The latest personal environmental transgression to be shamed for is air travel. Although commercial airlines emit a small fraction of total greenhouse gases, every little bit counts and people are cautioned to restrict their air travel to the absolute minimum necessity — whatever that is.
Air travel joins driving fossil-fueled vehicles, cooking with gas, eating beef, having lawns, using plastic straws and having a single-family house on a growing list of personal lifestyle choices to feel guilty about because they are considered environmentally selfish and irresponsible.
While human activity is rightly blamed for the degradation of the environment, the specific activities, particularly those concomitant with the industrialization and technology that afford much of mankind a comfortable lifestyle, are not to blame per se.
It is the amount of the activity that is the problem.
Everyone could drive a gas-guzzling car with far less impact on the environment if there were far fewer people to begin with.
We could eat all the steak we wanted without having too many cattle chewing up grasslands and polluting the atmosphere with methane if there were far fewer of us to feed.
More forests and jungles would remain intact if there were far fewer people who needed to clear them for farms, fuel and building materials.
More of us could have a decent house and not have to endure soul-sucking traffic congestion if there were fewer of us to be housed and transported.
The cost of burgeoning human population is not only environmental degradation and diminished biodiversity but also decreased personal freedom. As human population increases, lifestyle choices are gradually limited or even prohibited to accommodate the greater number of people.
For example, housing shortages in the United States have become so severe that state and local governments are imposing dictates on communities to pack more people into their neighborhoods — regardless of the objections or desires of current residents.
The city of Minneapolis wants to rezone all of its residential areas for multiple housing — essentially eliminating single-family home neighborhoods in that city. California is already proceeding to do that by overriding local communities’ zoning and building codes to force higher densities on existing neighborhoods.
And for what? Why are we polluting our home planet and allowing our lives and liberty to be diminished to accommodate more of us?
What is so great about having billions and billions of people alive at the same time? If you lived for 500 years, you could never get to know them all. What’s the point?
In our mindless passion for procreation we are rapidly fouling our nest and poisoning ourselves.
Scientists are warning that if carbon emissions are not substantially reduced or eliminated by 2050 there will be irreversible catastrophic consequences affecting mankind and most life on the planet.
Meanwhile, pollution from human activity already pervades the biosphere. For example, plastic pollution has been found throughout the world’s oceans and, recently, deep within them. Microscopic plastic pollution is likely in the bodies of nearly everyone on earth.
All the “green” technology and clean-energy alternatives, all the draconian dictates and prohibitions aimed at reducing environmentally destructive human activity will eventually be overwhelmed by human over-breeding if that continues unabated.
We won’t save the planet by banning plastic straws, but we might by focusing on the quantity side of the environmental equation. Human population growth must be arrested and then reduced to a safely sustainable level.
That level is one that allows enough essential resources and a healthy habitable environment to ensure a sustainably comfortable lifestyle for everyone. Scientists calculate that the safe level of global human population is no more than 2 billion — a number reached back in 1927.
The current global population is estimated to be 7.7 billion. A number that is rapidly taxing the planet’s ability to sustain a healthy biosphere — let alone provide a decent lifestyle for all 7.7 billion people.
Worldwide, human births exceed deaths by more than 83 million annually, and as more of the earth’s nations become industrialized, i.e. China and India, the strain on the planet will be exponentially greater.
Even if, starting today, not another baby were born on earth it would take 95 years to reach the 2 billion safe level of human population — and then there would be no one left young enough to procreate.
Realistically, then, mankind will not avoid all the consequences of its excesses, but it can mitigate them and avert some of Nature’s cold-blooded calamities by addressing the population side of the problem as rationally and humanely quickly as possible.
You don’t do that with boneheaded policies — typically based on religious beliefs — that deny funding for contraception and family planning education, or with blanket prohibitions of abortion.
You don’t do that by tolerating mass immigration from nations that have irresponsibly overbred. You don’t do that by having more than two children. You don’t do that by rewarding people with tax credits for each child they have.
The notion that having children is a natural, unalienable right that justifies certain entitlements or special considerations from society is misguided. Not having enough income to support a family when that situation is self-inflicted by irresponsibly having children before you can adequately support them does not entitle one to more income.
The justification for having children as being vital to secure the survival of the species is absurdly anachronistic. Today, the survival of the human species is most in danger from its over-procreation, not from a dearth of births.
Those folks who drive electric cars, are vegetarians, have solar panels and sort their trash for recycle are contributing to the solution, but they won’t solve the problem. Those folks who forego having children might.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.