The current September/October issue of World Watch Magazine explores human population issues. In the editor’s introduction, we learn that “while young people understand that growing populations strain Earth’s resources and that ‘global family planning initiatives will help improve the health of our planet and people around the world,’ only a third believe that having fewer children of their own will help protect the environment.”

And while human population continues to rise globally, in recent years the media report population declines in several wealthy European countries as national calamities.

Sometimes there is blatant racism in our contradictory statements about population, and I’ve heard even the most progressive activists whisper in hoped for confidence that people like “us” should have babies, not people like “them” (them being poor, uneducated, unenlightened people).

I’ve heard individuals in the U.S. argue that their third or fourth child may cure cancer, suggesting that there are really no ethical obligations to limit family size, despite the reality that a privileged child in the U.S. will use a disproportionate share of world resources compared to a child born in a less wealthy country.

Sometimes there is simply a narrow understanding of a finite planet. For example, a declining birth rate in Germany equals a perceived crisis in the German workforce and eldercare, necessitating more babies rather than a call for opening the borders to more immigration. Yet allowing more immigration would alleviate Germany’s declining population problem and non-industrialized countries’ growing population problem.

Why the disconnection?

Having children is, for most of us, a biological drive. Our species, like all mammals, have evolved to want to reproduce and to want to care for our offspring with all our energy and resources. Not all of us want children, of course, but if a large majority of us didn’t and took steps to prevent pregnancy, our species would become extinct. And for obvious evolutionary reasons, as a species we generally favor those like us, especially those who share our genes, and so we justify biological tendencies and drives to reproduce ourselves with attempts at rational arguments. But they aren’t rational arguments.

It’s critical that we recognize and explore our biological imperatives to contextualize and understand them, refusing to confuse them with MOGO choicemaking. We must do this through education to ensure that people can make the connections between their own personal family planning choices and the global necessity to reduce population consciously and with integrity.

Once again, education is the answer. If we included population issues directly in our secondary school and college courses, the next generation would not be so confused and would be able to make conscious, informed, MOGO choices about population as they entered adulthood.

~ Zoe

Filed under: MOGO (Most Good), population, positive choices Tagged: | Cultural Issues, Environmental Preservation, human rights, humane education, MOGO, overpopulation, positive choices, reproduction