How to reduce the human population

Raising children takes an awful lot of energy, attention, and money.

So why do we do it? What good are they?

There are, of course, a lot of reasons why we do it: Children and parents are a family. Children can (sometimes) be a pleasure. With children we share love and fun. They provide a chance to vicariously re-live our early years.

But primarily, at a deep psychological level, our children are a source of transcendence.

Because our mortality is a major psychological issue for us, various means of transcendence (work product, artistic expression, mentoring relationships, general contribution to “holding up the sky”) are very important to us. The transcendence of having children to carry on after we’re gone is probably the most important of them all.

So it would be cruel for society to impose restrictions on child-bearing. China tried it for a while as an official state policy and it was a disaster.

Yet . . . a case can be made that we’d be happier (and there certainly would be less stress on the natural environment) if the human population overall was reduced.

Gary Snyder wrote the following in 1970 when the global population was three billion (it’s now approaching eight billion): “Humanity is but a part of the fabric of life — dependent on the whole fabric for our very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, we must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and act as gentle steward of the earth’s community of being. There are now too many human beings, and the problem is growing rapidly worse. It is potentially disastrous not only for the human race but for most other life forms. Efforts to raise food-production — well intentioned as they are — simply put off the only real solution: reduce population. We need to correct traditional cultural attitudes that tend to force women into childbearing; oppose simple-minded boosterism that equates population growth with prosperity.”

There is a valid debate about the issue. Most of the ecological degradation can be attributed to the affluenza lifestyles of the well-off billion rather than the low-per-capita-consumption six or seven billion “others” (those oppressed in the third world and in the poverty pockets of the rich countries). With egalitarian income distribution we probably could feed and decently support the current number of human beings. But: (a) social policy is not actually moving in that direction; and (b) there are quality of life issues associated with high population consequences like congestion and the cog-like reality within the modern productive Leviathan. The teeming megalopolises are characterized by anomie and compassion fatigue, not to mention traffic, pollution, and sanitation challenges. In the United States 85% of the population is concentrated around the interstate highways. There is room to spread people around, but it’s ecologically problematic to do so.

My own viewpoint is concordant with Gary Snyder’s. In order to re-localize, re-establish ecological balances, and restore our righteous citizenship within the community of life, I advocate population reduction and decentralization into human-scaled bioregional polities. Instead of 200 nation-states, a truly green world might be comprised of thousands of sovereign bioregional entities — wherein the population level of each would be unlikely to exceed ten million. Figuring them to exhibit a high degree of diversity, maybe the bioregional population levels would range from considerably less than a million to a little more than five million if we want to adhere to the “human-scale” concept and the possibility of a participatory form of democracy.

Consider: Countries we admire in regard to their social democratic policies and relatively egalitarian cultures tend to have population levels more or less in that range . . . Norway: 5 million; Finland: 5 million; Denmark: 6 million.

How to achieve the decentralization is an issue for another essay, but here’s how I think we could achieve the population reduction:

Gary Snyder again: “Share the pleasure of raising children widely, so that all need not directly reproduce to enter into this basic human experience.”

The modern atomized nuclear family is hyper-individualistic. Its “domain of transcendence” is too limited. Each child is too precious. In a tribe or a village (or, now, in a cohousing community) the younger generation that provides a sense of transcendence is, yes, primarily one’s own kids, and the cousins, but also to some degree the cohort of the whole community. If we are familiar with the children of the neighbors, if there’s stability and the kids all grow up together and we interact with them, if we have some real shared childcare responsibilities among us . . . the preciousness is not so terribly concentrated in our own.

The perspective on depopulation could be something like this: Demographers say that the human population is likely to peak at around 10 billion sometime before 2100. If families would start to limit their number of children to one or two or no more than three, then gradually, over a period of maybe ten generations, the global human population could come down to two or three billion. That number, living more simply, could be ecologically benign.

Decentralize. Restore a bioregional sense of place. Rejuvenate local community. Broaden the extended family. Share life experiences. Generalize the transcendence. Live more lightly on the Earth.