Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Go Shrink Yourself

Here's an idea for saving our planet: make people smaller.

Sounds crazy, right? Nobody wants to be small. Everybody wants to be big. How would you make people smaller, anyway? Genetic modification? Wouldn't it be horribly risky? Even if it worked, wouldn't it be embarrassing and dangerous to be smaller than other people? I can already hear you snickering, "You first."

You're right. It's dangerous and crazy. But it might be less dangerous and crazy than the alternatives.

Our planet is in trouble. We're overheating its atmosphere. We're exhausting its resources. Just about every analysis suggests that we have no hope of averting disaster using known technologies. Solar power, wind, carbon caps—we should do all of that. But it won't come close to being enough. And even if we invent some brilliant solution to climate change, the next environmental crisis is just around the corner. There are simply too many people using too many resources. We're overtaxing our planet.

Could we get more resources from other planets? Theoretically, sure. But right now, we can't even afford to go back to the moon.

This is where contrarian thinking comes in handy. Maybe we don't have to find more resources. Maybe we can reduce the number of people.

That's the agenda of the Optimum Population Trust, which has just released an analysis of the environmental costs of bringing new children into the world. "Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change," says the trust's press release. Likewise, other environmental challenges—soil erosion, water shortage, deforestation, fish depletion, starvation—"would be easier to solve with fewer people."

The argument is totally, screamingly, urgently correct. Yet, as David Fahrenthold reported in yesterday's Washington Post, the Obama administration won't touch it, and a U.N. official calls it "an insult to developing countries." Why the resistance? Because everyone fears coercive population control. The only thing more hard-wired than our desire to procreate is our desire to fornicate.

So: If we're devouring our planet, and we can't find more resources, and we refuse to have fewer children, where does that leave us?

Hence my proposal: Shrinking our numbers isn't the only way to reduce our environmental impact. Another way is to shrink our size. Don't tell me it's impossible. Look what we've done to dogs.

If you come up with a less crazy solution, let me know.

A Black Market in Children

If the government stopped you from bearing a child, would you buy one instead?

Before you say no, look at what's happening in China, as reported by Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times:

The Chinese government insists there are fewer than 2,500 cases of human trafficking each year, a figure that includes both women and children. But advocates for abducted children say there may be hundreds of thousands. Sun Haiyang, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of 2,000 children in and around Shenzhen who have disappeared in the past two years.

Where are all these kids going?

[M]ost of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say. The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country's strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.

The family-planning policy fines most couples who bear more than one child:

[I]n many rural areas, including Anxi County, a resident whose first child is a daughter is allowed to have a second. Having a third child, however, can mean steep fines as high as $5,800 and other penalties that include the loss of a breadwinner's job. A boy, by contrast, can often be bought for half that amount, and authorities may turn a blind eye if the child does not need to be registered as a new birth in the locale. In some cases, local officials may even encourage people desperate for a son to buy one. After their 3-month-old son died, Zhou Xiuqin said, the village family planning official went to her home and tried to comfort her and her husband, who was compelled to have a vasectomy after the birth of the boy, their second child. "He said, ‘Don't cry, stop crying, you can always buy another one,' " Ms. Zhou recalled.

And that's just what the couple did. They bought a 5-year-old boy for $3,500.

This is what happens when you block legal access to what people desperately want: You create a black market. That's true of drugs, abortions, and even children. The black-market problem doesn't settle any of these policy questions. But before deciding on the policy, you had better take it into account.

Some Chinese parents are trying to defeat the human traffickers by catching kidnappers on surveillance video. Other activists are "agitating for the establishment of a DNA database for children." One activist tells Jacobs, "If the government can launch satellites and catch spies, they can figure out how to find stolen children."

Can a totalitarian regime of cameras, DNA databases, and forced vasectomies stop a black market in children? I don't know. But it sure can start one.