Terrific points. I'd love to see more research into the possible mis-reporting that you mentioned where folks don't want to admit to having antisocial views about more children, and secretly harbor a desire to have none or few. I grew up in an ecologically oriented family where the ethic was: you are only allowed to replace yourself, and having more than two children was harshly frowned upon. Thanks for this analysis here, Tony!
Excellent essay, Tony. I used to do a survey in my environmental science classes: How many kids were in your mom's family, and in your family? Then how many children would you like to have? It was a strong statistical decline for hundreds of students, each year (1992-2004). Even as a child of the 1960's I only ever wanted 2. It was clear in the 1970s that the US was getting super crowded and polluted. Kenya in the 1980s brought overpopulation into the blatantly obvious for me. I can never forget watching 50,000 Kikuyu families taking over what had been traditional lands of pastoral people and carving it up into 5-acre "shambas" (little farm lots). They cleared the forests so fast, killed off monkeys, forest wildlife, and ran the birds off. When the elephants came through on their migration, they shot them all. I was there to be a school teacher, but I was a 20-something student of overpopulation and its impacts. That was back when world population was around 4.5 billion. Here we are at 8 billion and still growing, and these pro-growth freaks want us to have more babies. The just want cheap labor!
Thanks for this. The impacts of excessive human numbers are clear to every wildlife biologist, whether they speak out or choose to remain silent on the matter. People and agencies who push for population growth entirely lack this perspective or are so extremely anthropocentric that they don't care about other life. It's painful and tragic to see how the environmental movement dropped the ball on overpopulation. We have got to find ways to reverse that.
I agree the pressures and stress of modern lifestyles could contribute to lessening the number of births (which doesn’t trouble me). I’m curious if you feel the views of Jeremy Grantham (who states the primary decline is from our toxic environment) are valid? And as a corollary, where you feel the impact of nano-plastics and PFAS, as well as the thousands of unrestricted (and often untested) chemicals in use in modern industrialized society fit into the current trends of physical/biological infertility among humans (and many other species)?.
great article. THANKS for writing it. incredibly disappointing.. F the UN. here is my latest
https://npg.org/library/forum-series/w-w-l-d-what-would-the-lorax-do-fp/
Disaster upon disaster for nature. Thank you and keep fighting!
Terrific points. I'd love to see more research into the possible mis-reporting that you mentioned where folks don't want to admit to having antisocial views about more children, and secretly harbor a desire to have none or few. I grew up in an ecologically oriented family where the ethic was: you are only allowed to replace yourself, and having more than two children was harshly frowned upon. Thanks for this analysis here, Tony!
Excellent essay, Tony. I used to do a survey in my environmental science classes: How many kids were in your mom's family, and in your family? Then how many children would you like to have? It was a strong statistical decline for hundreds of students, each year (1992-2004). Even as a child of the 1960's I only ever wanted 2. It was clear in the 1970s that the US was getting super crowded and polluted. Kenya in the 1980s brought overpopulation into the blatantly obvious for me. I can never forget watching 50,000 Kikuyu families taking over what had been traditional lands of pastoral people and carving it up into 5-acre "shambas" (little farm lots). They cleared the forests so fast, killed off monkeys, forest wildlife, and ran the birds off. When the elephants came through on their migration, they shot them all. I was there to be a school teacher, but I was a 20-something student of overpopulation and its impacts. That was back when world population was around 4.5 billion. Here we are at 8 billion and still growing, and these pro-growth freaks want us to have more babies. The just want cheap labor!
Thanks for this. The impacts of excessive human numbers are clear to every wildlife biologist, whether they speak out or choose to remain silent on the matter. People and agencies who push for population growth entirely lack this perspective or are so extremely anthropocentric that they don't care about other life. It's painful and tragic to see how the environmental movement dropped the ball on overpopulation. We have got to find ways to reverse that.
I agree the pressures and stress of modern lifestyles could contribute to lessening the number of births (which doesn’t trouble me). I’m curious if you feel the views of Jeremy Grantham (who states the primary decline is from our toxic environment) are valid? And as a corollary, where you feel the impact of nano-plastics and PFAS, as well as the thousands of unrestricted (and often untested) chemicals in use in modern industrialized society fit into the current trends of physical/biological infertility among humans (and many other species)?.