Babies and climate change

It's time to come clean. We're having our first baby here at the eco ranch. We're almost 6 months along. We've made it through the tests, the scans, and all that stuff, and it looks like it's really going to happen.

I'm not a huge fan of being pregnant, which has put my hubby's campaign for a second child on shaky footing. He's an only child, he says. Only when he was an adult, and saw how much fun everyone else had with their siblings did he realize he was missing out. That, and there is increasing pressure to take care of his parents emotionally because they have only him.

But the child debate also has another side, one only mentioned in whispers because it's such an unpopular opinion. It's that parents should limit their offspring to two or less because the world is overpopulated. Bringing too many more resource-using carbon-producing first-world humans into the world isn't helping the environment.

A lawmaker in Australia recently proposed taxing parents with more than two children, to offset the carbon emissions of those extra children. Here is the news story about this

At the risk of sounding harsh, I completely agree. Sustainability is factoring heavily into my family planning.

The need to have large families just isn't there any more. 100 years ago, when you'd lose some of your children to disease before adulthood or needed them to help on the family farm? Yes, have as many as you'd like.

But now? In the modern world? We simply do not have the resources or the economic need. With ever more of the environment being poisoned to meet the current population's needs, how can we rationalize putting more people on the earth?

It's led me to feel that if you must have children, have one or two then quit. Or, don't have any at all.

We are an American middle-class family. As such, even though we're making changes to be more environmentally friendly, just by our very nature and existence as Americans, we use more energy, food, resources, etc. than citizens of any other nation. Isn't it wise to reduce the number of Americans in the next generation?

I just finished Jared Dimaond's book "Collapse" as well, which is an historical review of ancient and modern civilizations that have collapsed economically, culturally, and environmentally. Overpopulation was a factor in most of them, and is used as an explanation for atrocities such as genocide in Rwanda. It's food for thought.