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‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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i agree with your general idea, but not with all the reasons. war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before (and much worse that the current situation), but I've never heard that there were large portion of people choosing not to have kids before (please, correct me if I am wrong)
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
And they've all been paired with downturns in new births. The Thirty Years War, the Bengali Famine, and the Great Depression all resulted in sharp declines in birth rates.
I don't think its limited to mental health. Two big changes from historical periods have been the sharp decline in dying kids and introduction of effective contraception. Historically, the only thing that countered a human's innate horniness was malnutrition, massacre, and high rates of infant mortality. With vaccines and contraception, the idea of family planning isn't "Have five kids and hope two live" but "Have two kids and hope you can pay for their college".
A big contribution to the 40s-era Baby Boom was the fertilizer revolution, which dramatically boosted crop yields. This, combined with early vaccine technology, saw a drop in maternal deaths and infant deaths, leading to parents with enormous family sizes who all lived to adulthood. These adults arrived just in time to start taking The Pill. Consequently, the Millennial second-tier Boom was much smaller than the first. And now Millennials are having even fewer kids, because contraception is trivial to obtain and large families are stigmatized against.
But as to mental health? I think that's tangential and hardly unique to the modern moment. If we didn't have fertilizer and contraception and vaccination, we'd have just as many mentally ill people running around and making babies who died before they turned three years old. And the population downturn would look the same as any other 18th or 19th century trend line.
i think another factor is that we are reaching or have maybe surpassed the earth's carrying capacity for humans, which is only going to get worse with climate change. in the past, more kids also meant more labor and there was still lots of land to colonize and spread into with those extra people. but we already have more than enough people and no realistic places left to expand.
...in the current economic model. Currently we have enough built housing and grow enough food globally and produce enough consumer goods that ever single person can be fed, clothed and shelter. But the wealthiest few would rather crops rot in fields, hoard houses to extract rent and burn unsold clothing instead of slightly lowering ther profit margins.
i totally agree, i didn't quite state it but was basing my comment in the status quo. without being able to personally change the world's economic model, one has to make decisions in the context of the current one.
The earths carrying capacity thing is old eugenic nonsense.
I mean, yes eugenicits have used carrying capacity in bad faith arguments. But why do the same and discount carrying capacity entirely?
TLDR: carrying capacity has been used by eugenicists in bad-faith arguments, but the finite nature of Earthly resources is a fact; ignoring it entirely makes any counter-argument against eugenics inherently flawed and weaker. When paired with the uncertainty created by human invention and potential extra-planitary resources, carrying capacity can be acknowledged as fact but effectively caveated, and instead debate can be shifted away from absolute limits on resources we are unlikely to hit, and to the much more important matter of the distribution of resources.
There is a finite amount of stuff in/on this little space-ball we call home. Some of that stuff is more rare, and some of it we need more of. There are physical limits to resources on Earth and I think it is fair to acknowledge that as well as helpful to avoid being wasteful with those resources or blind to the disparity of how they are distributed. Not acknowledging such a clear fact instantly gives the people using carrying capacity in an argument ammo to support their other non-factual claims and discount any other claims you make because you made this clearly unfactual claim about carrying capacity being just a made-up thing.
However, no other earthly species is as adept as humans at modifying their environment and the way they use resources. We find new ways to use resources, or replace resources entirely. See anyone using whale oil for lamps anymore? Nope, we changed what resources we need by advancing our lighting and power technology. We can't determine carrying capacity for humans on Earth because we don't know the limits of our ability to invent and adapt.
Also, at some point people have the potential to get off our home rock and start exploiting resources on other space-balls. The actual carrying capacity for Earth suddenly becomes meaningless. Will we make it that far as a species? I donno, but the possibility needs to be considered when discussing carrying capacity.
Much more important than carrying capacity is the distribution of resources. Currently, our resource distribution systems are incredibly inequitable and wasteful. As other have pointed out in this thread, at current capacity the resources we extract could address the basic needs of all humans many times over. It's a human issue that we don't do that, and that we polute/waste/etc, not an environmental/system capacity issue. We have improved these systems in the past, and we could improve them going forward.