Thursday, December 30, 2010 - Blog on a Log

Please Don't Save the Planet - Why the environmental movement needs your children

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and there's no shortage of blogs, tweets and articles suggesting ways you can reduce your footprint and be more eco-friendly.

I'm all for saving the Earth. Hey, it's where I keep all my stuff. Generally speaking I'll support initiatives that mean we use less, recycle more, and otherwise try to reduce how hard we are on this (currently) uniquely habitable planet. But there's one thing I'm not going to do to save the environment - and I'm not sure you should be willing either.

A 2009 Oregon State University study argued that the greenhouse gas impact associated with having a child is almost 20 times more important than other eco-friendly practices, such as driving high-mileage cars or recycling. They said that choosing not to have an extra child is the most eco-friendly decision a person can make.

Full of middle-child uncertainty, I worry I might come down on the wrong side of the vague "extra child" divider - and I wasn't the only person to question when to draw the line. Ecosalon took OSU to its logical conclusion, and argued what is really called for is to have no children at all. "Here's a simple truth," says one woman quoted in the article, "For an average person like me...the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children."

There's a cold, utilitarian logic to this argument. Even the best eco-warriors among us can't live entirely footprint-free. Therefore, less children = less people on the earth = less harm to the environment. Earth would get along pretty fine without us. The only beings who would miss humanity would be...well....humanity. Forget cutting down on the number of kids - wipe our species off the earth completely and I guarantee better results than any other footprint-reducing initiative.

But that doesn't mean I'm not having children.

Yes, we are hard on the environment, and yes, no reductionist measures will ever be as effective as removing humanity's influence full-stop. But reductionist measures are not our only option.

Levitt & Dubner's Super Freaknomics (recommended reading for those who haven't) argues that reducing new emissions is not an effective means of combating global warming. "It's illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse," the authors contend, "and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions." We're too far gone for reducing our eco-footprints to be more than a stop-gap. What we need is to figure out how to reverse the damage that's already been done.

Levitt and Dubner alone discovered three ingenious projects in development that would cheaply and effectively slow (or even halt) the effects of global warming. Sure, these measures aren't fixing the pre-existing damage either, but they could buy us practically unlimited time in which to research how to do so.

And you know what research needs? Researchers. Human beings who have the drive and passion to study the harm humanity has inflicted on our environment and try to determine how we can fix it, not just stop doing more.

So don't go childless to save the environment. Have children, and raise them to be eco-aware and passionate about saving the earth. Make sure they understand the difference between living eco-friendly, and attempting to remove humanity from the earth altogether. Once we save the earth, it'd be nice to think there was someone around to enjoy it.