I am sick and tired of disingenuous environmentalists. I’m not talking about your typical run-of-the-mill fair-weather greenies; most of them are harmless, albeit hypocritical (e.g., the soccer-moms loading their SUVs with cloth grocery bags). I’m talking about the hardcore set, the ones who preach population reduction without having the integrity to put the real questions on the table.
Let’s accept that population reduction is desirable, for the sake of argument. If we simply limit every couple to one child we are not going to accomplish anything. People are living longer than ever, and increased longevity is being actively pursued by science as a Good Thing. But something has to give: either we stop having babies or we start killing people. In order to reduce the numbers, we would have to kill enough people that the total death rate, natural and induced, exceed the birth rate — this is simple arithmetic.
The question then becomes: who do we kill? Surely not the elderly, not after all our efforts to keep them alive. That would fly in the face of pretty much the entirety of modern medicine. Babies? I doubt that would go over well… but wait! We could sterilize enough women so that even if all the rest had an unusually large number of children — let’s say a baker’s dozen, just to be safe — the birth rate would still be lower than the death rate, even with people living to, say, 150 (for starters). OK, this seems at least plausible; let’s examine this option further…
The question now becomes: whom do we sterilize? The obvious answer is: whomever is having the most babies. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, those tend to be poor brown people (birth rate/fertility rate). Well, isn’t that just lovely? No, I think we better move along before we start entertaining ideas that would reverse several hundred years of hard-won progress…
OK then, if euthanizing the people we all hope to become (old people) is no good, and if sterilizing (and thus exterminating) the most downtrodden people on Earth is no good, then what are we left with? It might be argued that since the most affluent nations are the biggest polluters, then eliminating the upper and middle classes of Europe and North America would be “as good” as sterilizing Africa — but that will not reduce the number of mouths that need feeding. The real problem from the environmental standpoint is that hungry people are too worried about their next meal to care about cloth grocery bags and compact fluorescent light bulbs. No, I’m afraid the question simply cannot be ducked. If the population must be reduced, then we must choose who is to be cut: old people or brown people.
But surely it can’t be so simple; isn’t there some other alternative? Well, one does come to mind, but it’s pretty far out there: we accept that the best we can hope for is to slow population growth, and that we are unlikely ever to reduce it without becoming something less than human. If we accept that, then the question becomes: how do we slow it? One proven method is to increase affluence — but that’s crazy talk, right?
Posted by DD 