Yay or Nay: Having children is bad for the environment
The sheer amount of green baby products around would suggest that today's parents are an eco-conscious bunch, but there are those who say having children at all is a menace to the environment. In last week's Guardian, Will Duguid asked the question 'is it ethical to offset your children?' His suggestion of waiting for a stranger to pop off before you pop one out seems ludicrous, but plenty of people seem to take this argument seriously. '
There are more than enough people polluting the planet as it is', they'll say, 'and bringing in more of them is plain selfish'. In my experience, these tend to be the same child-free brigade who like to berate anyone for stooping so low as to breed, but now they have an environmental argument to add to their arsenal, and it can be a tricky one to argue against. More people equals more pollution - fact.
But to me, this seems a reductio ad absurdium, which defeats the very purpose of being green in the first place: if there are to be no people to enjoy life on the planet, then what's the point in protecting it? To exist as a flourishing yet unappreciated green rock hurtling through space? We might as well start culling people to reduce the amount of C02 breathed into the atmosphere for the good of the planet, or maybe commit the ultimate act of sacrifice by ending our own lives to gain a saintly 'negative' carbon footprint.
It has always seemed to me that the stop-breeding-for-the-good-of-the-planet crowd are missing one very important point. The people who don't care will keep on breeding and they will teach their children not to care so people who care will be increasingly outnumbered by those who don't. Maybe they're hoping to convert other people's children but that rarely works. Most people, don't stray too far from their parents' attitudes and habits.
Posted by: Lynn | April 26, 2007 5:56 PM