I’ve blogged on this before but it’s such crucial issue I’m going to go on about it. I really think birth control is the solution to so many of our problems. Here’s a few:
- Climate Change – is a caused by a combination of behaviour changes (mainly fossil fuel usage) and the HUGE increase in the world population in the last century. If the population keeps going up as much as it is, then no amount of behaviour changes will help and if we could reduce it, we wouldn’t need such drastic measures as not visiting our relatives by plane.
- Species Loss – obvious
- Water shortages – obvious
- War – I’m very convinced by Jared Diamond’s arguments which show the clear link between competition for resources and war. Perhaps the best example of this is Rwanda where the war started just after the price of land in Rwanda became unsustainable for the majority of the population.
The main problems with reducing population are:
1. Christian fundamentalism. This is a big one. The US has withdrawn funding for billions of dollars of birth control programmes the world over because the belief that contraception is evil. They withdraw funding from any birth control programmes which support abortion even if the money doesn’t go towards the abortion part of the programme. The vatican has terrified millions of vulnerable Catholics into thinking that condoms are sinful and powerful Catholic lobbies are behind a lot of such US policy.
2. Economic myopia. People rant about pensions and bulges in demographic curves – yes – pensions are a problem if you reduce population. Not as much as a problem though as world wars, water shortages or the entire east coast of China being inundated by 20m of water for example.
3. Simply not seeing the obvious facts see here.