The article talks about how "we" value ending global warming as if this were some mainstream consensus that extended beyond a small group of dedicated liberal environmentalists.

I can guarantee you that to most Americans, the idea that saving Mother Nature is worth more than one of the greatest joys in life-- raising and nurturing a child is laughable.

And the people in the Latin America and India and the Muslim world where most of the population growth is occurring anyways, well, I'm sure they don't spend their days fretting about how humanity is a plague destroying our beautiful planet.

This idea is irredeemably stupid. The point of environmentalism should be to try to sustain the wonder that is the human condition, not to exterminate it. A world void of human beings would be a rare island where this bizarre thing called life has sprung up, but there would literally be no one to enjoy and marvel in the glory that is a planet populated by living beings.

The idea that humanity is little more than a plague on mother nature and that humans should stop procreating is an esoteric and nihilistic belief that will never be held by anything more than a small fringe of the most radical of environmentalist liberals. I am personally pro-choice and think the conservative rhetoric about liberals having a "culture of death" is fatuous, but if this type of thinking actually does become conventional wisdom among progressives and environmentalists, then perhaps it will not be so.

Hear hear! Very well put!

Humans cannot reproduce endlessly.

At some point, this "fringe" which cares about the earth more than about ever MORE humans will have to become the mainstream, or we will die in our own excrement.

Technology can delay and push out the inevitable point at which we will have maxed out the carrying capacity of the planet but simply sitting there in denial of the fact that at some point we will have to stop replicating ourselves endlessly is STUPID.

Jan VanDenBerg

the wonder that is the human condition? are you a person so in love with humanity that you see only its beauty and none of its flaws? but that's beside the point.

i agree that really this is something that would need to be addressed more in developing countries where the population growth rate is high. but that doesnt mean the idea doesn't warrant discussion and doesnt mean that it has no validity.

you miss the point because no one (at least noone rational) is saying "don't have anymore kids". what is being discussed is the idea that maybe we shouldnt just spread our seed as much as possible. we don't all need seven children in a household (and actually in many american families nowadays, it tends to be that many children in that many households!).

i just don't see the need to have 16 kids in one family. but there are those that see nothing wrong with either. i would encourage people to have less. but ultimately i dont have a right to govern their body any more than they have a right to govern mine.

"Humans cannot reproduce endlessly.

At some point, this "fringe" which cares about the earth more than about ever MORE humans will have to become the mainstream, or we will die in our own excrement.

Technology can delay and push out the inevitable point at which we will have maxed out the carrying capacity of the planet but simply sitting there in denial of the fact that at some point we will have to stop replicating ourselves endlessly is STUPID.

Jan VanDenBerg"

I am not saying that the environmentalist movement writ large is a worthless enterprise. Indeed, the wonder of this planet is something that should and must be preserved. But the whole point of preserving it is so that it can be inherited by someone. There is no fundamental good that I see in a pristine earth with no human beings on it. I suppose the higher primates and other mammals have fairly well developed brains, but in general, the wonder of the planet earth is that it is a fragile lifeboat with an amazing diversity of living beings. But the wonder comes from the fact that there are human beings. Worrying about how to make sure that future generations have clean water to drink and do not live in a world where vast portions of what is now dry-land are underwater is a sensible and good thing to do, but I think the solution has to be in technology. Developing non-greenhouse-gas producing energy sources that can feed humanity's need for energy is perhaps the primary challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Other technologies like managing fresh-water, getting safe fresh water in the third world and making desalinization of seawater economically feasible are other pieces of the puzzle. And the rest of the pieces of the puzzle are improving all sorts of technology-- making manufacturing goods do negligible harm to the environment, continuing economic development the world over so that half or more of the world's population does not need to have heaps of children just so that they can survive by subsistence agriculture (which often harms the environment, as well).
But the point of all of this is so that humans can continue to enjoy their lives, a fundamental joy of which is bearing and raising children, without destroying nature. As the article itself points out, measures like those in China which forcibly try to stop people from acting out on this basic human instinct have proven both impractical and immoral. The idea that this kind of population control could be carried out on a global scale is simply not realistic. So we need to figure out a way to reconcile the fact that at least for the foreseeable future the population will continue to rise, the human race will not voluntarily undertake massive depopulation, and to do this while not destroying the planet. I think that if as the article implies that "we all" have a desire to save the environment, it is this vision of sustainable development and improvement of the human species that they have in mind. The massive forced depopulation of the world by turning bearing children from one of the most fundamental and wonderful parts of the human experience into some sort of crime against mother nature is certainly not how most people envision the human race not destroying the environment, and that is good, because this idea is reprehensible.

It is tough to imagine a way we could reduce population growth enough and fast enough to change the outcome, but it is very clear that the earth will strike back at some point.

When that is is subject to argument, but it must be clear that we can't as a species just keep breeding excessively forever. We aren't planning to get more room by colonizing off the earth. We aren't even seriously working on it.

At the current rate, what do you think it is going to be like to be human on this earth in 100 years?

Our descendants are going to suffer. And it is starting to look like sooner rather than later.

We ought to think farther ahead.

Nothing of the sort is needed..simple observation shows that poor people have more children that rich, and third world countries have more children than first. There is an unmistakable correlation between population and the economic well being of a country. In the past, and in many thrid world countries today, families need to have more children to farm lands, do work, etc.. As economies grow and become industrialized, people get better and more rewarding jobs, women have careers and have less incentive to have many children, etc.. and therefore, population shrinks. In Western Europe and Japan, for example, sociologists are already worried about a population implosion, not the other way around.

Therefore, the solution being discussed addresses a flawed hypothosis that human population is somehow out of control. Most estimates of world population actually show population is leveling off and should not exceed 10 billion. The doomsday senerios of bad science fiction were wrong because they ignored economic growth as a population inhibitor. Thereofore, the logical cure to population growth is not sociopathic disrespect for human life, but economic growth and capitalism.

Don't worry about the population, I heard to day on ABC that
the Russian government a day of conception to boost
the population.

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"It is tough to imagine a way we could reduce population growth enough and fast enough to change the outcome, but it is very clear that the earth will strike back at some point.

When that is is subject to argument, but it must be clear that we can't as a species just keep breeding excessively forever. We aren't planning to get more room by colonizing off the earth. We aren't even seriously working on it.

At the current rate, what do you think it is going to be like to be human on this earth in 100 years?

Our descendants are going to suffer. And it is starting to look like sooner rather than later.

We ought to think farther ahead."

I think the message is beginning to get through. But you're right, there is no way to imagine with our current technology any way to either slow population growth enough to make a difference or to make living green enough to make the earth 100 or 200 years from now anything but a miserable existence, jammed to the brim with humans, the last vestiges of the virgin wild destroyed, and massive changes in weather wreaking massive havoc.

But fortunately for the people 100 years from now, they will have the technology of 2107 to bring to bear against these massive challenges, not the technology of 2007.

I heartily agree that we need to get started now developing the technologies that will make energy use, land use, and water use much more sustainable, to give the people who live 100 years from now a fighting chance to live on a planet that is still largely habitable and not full of miserable people dealing with the environment we wrecked and left them with no contingency plans. But technology improvements have been exponential over the past several centuries, and I think it is also foolish to simply extrapolate current population growth scenarios and living conditions with no account of how the technology will be different by then. I think an important part of helping to save the environment will be to raise the living standards of those in the poorest parts of the world, who presumably like people in all countries with high living standards, will then have much lower birth rates than they currently do.

I am not sanguine and blindly optimistic; it is quite possible that people 100 years from now will face environmental challenges they inherited from us that will make life much more difficult. But it is also possible that birth rates will stabilize themselves somewhat as a result of growing prosperity in places like India, and it is also possible that things will not be so bad.

I agree these are huge problems and the growth of human population at current rates is not sustainable in the long-run, but I see no reason to assume that both the growth rates and the technological ability to mitigate the impact of humans will stay the same 100 or 200 years from now. The answer, however, is not to somehow try to throw a brake on human breeding. Aside from being impossible, it is not even desirable from my point of view as a value we want to embrace. Sure, it is not good or necessary to have 16 kids (and inevitably it seems the people who have 16 kids are those who can least afford them) but instilling the value in us that giving birth to humans is some sort of affront to nature is going too far in the other direction.

2050 is a long way out. Surely by then technology will have increased the carrying capacity of the world, as it has continuously for all history. Yet the U.N.'s most aggressive estimates have world population increasing by just something like 3 billion people by 2050. There's plenty of space and food to accomodate this 30% increase in population, even with current technologies, and 30% is the maximum.

Bottom line is that you're dead wrong - 100% factually incorrect. As wealth expands, birthrates decline and yet population capacity increases. Trends are pointing exactly in the opposite direction of a population "crisis." Will there be a lot of people around? Sure. Will it be more crowded? Sure. Will there be enough calories for everyone, enough water for everyone, enough space for everyone? Sure. So it's a real value judgement to say that the lives of those 3 billion people are so worthless that they do not warrant a marginal, hypothetical decrease in the comfort of some others.

I, and I think most humans who aren't psychopaths like you, reject that judgement.

But you're right, there is no way to imagine with our current technology any way to either slow population growth enough to make a difference or to make living green enough to make the earth 100 or 200 years from now anything but a miserable existence, jammed to the brim with humans, the last vestiges of the virgin wild destroyed, and massive changes in weather wreaking massive havoc

Huh?? Don't you know that the U.N.'s most aggressive estimates show a serious leveling of population growth with a theoretical maximum of 3 billion more people by 2050? That's a 30% increase - and it's an aggressive, hypothetical maximum. It's probably not going to happen, but even if it did, it would be a marginal change only. We can accomodate that level of growth without causing a catastrophe. So...you're simply wrong.

Completely agree.

you say: Sure. So it's a real value judgement to say that the lives of those 3 billion people are so worthless that they do not warrant a marginal, hypothetical decrease in the comfort of some others.

um. now we're taking the pro-life argument to hypothetical people in the future? who said their lives are worthless? i'm pretty sure noone because these people DON'T EXIST YET!!!

What baffles me a bit with a lot of these postings is that so many people seem to have the impression that there's barely any undeveloped land left. I've traveled my fair share in the states, and I've seen plenty of beautiful wild places still very intact, and not very likely to ever be developed. In 100 years, if my grandchildren need some space, I really believe they'll be able to find some. Imagining everyone in the future dirty, crowded and claustrophobic is ridiculous, even if there are more of them.

Cowboy:

Is in China, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and many European countries? They sure are not having 16 kids; but them, having 16 kids in Africa when only 2 survive (less than replacement rate) is not terrible.

Thoughts?