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Global SwarmingIs it time for Americans to start cutting our baby emissions?

By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Sept. 10, 2007, at 4:49 PM ET

Daniel Engber was online Sept. 13 to chat with readers about this article. Read the transcript.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Oh, if we all just disappeared. According to The World Without Us, Alan Weisman's strangely comforting vision of human annihilation, the Earth would be a lot better off. In his doomsday scenario, freshwater floods would course through the New York subway system, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks, and a parade of coyotes, bears, and deer would eventually trot across the George Washington Bridge and repopulate Manhattan. Nature lovers can take solace in the idea that the planet will thrive once we've finally destroyed ourselves with global warming. But Weisman takes the fantasy one step further: Let's not wait for climate change, he says. Let's start depopulating right now.

Instead of burning down our numbers with oil and gas, we might follow the advice of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who tells Weisman that everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once. Weisman isn't up for quite so drastic a measure, but he makes his own pitch, moderate in comparison: Let's cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in "the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful." It seems like a notion from the fringe, but Weisman's book has become a mainstream best seller. Could population control be the next big thing in green culture?

Nine years ago, Bill McKibben was raked over the coals for making a similar proposal in his vasectomy memoir, Maybe One. ("It's the last remaining taboo thing to talk about," he said after it was published.) Maybe times have changed. As social policy, population control seems like an infringement on fundamental human rights. That's been the case in China, where mandatory birth planning has been a ghastly failure in both moral and practical terms. But these days, we tend to think of saving the environment in terms of personal choice, rather than government programs. We're obsessed with our green lifestyles—eating local, driving hybrids, paying off our excess carbon-dioxide emissions. From that perspective, voluntary familial extinction (or at least reduction) might not be such a bad idea. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, cutting back on kids is the best choice you can possibly make.

What's the environmental cost of having a child? In the crudest terms, you've added another version of yourself into the world, which means you're potentially doubling your carbon-dioxide emissions over the total life of your family. That's a high estimate, since our kids won't spew as much greenhouse gas as we do—automobiles, appliances, light bulbs, and everything else will become more efficient in coming generations. But these marginal improvements aren't going to make our babies carbon-neutral. They'll just contribute to global warming at somewhat lower rates than we do.

Our other green lifestyle choices can't even begin to offset the cost of adding a brand-new CO2-emitter to the population. When I ran my own numbers through Al Gore's carbon calculator, I discovered that a switch to 100 percent wind and solar power would reduce my emissions by just 1.3 tons per year. That's not even enough to account for one quarter of today's average American. Meanwhile, I'd have to do quite a bit of driving around in a Hummer H3 to mimic the environmental impact of creating another version of me. Not to mention the fact that my children might eventually decide to have their own children, who would emit even more carbon dioxide down the line.

Critics of population-based environmentalism point out that the people most likely to cut back on their baby emissions are also the ones most likely to instill their children with green values. It's the Idiocracy argument: If all the eco-conscious Americans stopped having kids, their numbers would decline. But having fewer greenies around would be a net loss for the environment only if each greenie baby did more good for the planet than harm—i.e., if the value of his or her vote exceeded the costs of his or her CO2 emissions. (If that's true, environmentalists should have as many children as possible, to stuff the ballots for Dennis Kucinich.) It's also naive to assume our children will embrace our values just because we want them to; for all our preaching, we might end up with a generation of rebellious, gas-guzzling teenagers.

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Daniel Engber is an associate editor at Slate. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Remarks from the Fray:

If the green movement is, at heart, nothing more than a sheer conservationist piety, a desire to protect innocent nature at the expense of the best of human value, then it has already lost the fight. The joys of the family, to my mind, ought to be enlisted as a powerful tool for the fight for sustainable ecology.

To suggest that one ought to worry about the eco-ethics of one's progeny is to admit to the discussion an ugly and joyless consideration. To be asked to stand upon the brink of parenthood and calculate the carbon emissions of one's progeny reveals a coldness at the core of the war on global warming.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is not that it is illogical, but that it is merely logical. Such thinking cuts the heart out of any powerful movement for change by replacing deep, human value with consequentialist calculations.

Suggesting that the best way to protect mother earth is to refrain from becoming a mother (or at least to refrain from increasing one's flock of children), then one wonders why exactly we are working to protect the planet?

A desire for a world without humanity seems to carry with it a marked disdain for human life, and human worth. If humans are really the excrescence at the end of an evolutionary digestive tract, then reducing our numbers makes sense. Perhaps the planet is better off without us. But undercutting human value then calls into question our own responsibility for the planet. Are we then moral agents with a unique role, or something else, a poor thing the world would be better off without? And if so, what moral role we play in protecting the planet?

The traditional Christian virtue of stewardship, represents a more full-bodied approach to nature/creation, as humans are not merely to absent themselves from interference, but carefully interweave themselves into creation's ecology. The goal of "creation stewardship" is to live in harmony with creation, and if this is possible, multiply voices for this harmony. The intrinsic value of creation calls us to protect it, but this does not over-ride, but fits together with, the value of humans as responsible actors in the world, with a unique role to play. That procreation is not only a right, but also a joy, as well as a strong motivation for ecological care, follows from a sense of divine purpose.

If the green movement wants to motivate humans to eco-action, then it will need to enlist our most meaningful human roles, not fight against them.

--ptallon

(To reply, click here.)

If the science of global warming is correct, and the predicted catastrophe happens (sea levels rise, ice age, famine, massive migration, etc, etc), then population control will take care of itself. And most likely, those with more resources are more likely to survive, an anti-Idiocracy.

There's no need for ill-informed policies with their unintended consequences. It's time to face the facts that global warming is going to happen, and there's nothing we can do about it. Inconsequential changes in energy efficiency aside, it would take massive reductions in the global economy to significantly decrease the rate of carbon emissions, not even reducing it. This economic destruction would leave billions more in poverty and facing starvation.

Our only hope is technology.

--QED

(To reply, click here.)

How strange that a few billion years of evolution on the planet Earth have culminated in the species at the top of the food chain being seemingly genetically predisposed to believe that the universe, or at least the planet, would be better off without it.

So we've passed from ancient religions that warned of man's inherent evil nature and imminent destruction (often with seeming relish), to an environmentalism that warned of man's imminent destruction (taking most of the rest of the planet with us), and now move on to a worship of nature--a nature that we define as: everything except us. Of course, only man could invent an environmentalism that imagines a better world if he had never existed and which suggests that he contemplate voluntary extinction. (Apparently, if humans hadn't also evolved irony, the smartest of us would have all committed suicide by now anyway.)

Seems natural selection managed consciousness only in a life form that could help the process further along--by being its eraser.

So, if we haven't managed to demonstrate that we are born into sin, we continue to prove that we are definitely born into guilt. It's OK though. Since, we can only have acquired our guilt through the process of natural selection, we obviously need it in order to survive.

--not_abel

(To reply, click here.)

(9/11)

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