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Controlling OurselvesDaniel Engber takes readers' tough questions on depopulation and the environmental impact of procreating.


Updated Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, at 6:15 PM ET

Slate writer and editor Daniel Engber was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Sept. 13, to chat about population control and the environmental impact of having children. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Second, if you're an environmentalist, it doesn't necessarily mean that your child will be one, too. By the same token, a climate change skeptic could end up giving birth to a radical ecoterrorist.

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rjc (The Fray): Lately it seems that Slate will publish anything as long as it's contrarian enough. It doesn't matter how wrong-headed or poorly thought out it is.

The United States and Europe are stable populations; our birth rates have been in negative numbers for much of the past thirty years. Immigration, not birth, is what drives our population growth.

But Engber's proposal would do nothing to curb the population explosion of the developing world.

If Engber were serious about fighting overpopulation, he would work toward raising standards of living in the developing world. Increased medical access and higher standards of living keeps population growth in check far more effectively than voluntary depopulation.

There aren't too many people stupid enough to take Engber's advice, and we can be grateful that their stupidity won't pass on to any future generations. But shame on Slate for publishing such a misleading article. The argument here really doesn't live up to the least amount of scrutiny.

Daniel Engber: I think you may be missing the point. I agree that improved education, literacy, and access to contraceptives would lower birth rates around the world. And it's plainly true that almost all of the population growth in the course of the next century will occur outside of Europe. But that's irrelevant to the question of what it means to have a child in the United States.

Simply put, each child you have in the U.S. has a dramatic and negative impact on the Earth's climate. That's true if the U.S. population were shooting through the roof, and it's true if our population were stable.

To be clear: The question here isn't "how do we reduce the global population?" (That's not an end in itself, after all.) Instead we're asking "how do I reduce the damage that I'm personally doing to the environment?"

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Mount Rainier, Md.: Completely playing devil's advocate here: If Americans cut down their already low birthrate, and developing countries don't—what do we gain? Do we become like Japan, which is experiencing a real decrease in births and serious economic worries?

Daniel Engber: Good question, and one that's analogous to the question of whether we should impose an expensive carbon tax—which would make us less wealthy but more green.

I sound like a broken record, but if you're concerned about reducing your own contribution to global warming, it doesn't matter what other countries are doing...

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cyberfarer (The Fray): The Al Gore calculator says the average American will produce 7.5 tons of emissions annually. It also shows that a 2006 Hummer H3 will produce 6.8 tons of emissions annually.

So, in fact, the premise of this article is based upon a falsehood. And while children may grow up to give something back to the earth, the Hummer H3 will only ever suck.

Please stop falling for simple-minded nonsense. Look where it has gotten you so far.

Daniel Engber: I'm not sure I see how that statistic undercuts my argument. In fact, it just proves that not even the most reviled symbol of emissions-spewing consumerism matches up to the environmental cost of a single human being.

I should also point out that children grow up and reproduce, creating even more average Americans. The Hummer H3, for all its evils, will remain forever a virgin.

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Philadelphia: Do you favor assisted suicide?

Daniel Engber: I've gotten a bunch of e-mails asking me if I favor euthanasia, murder, genocide, etc. But I don't think that's the logical extension of my argument. If I told you I favored a Prius over a Hummer, would you then ask me if I thought we should walk everywhere?

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Daniel Engber edits Slate's "Science" and "Explainer" columns. He has a graduate degree in neuroscience and has worked in research labs at Columbia, University of California-San Francisco, and the National Institutes of Health.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The subtext of this desire to depopulate the planet (and a 80% cull is nothing less) is that humanity is a uniquely dangerous and unnatural intrusion into the natural world. We have been here for 100,000 years and the world has survived just fine. Modern industrial civilization has caused some harm, but nothing compared with the last ice age, which destroyed the ecosystems of Europe and North America and reduced the tropical rain forests to savannah and fragments. Nothing we have done or will do compares to that. Even the great stress that fossil fuel based humanity has created will only last another 100 years or so, then we will move to more durable power sources. Already, the richest parts of the world are healing their environments, and forests are expanding in North America and Europe to extents not seen in centuries. The same will happen in the tropics in another generation.

In the extremely long run, only sentient toolmaking life can defend the environment against geological and astronomical dangers. In another billion years, the oceans will have boiled off due to a warming sun. Without humanity to save it, life on Earth will be extinguished. And who will deflect the next asteroid to hit this planet if not us?

We have been hard on this planet for the last 50 or 100 years, and will be so for another 50 or 100, but in the long run, we are also the only stewards and protectors this planet and DNA based life has.

--nayyer

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(9/15)

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