The Elephant in the Room

"Let's Try Cap-and-Trade on Babies"

"The single most concrete, substantive thing a young American could do [to help curb climate change] is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius. It's having fewer kids."

That statement by Andrew Revkin, author of the New York Times Dot Earth blog, highlights the problematic relationship that exists between the environmental concerns facing the global community and the increasing population crammed within its confines. Talk of family planning and population control rarely elicits a benign response. But remove emotion and philosophical ethics from the conversation and a relatively simple concept remains. In ecological terminology, the concept is called carrying capacity, and it refers to the population of a particular species that its habitat can sustain. When graphed, carrying capacity appears as a curve in which the Y value (population size) increases exponentially until it abruptly plateaus at a particular value. Once the population reaches carrying capacity, it may fluctuate just above or just below that line, but the size will not ever indefinitely increase above the carrying capacity.

I highlight this article and present these thoughts not as an advocate for population control, family planning, or whatever other moniker you would like to give the concept of limiting the global human population. What I do find interesting about this scenario is the way social influences dictate the way we address problems and solutions. The number of people on this globe is a fundamental contributor to many of the global crises of the past few decades - food shortages, water shortages, climate change, pollution. Even if population size is not a cause of the problem, so to speak, population size magnifies and exacerbates those issues. On top of an increasing global population, many more people are living an increasingly consumptive lifestyles as developing countries continue to grow economically.

But the solutions for dealing with the size of the global population seem to be taboo when it comes to discussing action to deal with the aforementioned issues. Instead of dealing with foundational problems, solutions attack symptoms that are, in relative terms, uncontroversial. When I was younger, a bit more brash, and much more naive, I would get myself moderately intoxicated and pontificate about the merits of population control measures, reproductive limits, and licenses to breed. Like I said, the point of this piece is not to advocate for those measures. For me to do so would, at the least, a little hypocritical, if not a return to the brashness and naivety of my youth. Rather I want to point out, as I often strive to do, the difficult underlying issues that few people want to talk about. Certainly I believe that we can all do small things in our lives to help alleviate the symptoms of the global issues that touch us in big and small ways each day. But I wonder if, at a certain point, that will be enough . . . .

Then again, maybe I worry too much about things that won't change -

"The universe is expanding . . . . Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything." - a young Alvy Singer, Annie Hall