Seven billion people. So what?

The environmentalist worldview is haunted by the terrifying prospect of human achievement. Environmentalists see people as consumers of scarce resources, neglecting the fact that human beings are inventors and producers as well. — Paul Wilson, Business & Media Institute

Exactly. So-called “environmentalists” always see the glass as half-empty. A human being is more than just a mouth to feed; there’s a mind attached which is often capable of solving even the most difficult of problems.

The tunnel vision that is characteristic of environmental alarmists is exemplified by a British group calling itself Population Matters (PM), which thinks it knows how to deal with this non-crisis crisis.

They claim to oppose “coercive population policies on ethical grounds, in defence of individual human rights, especially women’s rights.” But, they say, “At the same time, population growth raises important ethical issues around the balance between reproductive rights and social and environmental responsibilities.”

So by positing a false dilemma (we must choose between having babies and protecting the environment), Population Matters — as with so many of these groups — stacks the deck in favor of the notion that environmental “protection” is of vastly greater importance than continuing the race itself.

Unlike nearly all of their amoral confreres, however, PM uses six areas of newly-minted “ethics” to bolster their opposition to people doing what comes naturally:

Inter-generational ethics: It is a fact that current growth (10,000 more per hour) will stop one day, simply because a finite planet cannot sustain an infinite number of people. But it can only stop in one of two ways: either sooner, the humane way, by fewer births — family planning backed by policy to make it available and encourage people to use it; or later, the ‘natural’ way, by more deaths — famine, disease and predation/war. Campaigners against the former are in practice campaigning for the latter. We owe it to our children to prevent this.

Here they cheerfully ignore history, which tells us that despite population increases, means have been discovered to feed those new mouths. They also plump up another false dilemma: “[Population growth] can only stop in one of two ways: either sooner, the humane way, by fewer births — family planning backed by policy to make it available and encourage people to use it; or later, the ‘natural’ way, by more deaths — famine, disease and predation/war.”

International ethics: This is not just an issue for poor countries. The UK population is projected to grow by 10 million in the next 22 years — that’s ’10 more Birminghams’. England is already the most overcrowded country in Europe, taking far more than our share of our planet’s natural resources. Each of us does far more damage to the planet than any poor African; every extra Briton, for instance, has the carbon footprint of twenty-two more Malawians – and the poor will suffer first and worst from climate change. We owe it to others to stabilise our numbers too (and our resource-consumption), and then reduce them to a sustainable level.

It doesn’t take long for the group’s affinities with the “global warming” crowd to emerge. Note the mention of “carbon footprint”, “climate change”, and “sustainable” to implicate us all in crimes against humanity.

Reproductive ethics: It is also a fact that if two people with two living children have a third child, they will ratchet up the population of the planet, and thus: ratchet up damage to the environment; bring nearer the day of serious ecological failure; and ratchet down everyone else’s share of dwindling natural resources to cope with this. So individual decisions to create a whole extra lifetime of impacts affect everyone else (including their own children) – far more than any other environmentally damaging decision they make. We need to be aware of the ethical implications of having large families; and sex education in schools should include it.

What a cornucopia of unproven assumptions! Having a baby automatically means “damage to the environment”, “ecological failure”, and “dwindling natural resources”. The possibility of a technological fix for these problems — assuming they actually are problems — never enters their heads. There’s also something ominous about those “ethical implications of having large families”: for some reason, Communist China springs to mind. Like the Chinese and Americans, Population Matters thinks government-run schools should indoctrinate children in sex ed, regardless of what their parents think about it.

Humanitarian ethics: Some 220 million women world-wide lack access to family planning, and 40% of pregnancies are unintended. There are some 50,000 deaths from unsafe abortions each year; while the women dying from pregnancy-related causes is equivalent to 4 full jetliners crashing every day. The close correlation of high fertility rates with high maternal and child mortality is well established — every mother on $1 per day knows that the family will be better fed if there are three children round the table rather than ten. Universal access to family planning is Millennium Development Goal 5b; and coercive pregnancy through lack of it is an abuse of women’s rights too. As UNICEF said: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other known technology”. It should be a very high priority.

Lying with statistics has become a highly-refined art. In this instance, it’s impossible to know if the numbers presented here are accurate or not. It seems likely they were manufactured by United Nations agencies to provide rationales for their usurpation of United States’ sovereignty and a global tax on energy consumption. The Judeo-Christian moral point of view with respect to abortion is simply ignored.

Inter-species ethics: The very recent population explosion since the industrial revolution is causing the current ‘6th major global extinction’, as humans occupy, degrade, pollute and destroy wildlife habitats. Other creatures have as much right to occupy the planet as we do.

People are pests, far worse than the animals they “degrade, pollute and destroy.” Population Matters buys into the “animal rights” groups’ philosophy that lower creatures are entitled to as much respect and legal protection as any person. At least they didn’t say “more of a right to occupy the planet than we do.” But one day they just might.

Political ethics: For all the above reasons, the government should state a national goal of stabilising and then reducing UK numbers to a sustainable level, by non-coercive means, as soon as possible; and give top priority to family planning and women’s education and empowerment programmes in the development aid budget.

They fail to tell us how to achieve “a sustainable level, by non-coercive means.” They don’t even attempt to define “non-coercive means”. Living in the enlightened West, they might be making the assumption that governments can control populations without resorting to violence. The Chinese experience, in which non-conformists were thrown out of high windows for not getting with the program, seems to be lost on these folks. Perhaps they imagine the ineluctable purity of their intentions will somehow be manifest to everybody and curb authoritarian impulses. Finally, note the Liberal-Progessive feminist buzzwords “family planning” (meaning abortion on demand) and “empowerment” (meaning, among other things, preferential treatment in hiring and divorce settlements) — all to be paid for by the taxpayers.

You can read Population Matters’ “The Ethical Implications of Population Growth” here (PDF: 2 pages, 679 KB).

You can also consult Paul Wilson’s BMI article, “Population: 7 Billion Reasons to Panic This Halloween”, which has numerous links to other related articles.