One of the little amusements of current day fashionable opinions is the manner in which they collide. For example, we are told that mere technology just won’t save us on the grand environmental questions. We must change our ways, it is necessary to become New People in order to save Gaia.
Yet when we come to population then it’s all technology, technology all the time. Everyone gets contraceptives and the problem’s done. Rather than, for example, thinking that we all become new people by shagging a bit less. Or, possibly more relevantly, we desire fewer children therefore we have fewer children.
Which is why we get this for World Population Day:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] A UN-backed campaign has been launched to help tackle the destruction of wildlife by boosting people’s access to contraception. Growing human populations often underlie the destruction of nature, and barriers to family planning are the “most important ignored environmental challenge”, say the campaigners. [/perfectpullquote] [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The Thrive Together campaign, launched on World Population Day, unites more than 150 reproductive health and conservation organisations, which spend a combined £8bn a year in 170 countries. The groups say they intend to work together to both improve the lives of people and arrest the huge losses of biodiversity by reducing population growth. “There is very often an overlap of areas facing the greatest need for improved reproductive health services and for conservation,” says a declaration signed by the groups, which include the UN Population Fund, the Jane Goodall Institute and Marie Stopes International. “We believe that by working together we can help human communities and their ecosystems thrive.” [/perfectpullquote]Sure, we can see the logic. Habitat destruction is probably the greatest threat to biodiversity. So, less of that and we’ll do better on the other. Poor peasants clearing land to grow runty corn is a major cause of habitat loss. Have fewer peasants and there’ll be less loss. Sure, the logic works.
It does rather miss a few steps of course. How do we have fewer peasants and their runty corn? Maybe by getting richer, so that we all live in the cities with vast and efficient latifundia – chemical powered of course, laced even – growing the food. That reduces habitat loss. Both by using land more efficiently and also because urban peeps tend to have fewer children. Actually, richer people have fewer children.
It’s not actually the contraception:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] So too with contraception. Of course those who wish to limit their fertility should have the ability to do so. And if circumstance means they’ve not the ability to do so we can and perhaps should help. But it’s not the availability of contraception which reduces fertility. The usual estimation is that about 10% of any fall in the fertility rate comes from that general availability of effective contraception. The other 90% comes from the fall in desired fertility. Which seems logical enough. Fertility rates did first start falling long before the invention of cheap, modern, contraceptives. Plus, obviously enough, people must desire to have fewer children before they’ll employ a technology which produces fewer children. [/perfectpullquote] [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] What is it that reduces desired fertility? The joint effects of the intertwined increasing urbanisation and increasing richness of society. Richer people have fewer children. Urban populations have fewer than rural. As places become richer they become more urban. So, what do we need to do in Africa to reduce future population growth? Aid Africa in becoming rich. All else is tinkering around the edges. [/perfectpullquote]There is that scream of rage at the insistence upon incorrect policy of course. But laced with that amusement. The cure for our environmental ills is not technology except with fertility when it is – contraception.
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Unsustainable levels of reproduction in industrialised societies is serious cause for concern, limiting reproduction as a policy is in many parts of the world exactly the wrong policy. The reduction of land put to arable use over the last half century suggests that increased population levels does not necessarily lead to reduced biodiversity.
Most western governments have recognised the problem, not of increased population levels, but quite the reverse, that of low birth rates. The more favoured solution, importing populations from more fecund regions has, as much of western Europe can attest to, its own problems, in terms of security, economics and social cohesion. This approach also inclines donor countries to keep reproducing at high rates. If large numbers leave the human resources needed to enrich those countries is reduced, and those that remain are thus incentivized to keep reproducing in the the hope, which is often realised, that their migrating offspring will, at least in the first generation, send monies back to their families.
There are a number of drivers than disincline wealthier populations from reproducing. Urban societies have very high accommodation costs both in the cities, substantially driven by immigration, and consequentially in rural areas, with urban flight driving up the price of the country cottage. The cost of housing, especially in societies that value individualism, limits family size. Most western parents would prefer each child to have their own bedroom, for each family to have the sustainable number of three children, a four bedroom house or apartment is desired. The cost of such in major European cities is prohibitive even for those earning quite a bit more than the average wage. With bigger properties attracting higher property taxes the cost of another child, beyond clothing and food food, is significant and often irksome.
Larger families require that one parent, usually the mother, is less able to work for longer periods, yet the increase in income required to support a larger family often requires that both parents work full time. A unsolvable conundrum for many.
There is also the social devaluing of parenting, caring for ones children is not, in western societies, as highly valued as it once was. Career, self-determination and the freedom or right to work have eclipsed maternal and even paternal aspirations.
In Europe there are two distinct policy approaches, that the more ubiquitous one is championed by childless politicians such as Merkel, May and Macron of importing more people, perhaps even an unlimited or at least uncontrolled number, is perhaps not insignificant.
And then there is the approach which Hungary is leading and that Poland and the Czech Republic are following. Basically these revolve around encouraging the native population to reproduce through social campaigns, coupled with economic and tax incentives. Whether or not these will work remains to be seen, but the attempt to demonise family friendly policies by the increasingly childless political class is arrogant, foolish and more than a little unpleasant. The family, for those influenced by Marxist thought, is a tyrannical structure, however, for those influenced by evolutionary psychological it is the bedrock of economic well being and psychological health.
Let us then encourage larger families, both by restoring the social status of the mother and as well as by implementing economic and tax polices that support fathers and mothers to raise families.
The nuclear family in Western cultures is under attack from the rabid feminazis who hate it as it oppresses wimmin who should be out working so as not to be beholden to a man.
Environmentalism is an ideology that elevates Nature/Environment above the Human Race, which is not part of Nature but a plague of vermin which must be controlled.
Only those who have transcended to ideologically purity, will be part of an elite in this Natural World order. This select, exclusive group will be so small in number so as not to be a threat to ‘the Planet’, but it’s guardians, all others must be exterminated.