A pro-life enviromentalist
If I had to name the two things which I think are the issues I think of as most important they would be abortion and climate change. That might seem like a slightly odd combination but I think that they are two biggest issues facing our species. Abortion kills more than 46 million unborn humans every year and thousands of women. That's about one in four known pregnancies worldwide. Climate change is already killing people and, depending upon how we act to counter it and how it pans out it is likely to kill a lot more people and cause major irreversible changes to our way of lives.
The case for pro-lifers to be concerned about climate change is clear. Climate change kills people; it will kill more people. I think the kind of people who are concerned about the unborn are likely to also be concerned about the life chances of those people when they grow up.
Being pro-life might seem more antithetical to environmentalism but this doesn't have to be the case. Organisations such as the Optimal Population Trust make out that the best way to combat all environmental problems would be to reduce the human population but as George Monbiot points out that this isn't necessarily so. For the linkphobic the gist of his argument goes as follows. Population growth isn't what's driving increases in emissions of climate change gases. World economic growth far outstrips world population growth indicating that the thing leading to greater exploitation of the Earth's resources is higher per capita consumption, not more capitas. Even food shortages aren't caused by increases in human population, as the supply of food has outstripped the increase in population. Food shortages have been caused by higher per capita demand for meat, which is a much more resource hungry food stuff.
On top of that, global population growth is likely to end in the next century all by itself. As countries get richer they tend to go though an upside down U in terms of population growth. Initially the extra resources contribute towards such terrible things as reduced infant mortality, extermination of contagious diseases etc. which means that many more people survive to have children of their own. Then as the economic need to have children are replaced by financial instruments such as pensions and insurance, as the need to educate children makes a smaller family a better bet, as cultural norms about appropriate family size change, people tend to have fewer children. Already almost all more developed countries, plus a lot of poorer countries, have below replacement levels of fertility. Even the US is only at about replacement level. The UN estimates that the world population isn't going to make it much above 10 billion before it starts falling.
Here, however, is the kicker: where people have access to contraception, abortion doesn't lower fertility rates. This can seem counter-intuitive as surely more babies aborted means fewer babies born but that fails to take into account that pregnancy decisions effect future conception decisions. In developed countries the typical woman having an abortion is in her late teens or early twenties, before she's started family. A baby at this stage may well be compensated for by fewer children later.
Another thing which most people don't pay enough attention to is that the things which reduce average fertility rates tend to also reduce the rate of abortion. Access to contraception reduces both average fertility rates and the abortion rate. So does improving women's autonomy to decide when and how to be sexually active. Decreasing infant mortality eventually reduces fertility rates. By contrast, the draconian Chinese one child policy may have had a relative small effect upon fertility for the huge cost of death, misery and human rights abuse, because fertility rates were already falling b themselves before it was implemented.
On a more personal level, I think that one of the things which put me off engaging with climate change is a general disapproval among environmentalists toward breeding, as I would like to have a above replacement levels of fertility. There seem to be a lot of people about who think that no-one should have more than two children, but I don't think that we need to all have the same number of children. I know quite a lot of people who never want to have children, if we want to keep our average fertility rate below replacement levels, we can do that with childfree people and people with one and two child families and the increasingly rare three, four or more child families.
The case for pro-lifers to be concerned about climate change is clear. Climate change kills people; it will kill more people. I think the kind of people who are concerned about the unborn are likely to also be concerned about the life chances of those people when they grow up.
Being pro-life might seem more antithetical to environmentalism but this doesn't have to be the case. Organisations such as the Optimal Population Trust make out that the best way to combat all environmental problems would be to reduce the human population but as George Monbiot points out that this isn't necessarily so. For the linkphobic the gist of his argument goes as follows. Population growth isn't what's driving increases in emissions of climate change gases. World economic growth far outstrips world population growth indicating that the thing leading to greater exploitation of the Earth's resources is higher per capita consumption, not more capitas. Even food shortages aren't caused by increases in human population, as the supply of food has outstripped the increase in population. Food shortages have been caused by higher per capita demand for meat, which is a much more resource hungry food stuff.
On top of that, global population growth is likely to end in the next century all by itself. As countries get richer they tend to go though an upside down U in terms of population growth. Initially the extra resources contribute towards such terrible things as reduced infant mortality, extermination of contagious diseases etc. which means that many more people survive to have children of their own. Then as the economic need to have children are replaced by financial instruments such as pensions and insurance, as the need to educate children makes a smaller family a better bet, as cultural norms about appropriate family size change, people tend to have fewer children. Already almost all more developed countries, plus a lot of poorer countries, have below replacement levels of fertility. Even the US is only at about replacement level. The UN estimates that the world population isn't going to make it much above 10 billion before it starts falling.
Here, however, is the kicker: where people have access to contraception, abortion doesn't lower fertility rates. This can seem counter-intuitive as surely more babies aborted means fewer babies born but that fails to take into account that pregnancy decisions effect future conception decisions. In developed countries the typical woman having an abortion is in her late teens or early twenties, before she's started family. A baby at this stage may well be compensated for by fewer children later.
Another thing which most people don't pay enough attention to is that the things which reduce average fertility rates tend to also reduce the rate of abortion. Access to contraception reduces both average fertility rates and the abortion rate. So does improving women's autonomy to decide when and how to be sexually active. Decreasing infant mortality eventually reduces fertility rates. By contrast, the draconian Chinese one child policy may have had a relative small effect upon fertility for the huge cost of death, misery and human rights abuse, because fertility rates were already falling b themselves before it was implemented.
On a more personal level, I think that one of the things which put me off engaging with climate change is a general disapproval among environmentalists toward breeding, as I would like to have a above replacement levels of fertility. There seem to be a lot of people about who think that no-one should have more than two children, but I don't think that we need to all have the same number of children. I know quite a lot of people who never want to have children, if we want to keep our average fertility rate below replacement levels, we can do that with childfree people and people with one and two child families and the increasingly rare three, four or more child families.