(this is totally unrelated to anything I’ve blogged about before)
A friend sent me a link to an old article on SFGate.com about the environmental impacts of having children.
Two delightful excerpts:
“Hall and his colleagues found that a single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will entail the slaughter of 2,000 animals.”
Wow.
Another gem:
“In terms of energy usage alone, [which is] a convenient measure of environmental impact,” Knight says, “the average Ethiopian uses one 310th of what we use. So when an American couple stops at two kids it’s like an Ethiopian couple stopping at 620.”
This makes me wonder at the irony of passionate environmentalists driving around a couple of kids in their Prius’. It also makes me wonder if every single dollar we spend on environmentalist causes oughtn’t be redirected to things like birth control education, birth control research, and free vasectomies.
The right to freely reproduce is so sacrosanct in this world (and especially in the US) that people get REALLY uncomfortable when discussing (or even thinking about) the relative immorality of reproduction.
RELATIVE. I’m not going to go so far as goofiness like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I’m all for continuation of the species. But can we set aside our love of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood and think about the consequences of our actions?
One parting thought. When I talk a bit about the fact that my wife and I don’t have any plans to have children, most parents sadly shake their heads. “You don’t know the joy that you’re missing” or “You’re going to be so lonely when you’re old,” are common responses. From what I can tell from this article, there is no apparent relationship between having children and happiness/contentment/satisfaction (the only exception being if you WANT to have children but cannot).
(for the record, I eat meat, drink from paper cups, drive when I feel like it, and occasionally don’t recycle. So I’m throwing stones from a bit of a glass house, here)
