be high enough. Gold is a great example of this.
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