save the planet, have less kids?

Jonathon Porrit, an English environmental activist, wants you to know that if you have more than two kids, you’re endangering the health of the planet. As you can probably imagine, his message of limited fertility has given the British media some fodder for a quick, ready made controversy and debate. What comes first? The planet, or our drive to reproduce? Are we really ready to abandon our natural instincts and start thinking about our impact on the environment before we decide to start our families?

I’ve posted about the Earth’s population woes not too long ago, worrying about disease, crime, poverty and social unrest bound to escalate if we continue our out of control propagation. But in Mr. Porrit’s case, the concern behind the campaign is global warming. He and the organization that promotes his environmental message, the Optimum Population Trust, are apparently so fixated on how much carbon dioxide is emitted per every person on an annual basis, they believe that new strategies to stem the tide of global warming should include family planning. For every person not born, they figure that hundreds of tons of greenhouse gases would never have to find their way into the atmosphere. Though when they mention that every person generates some 11 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, it’s as if they’re saying that people are a necessary evil and we only need so many of them so they don’t generate too much of the wrong gas.

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We need to limit the number of kids we have to two because every human emits carbon dioxide or adds to greenhouse gas emissions. Not because of economic worries like whether there will be jobs for all those kids when they grow up. Not because of the problems presented by out of control population growth in areas of the world afflicted by civil unrest, poverty and disease. No, it’s the annual carbon dioxide emission stats that are going to do it. Couldn’t we just focus on developing clean, renewable energy and biodegradable plastics for toys and games and then let people make up their own minds about how many kids to have instead of giving them guidelines based on vague emission calculations?

Of course we need to highlight that this is all Porrit and the Optimum Population Trust will do; recommend and ask really nicely if you would be so kind as to stop at two kids per family. But in my humble opinion, they’re overdoing it. Our environment is a concern and we must try to do all we can to keep our planet green and healthy. After all, pollution hurts us too. Dumping a whole lot of toxic waste in a stream to save some money comes back to haunt us by leaching into the soil and poisoning vast swaths of water where we raise fish that find their way to local supermarkets. Same with spewing out billions of tons of noxious gases into the air. We’ll have to breathe that gunk. However, there’s no need to get extreme and start advocating limits on the number of children one can have as an environmental policy. There are other ways to deal with climate change, ones that don’t involve attempts to influence such personal decisions as how many children someone should have.