Celebrating the declining birthrate as some of have done will not save the planet. It will lead to less human fulfillment, less innovation, a lower standard of living, more loneliness, and a world that most would not want to live in.
For years, if not decades, conservatives have suspected that progressives simply don’t like people. They, or at least some non negligible contingent of the progressive population, looks at the world around us and concludes that humanity itself, our collective growth and fulfillment, is the problem, not the solution. We are not the pinnacle of the natural world, the most glorious and unique creature in the known universe. We are instead something of a virus upon the planet, consuming it, devouring it, and destroying it with our greed and avarice. Until recently, however, progressives were at least somewhat reticent to state this belief openly, preferring to speak in tangents such as the relative size of our carbon footprint, the consumption of one country versus as another, the emission of pollutants in the atmosphere, deforestations, mass extinctions, and more. The root cause of these problems might well be humanity’s negative impact on the world in their view, but rarely was it phrased so directly, as in the best hope for the world is less and less people occupying the planet doing less and less with less and less. Potential solutions from limits on carbons to the adoption of electric vehicles were generally couched in positive terms, as in we can save the planet, while still raising happy families and enjoying a modern standard of living. Putting this another way, if we subjected ourselves to their preferred policies, all would be well. We might have to pay a little more here and there, rely on some slightly different and potentially less convenient modes of travel, perhaps even change our diet, but otherwise the combination of abdicating some control over our lives to the government and new technologies would enable us to live at peace with the Earth itself, preventing catastrophic global warming and other potential ill-effects. Of course, there were rumblings from time to time that these measures might not be enough. Progressive firebrands such as Representative Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez have occasionally noted that they were afraid to bring children into a world being ravaged by the effects of climate change. In 2019, she asked on Instagram, “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?” There have also been sporadic concerns about the impact of so-called green technology, specifically the mining of rare earth metals necessary for this green technology, but generally speaking the consensus among experts was that “the real culprits were fossil fuel corporations and successive global governments’ inaction,” to quote The Guardian in response to Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s original question.
Last week, however, an article in Newsweek openly celebrating the decline in birth rates around the world has completely ripped away even this thin facade, revealing the shockingly anti-human ideology that had long been hidden in plain sight. First, a little backstory: It’s no secret that the growth of the global population has slowed over the past five decades. In 1963, the average woman had 5.3 children, but by 2021 that number had plummeted to 2.3, even lower in developed countries. In South Korea and Serbia, for example, the number is a staggering 1.1, so low it would come close to having the population in a few generations. Last year, the Census Bureau predicted the United States would not be immune from this trend; our population would begin to decline after peaking at 370 million 2080. The reality that declining birth rates are likely to be an ongoing trend is buttressed by recent polling. When Pew asked respondents, “whether society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority,” only 39% of voters said so. Not surprisingly, this was split along ideological lines like everything else with 59% of potential Trump voters claiming marriage and children should be a priority with only 19% of potential Biden voters agreeing. We can debate the reason for this split and conservatives might well cheer that more than three times as many of their ideological allies champion marriage and family, but the numbers are not exactly positive either way, not when about 40% of conservatives and 60% of the overall population aren’t exactly big on marriage and families. To be sure, I am not a parent myself outside of my step children, but even I am forced to wonder, if my fellow citizens aren’t prioritizing marriage and children, what are they focusing on and what do they think their lives will be like as they get older without being surrounded by family? As William Shakespeare put it, the world must be peopled. Last year, my stepdaughter and her husband had their first child, my wife and my first grandchild. It doesn’t take an astute observer of human nature to see the look on my wife’s face at even a picture of her granddaughter, much less actually spending time together, to understand that this new arrival means everything to her. We have another one the way who will mean just as much and I’m more than certain the vast, vast majority of grandparents feel the same way. This shouldn’t be surprising in the grand circle of life, especially given the relationship that many of us had with our own grandparents, but that only re-prompts the question: What does anyone think can possibly fill this void?
For their part, progressives do not seem to be concerned, bringing us back to last week’s Newsweek opinion piece. Kirsten Stade, a conservation biologist, makes it plain that humans and at least some of us who love large families, are the real enemy, when she openly bemoans that “lowering our population is conspicuously absent from the conversation on solutions” to global warming and other challenges facing the planet. In her view, contrary to all that we’ve been told over the years, the “green” technology promoted by Democrats including President Joe Biden, funded with billions and billions in taxpayer dollars, frequently with very little measurable effect, are not the “solution it is cracked up to be” citing continued use of fossil fuels and mining as her chief concerns. Even if it were, however, humans would still be taking too much from the environment. Indeed even if we solved the energy problem in its totality, that is the 80% of energy that is “devoured” outside of transportation, the “impacts of feeding that many are even more chilling. At our current population and rates of consumption, agriculture takes up 40 percent of Earth’s ice-free land area. It is difficult to imagine how food production can expand to feed the additional 2 billion people projected by 2100 without further devastating Earth’s biophysical systems. The rapidly growing global middle class and its preference for meat-heavy diets has dire ecological implications, as animal agriculture uses the vast majority of farmland and is responsible for 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.” This has also resulted in the wanton “number of land animals slaughtered globally” and what Ms. Stade sees as an inordinate amount of biomass devoted to humans and the livestock to feed them, “of the total biomass of terrestrial vertebrate species, 60 percent is livestock, 36 percent is humans, and 4 percent is all living wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians,” she noted. Nor is the weight of living things her only concern. We have too much stuff as well, “the sheer mass of human-made things, from cellphones to interstate highway systems, has exceeded the weight of all living things and grows by 30 billion tons annually.” Ultimately, “When global heating threatens to push billions outside of temperature limits compatible with human life, it is no time to panic that we are adding fewer to those billions. In fact, declining birth rates should be cause for celebration for all they signify about gender equality, children’s wellbeing, and easing our burden on Earth. Rather than lamenting low birth rates and strategizing about pronatalist coercion that might reverse them, we should embrace and adapt to this positive trend and celebrate what it means for our planetary future.”
Even if you take her metrics at face value – and impart some meaning to them given I’m not sure why anyone cares about the relative weights of livestock and stuff beyond this sort of lament – the dark way Ms. Stade, and presumably many others, feels about humanity is evident in the language. The consequences of our actions are “dire,” our energy needs “devour,” so much so it “threatens,” is “even more chilling,” leading to “destruction” and “extinction, “devastating,” “extraordinary,” and “insidious.” The only answer, apparently, is to “celebrate” the decline for “our planetary future,” but what sort of future does she imagine on both a practical economic level and a moral if not actually spiritual one? Practically speaking, the world demands and depends on growth. Social Security and Medicare, for example, along with almost all of the government funded retirement plans in the developed world, are based on more people paying into the system than collecting benefits. If the population were to start declining, the entire social contract in the United States would be completely upended, leaving the aging population with none of the monies and services that were promised or the younger population with an immense financial burden that no one in their age group has ever been asked to shoulder before. Today, we talk about entitlement programs running out of funds while assuming population growth for the next 60 years. The conversation would be decidedly more “dire” if Ms. Stade had her way and we were trying to pay for it with less and less taxpayers. The effects would necessarily extend well beyond retirement programs as well. Population growth powers economic growth, driving demand and the innovation necessary to meet that demand. As Professor Charles Jones of Stanford University’s King Center found in an October 2020 study, “In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is a distinct possibility…that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. In standard models, this turns out to have profound implications: rather than continued exponential growth, living standards stagnate for a population that vanishes…Other things equal, a larger population means more researchers which in turns leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards.” As he concluded, “When population growth is negative, both endogenous and semiendogenous growth models produce what we call an Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
Morally-if-not-spiritually, the impact might even be more dramatic if that’s possible. What does the world look like when the majority of 70 and 80 something men and women have no families, no children, and no grandchildren in their lives? If the pandemic taught us anything, it should have been that humans are creatures that require meaningful connections for their lives to be meaningful and in that regard, few connections mean more than family. Humans do not prosper when we are separated from our family, friends, and communities, and a declining population would necessarily be accompanied by more separation, more loneliness, more anxiety, more depression, and less overall fulfillment. Family, in many ways, is both the tightest bond we share with our loved ones and the great equalizer across economic quintiles and racial differences. Rich, poor, or middle class, white, black, or brown, parents, wherever they may be in the world, can all relate to the experience of having and raising children. The joy and the contentment, the challenges and tribulations, are all shared whether you drive a 20 year old Honda or a new Ferrari. Further, the desire for our children to do better, be more successful, more virtuous, live better lives, unites us all. Even if we do not have children, we can certainly hope the next generation has it better off, but progressives have decided that’s bad for the planet’s future and – make no mistake as we saw during the pandemic – they will not hesitate to consign you to a lonely, bleak existence to enact their plans. As I have previously opined, nature means nothing without people. Progressives, or least some of them, are now claiming we have to get rid of people in general to protect nature. Does anyone truly believe these sort of schemes end well?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 