Darrell Epp

http://reason.com/news/show/125163.html

     It turns out Mark Steyn was right on target when he noted in his book America Alone that people always tend to worry about the wrong things. A generation was terrified by Paul Ehrlich’s ‘population bomb,’ and yet every single available model shows global population plateauing/declining by mid-century at the latest. Population stability requires each woman to bear an average of 2.1 children. The EU’s average is 1.5, and Japan’s is 1.3. This trend towards a lack of consumers/producers/teachers/leaders/etc. in the western world should rather inevitably trigger all sorts of economic and social upheaval.

     This article I’ve linked to rather delicately omits half of the tale: while a third of German, Swiss and Austrian women have zero children, the story is dramatically reversed in the more rowdier parts of the globe, like, say, Waziristan, where the fertility rate is over 6.5. This seems to point out a structural flaw in the arguments of the ‘save-the-earth’ folks. Humans are not profitably viewed as economic entities, or as mere carbon-footprint-generators, but as individuals with distinct personalities who make personal choices based on their personal values. Isn’t the question not simply ‘how many’ people there are, but what sort of people they are, and how they think and behave? The regions that are truly experiencing a population explosion demonstrate scant interest in ideas like sustainable growth and carbon sequestration (never mind the socio-political ideals I happen to cherish, pithy encapsulated by James Madison in the Bill Of Rights). How sensible a long-term strategy is it for the David Suzuki/Al Gore types to admonish us to protect ‘the future’ by remaining childless and minimizing our footprint as we timidly sit still waiting for the Reaper, when all this does is ensure that in half a century’s time, there won’t be any environmentalists around? By outsourcing the chore of childbirth, aren’t the enlightened ‘experts,’ in the long view, simply forfeiting the game to the other side?

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