Climate change - Calling planet birth

On 13 February, the UK Guardian published a lengthy article by Oliver Burkeman arguing that ‘family size has become the great unmentionable of the campaign for more environmentally friendly lifestyles’. 

Burkeman argues:

‘...In 1998, most people weren’t willing to consider any significant lifestyle changes for environmental reasons, let alone cutting back on kids. Much has changed since then, of course, both in terms of the consensus on the threat posed by climate change, and our willingness to make sacrifices in the face of it. But one thing has not: you still won’t hear any major environmental campaign group in Britain or the US arguing that, in addition to flying less and recycling more, middle-class westerners should be having fewer children to save the planet. Even commentators who warn of the evils of overpopulation, proudly trumpeting their willingness to raise controversial issues in defiance of “political correctness”, only rarely emphasise the notion that we – rather than those in the developing world – might consider doing less of the populating. For several thorny reasons, family size has become the great unmentionable of the campaign for more environmentally friendly lifestyles. And yet, in the end, it may be the only one that really counts.

‘Trying to understand the debate about population and the climate sometimes feels like peering into a kaleidoscope while drunk. Directly contradictory claims, that can’t both be true at the same time, are advanced as if they were facts. Weird allegiances are created: George Monbiot and American creationists, for example, are roughly equally contemptuous of organisations such as the Optimum Population Trust; supporters of reproductive rights find common cause with anti-abortionists. You come across nutty-sounding fringe groups like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, but then you phone its founder, Les Knight – he’s a supply teacher, based on America’s west coast, and can only talk during breaks between lessons – only to discover that he isn’t nutty at all, but in fact rather sane and self-deprecating. (He simply wants people to choose not to breed. “Eventually we’ll be extinct anyway, but it would be so much nicer if we phased ourselves out through natural attrition,” Knight told me affably. “You know – the way a company reduces its workforce without firing anyone.")

‘For all the confusion and sensitivities that ­surround the subject, though, the basic facts are clear. If you live in Britain or the US in 2010, there is nothing you can do to reduce your impact on the environment that even comes close to the effects of having one fewer child...’

Read on: Climate change: calling planet birth, by Oliver Burkeman. The Guardian, 13 February 2010

Also read:

Population debate section, Abortion Review