Barbara Kay has an interesting piece about having children, or rather not having children, in today’s National Post.
As she describes the anti-kiddists views, it seems that not only does having children make you less able to self-actualize and increase your standings on the happiness index through career achievement, peak experiences (climbing Kilamanjaro) and material acquisition (see Véronique’s post below), it also destroys the planet.
Sigh. I would like to think that such views are marginal but there is an element to the environmental movement that depicts humanity as a parasite or a cancer on the earth. And I worry that its influence is more mainstream than we think. Check out “The World Without Us” website. Or the calls of Tim Flannery, Australia’s 2007 Man of the Year and one of Time Magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” for decreased population. Or the charming Paul Watson, Toni Vernelli and David “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” Benatar, all described in Kay’s column.
It seems to me it’s all part of the world view that kids just weigh us down, prevent us from becoming what we really should be. And they just weigh down the earth, too.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s wrong to misuse the resources of the earth. Don’t waste and don’t litter. I think that about covers it for environmental policy.
As for the impacts of more kids, the irony is that many of the practices that the environmentalists seem to want us to adopt come naturally in a household filled with children. Sharing space and resources, remembering to think about the needs of others, consuming less so there’s enough for everybody, all these habits are almost second nature for the person who grows up in a full household.
Alas, many don’t see this. Instead, they argue for more regulation, more legislation, more public officials to enforce the laws and regs to meet our environmental objectives. One has to ask though, if no one is having kids, where are they going to get the bodies to fill those jobs and the taxpayers to pay their salaries? And for whom are we saving the planet?
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Tanya adds: On the up-side, if they do go so far as to implement a global one-child policy, pro-aborts will need to find a new platform. “Pro-choice” just wont have much of a ring to it when you have the choice to have one child or less; not two; never three!
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