Without wielding prejudice or presumption about climate change (many still remain skeptical), the aforementioned question attempts a pulse check of families afflicted by deprivations of living standards within the world of early 21st-century private enterprise.
In other words, it costs too damn much to start and support a family.
As a result of the widespread financial obstruction to making babies, there is the anguished (or relieved, depending on one’s point of view) decision to produce no offspring.
All over the industrialized world, there is news of dwindling populations that many nations will face by the end of this century. The birth rates in regions like Europe and Asia are beginning to falter to the extent that they will not sustain the population as that currently dwell in each of these nation states.
Might there be a silver lining to all the dystopian tidings?
Would not a population decline mean a decrease in the use and exploitation of earth’s natural resources… naturally? Fewer mouths to feed will precipitate a decrease of extracted resources, less associated waste arriving at fewer landfills and, hopefully, fewer acts of ecological assault in between birth and the landfill.
A population plunge could eventually unwind several generations of ecological damage set in motion by the Industrial Revolution, arriving at peak throttling by the global economy. Would a global economy even be necessary to sustain dwindling populations whose needs and demands unwind and simplify so that they evolve into communities of self-sufficiency? (Think of the Amish who have survived modern technology’s onslaught to remain self-dependent.)
A shrinking global population would overall require far less economic and political complexity, there being far fewer social linkages binding humans together. The world might regain some of its enormity that had been formerly lost to advances in rapid transportation and light-speed communication.
It would be the ultimate irony if it turned out that inscribed in the extractive and destructive efforts of the private enterprise system was its very own doom. There can be no sustainable growth within an economic ecology that suppresses the wages and living conditions of the bottom 99% — the bulk of the population needed to sustain humanity as a species.
From the wisdom of North American indigenous communities arrives the most relevant maxim aimed at European materialism: When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.
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Previously Published on Medium
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