Is not having children an acceptable tactic to fight to climate change?
If you have a moment read this: http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/06/no-child-left-behind.html
Orson Scott Card presents the argument for having children in simple and eloquent terms during his novel Ender's Game:
"Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive ... the race as a whole can never decide not to exist."
This is indisputable fact. A species with no will to survive and procreate would fold within a generation. An organism can't wake up in the morning and be ambivalent to its own survival. If every living thing isn't working as hard as it can to eat, drink, and reproduce, the entire foundation of life on this planet would collapse. Evolution would cease to be "survival of the fittest" and start being "survival of the least lethargic".
Unfortunately the above argument is not complete because humans are not like other organisms. Because we have conscious, self-aware minds we are capable of removing ourselves from the process of evolution. We give eye glasses to those with bad vision and wheel chairs to those who can't walk. I'm not suggesting either of the aforementioned activities are harmful, only that they remove or at least decrease the effects of natural selection. Humans are also the only species who make a conscious decision to remove themselves from the gene pool through suicide. We have enough mental power as a species to stop our own reproduction, but should/would we?
Even if we were to curb all of our carbon emissions, Earth has a "maximum occupancy". Eventually we will run out of arable land, water, or habitable places. Maybe a combination of any of the above. If left unchecked the population will grow until it so large that the Earth cannot produce enough of what is necessary to maintain it. Then the population will be regulated by shortages of food.
The questions are:
-Is it better for people to self-limit now, or should they wait until natural population pressures take hold?
-Is the environmental impact of a potential child a legitimate reason for not having kids?
-Would the population at large be willing to succumb to a limitation on the number of children? Would people's consciouses allow them to reject 3.6 billion years of evolutionary hardwiring?
Please respond with your thoughts on any of the above questions, or any other questions you feel should have been raised.
Melting into this
4 months ago
1 comment:
i read the blog you mentioned earlier today and i gotta say, how very interesting.
as far as your questions go i have some thoughts.
people WILL cut back on reproduction. i just dont think it would happen the way we all expect it to. it'll happen when the oxygen is running out and we cant walk anywhere without being shoulder to shoulder. it wont be until the last possible moment. and it wont be pretty. in vonnegut's book welcome to the monkey house he writes about a similar scenario where population is out of control and theres no choice but to create a pill numbing people from the waste down and making felons out of people who have sex. in the story there are suicide shops, the name says it all. you get a last meal and a pretty nurse to kill you.
furthermore, i dont think that people who hold back on kids for the sake of the environment are all there. but then i'm no environmentalist. i'm an existentialist and all i see is their limited numbers compared to the billions that don't take action or are overly wasteful and i realize that maybe the whole thing is a lost cause.
but thats just me.
thanks for the space for my opinion. and id welcome any feedback.
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