There are plenty of individuals and communities who want more babies, and more people. I am an example of that – my former wife and I only stopped at three children because we had to – otherwise we adore them and would have wanted at least one more. Churches of course like a larger flock and famously ban contraception, or the like. Entire countries are currently actively promoting having more kids, because of the demographic and financial nightmares they fill soon be facing.
But nobody, and I mean that literally, thinks that Planet Earth should collectively have more people.
More people would be a drain on resources of course, but even though technology has in recent decades more than countered that, making sure that people have food, clothes, plastic and fuel is only one consideration. Every single aspect of more people means a worse for all the animals and plants, their diversity and flourishing, on our planet. It is selfishness from the only species that knows how to be so selfish.
With the expectation that nobody is going to argue for more of us, then the serious question, and one rarely asked and never answered, is how few of thus there should be. Given our destructiveness, and green, and damage, one answer is that we should exit from the equation altogether.
I would argue that there is a place for us – even, at a stretch, a technological us – even potentially us on planets that can be grown instead of destroyed – and maybe all we need is some tough love to make the hard decisions.
That hard decision is to – collectively, in aggregate – have fewer children. Dramatically so, so that our numbers are decimated.
I say tough love because we have well proven it is too hard of an ask for us to voluntarily make, and the harm we are doings means any natural decline will be too slow. The dictates of capitalism, and its thirst for growth, suggests that degrowth is not something we will allow.
So all that leaves is for someone, for some people, to make that decision for us. Few people would condone actual slaughter or effective slaughter (concocted diseases for example), yet I am surprised no super-villian has emerged who is actively doing it. And no, Bill Gates is not that guy.
But persuasion is a tool we can use. And I am okay with taking that angle. Simple persuasion, as in advertising, is unlikely to be effective. But radical actions, forms of civil disobedience, and wanton destruction, of tearing apart the fabrics of all the negative sides of society and putting the spotlight on the harms of capitalism and overconsumption, might persuade enough people that bringing more kids into this world feels wrong.
Radical actions of the few, in arenas that are not expecting it, in fragile systems that are barely staying afloat anyway, is what I am talking about.