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by-your-⌘, flickr
How far do you think we should go to solve climate change? Enforced carbon diets for everyone? A global economic revolution moving to a steady state economy? What about population control?
While technology advances to allow people to have as many children as they want (as per the recent birth of octuplets in the United States), and with 2.5 billion people on the planet in 1950, 6.7 billion now and likely 9 billion by 2050 some people are beginning to wonder if the latter might be the solution to many of our environmental problems.
Population control is obviously problematic (as in China where one-child limits have led to infanticide, forced abortions and adoptions). In Britain, the chair of the Downing Street Commission on Sustainable Development has come out in favor of government controls, saying that in limiting a country's environmental impact, reducing birth rates "is probably the single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using."
People argue that such controls are necessary with 20% of the world's population residing just in China. Others say that reducing population could be done through education, teaching children the environmental impact of having children and letting them grow up to make their own decisions. But of course, not all children around the world go to school.
I don't pretend to know what the answer is, but it just might be in the planet's best interest that we at least open up the discussion.
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i can't imagine western countries actually putting legal limits on births, so this movement will stay strictly in the realm of "personal responsibility". and since only the more wealthy, educated, and "enlightened" segments of the populations (who already have less offspring) are ever going to embrace this idea, it won't even address the problem at the root. we'll see what happens when educated british and other europeans start reducing their birthrates even more while their rapidly expanding poor immigrant populations (largely muslim) do nothing to curb their growth. since having as many babies as possible is the quickest and easiest way to expand the next generation of fundamentalists (see mormon and christian fundamentalist groups in the US) and the goal of many of these people is to completely transform the cultures that shelter them, i don't see this turning out well for western culture and civilization.
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