Is Having More Than Two Children Environmentally Unfriendly?

While many of us wonder at the spectacle of a single mother who lives with her parents increasing her family size to 14, there is a growing discussion about the negative impact of parents having seven times less than that. Supporters of the idea that “two-is-enough” say that any environmental positive action we take will be negated by population increase.

On the BBC’s site, environmental writer John Feeney says that uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet and calls on the environmental movement to stop running scared of this controversial topic:

It’s the great taboo of environmentalism: the size and growth of the human population.
It has a profound impact on all life on Earth, yet for decades it has been conspicuously absent from public debate. Most natural scientists agree our growing numbers and our unchecked impact on the natural environment move us inexorably toward global calamities of unthinkable severity. They agree the need to address population has become desperate. Yet many environmentalists avoid the subject, a few objecting strongly to any focus on our numbers.

In the Times of London reports that a green adviser to the British government says that couples who have more than two children are being irresponsible by creating an unbearable burden on the environment:

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population. A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word,” [Porritt said].

And meanwhile the much admired naturalist Sir David Attenborough has said that much of man’s destruction is due to our assumed god given right to go forth and multiply and rule over the planet. World Net News Daily reports about a recent video interview with Attenborough and says:

Attenborough insists that Genesis has allowed people to justify destroying the environment and that embracing Darwinist evolution frees people from their biblical excuse.

“The influence of the Book of Genesis,” says Attenborough, “which says the Lord God said ‘go forth and multiply’ to Adam and Eve and ‘the natural world is there for you to dominate,’ [is that] you have dominion over the animals and plants of the world.

“That basic notion,” Attenborough continues, “that the world is there for us and if it doesn’t actually serve our purposes, it’s dispensable, that has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land’s surface.”

Attenborough further explained to the science journal Nature, “That’s why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution, is of great importance, because it is that attitude which has led to the devastation of so much, and we are in the situation that we are in.”

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