Is One Child An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

There is a fine British ezine called Spiked with which the Geek finds himself in general agreement. In terms of politics the site is, in American terms, rather libertarian-socialist, which seems to be but is not a contradiction in terms. In this case the designation "libertarian-socialist" implies a strong trust in the individual, a strong distrust of central governments, and a healthy disregard for capitalism as the sovereign remedy for economic disparities and social injustices.

However, the Geek profoundly dissents from the well argued view presented by editor Brendan O'Neill in opposition to the growing applause by greens and others of the anti-global warming camp for the long standing Chinese policy limiting most urban families to one child. The recent and increasing embrace of the Chinese approach to the problems presented by overpopulation is predicated upon the belief that no child, no human, is "carbon neutral. Mr O'Neill's opposition is based upon the undeniable reality that the one child policy provides, indeed, requires a very potent governmental intrusion on the most intimate of human decisions.

The Geek yields to no one primacy of place in inherent and well founded suspicion of governmental intrusion into the private sphere. As numerous posts have shown, the Geek is unalterably opposed to any, repeat, any expansion of public space, of governmental supervision or regulation of the private space, the sphere bounded by personal, private decision making and behavior.

Given that orientation it would be natural for the Geek to agree with Mr O'Neill's position. In the present matter the weight of fact falls firmly on the side of those who support a global version of the Chinese one child policy. The successes of public health and agricultural technology over the past century have assured the world's population has exploded to a level where it exceeds the carrying capacity of the land or, in a best case, the economic capabilities of a country.

The ground truth is simple. There exists not a single matter of environmental degradation which cannot be reduced to a unitary cause: Too many people.

Whether the problem is one of pollution, resource exhaustion, or global climate change, the root cause remains the same: Too many people.

The converse is also true. Fewer people, regardless of the technological or consumption level, use fewer resources, emit less waste, generate less carbon dioxide and other alleged greenhouse gases.

In the wild and wacky world of the dismal science, economics, the same ground truths apply. Greater population exerts downward pressure on wages. Lesser population exerts a pressure for higher wages. A very fine example of this dynamic is seen in the aftermath of the Black Death epidemics in Europe. An alternative, reinforcing demonstration is seen in the effects of the Thirty Years War on population and income.

Human population growth remained very low during our long centuries as hunter-gatherers. The few remaining enclaves of hunter-gatherer societies available for ethnologists and anthropologists to study further demonstrated that the low population increase was a matter of policy, of individual choice, rather than the consequence of life being according to the paradigm of Hobbs--nasty, brutish, and short.

The hunter-gatherers practiced a wide assortment of approaches to gain the goal of limiting population. These included prolonged lactation, strong taboos, use of abortifacients, and, quite rarely, infanticide.

The development of agriculture took the lid off self-imposed restraint. Children, lots of them, were necessary not only to offset the shorter life expectancy of farmers but to provide labor.

Because of the inherent uncertainties of agriculturally based life, population growth remained low. Importantly, this low growth was imposed by the nature of agrarian life and its corollary, urbanization. The coming of industrialization in the West did nothing to change the trajectory of high birth and high death rates.

Not until the advent of effective public health measures which lowered the death rates from infectious diseases did the population--even the middle class sort so beloved of demographers--move to limit family size as a matter of individual decision making. The phenomenon noted by so many of declining middle class and elite birth rates came as a consequence of lowered infant and childhood mortality during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century. As public health improvements spread from the West to other areas of the globe with the inevitable result of lowered mortality among the young, the emerging middle class of these countries followed the same limiting dynamic previously observed in the West.

The combination of lowered death rates, which ultimately affected all strata of society, and massively asymmetrical birth rates as between the elite and non-elite segments of any country's population assured the explosive overall population growth seen during the past seventy-five or so years. The reckoning predicted by Malthus was forestalled by advances in technology, most notably the "Green Revolution" of the Fifties and Sixties.

A reckoning delayed does not equal a reckoning denied. The human race has been entirely too fruitful and has multiplied too well. While all monotheistic religions decry and deny that there can ever be too many people and advocates in certain ethnic groups may loudly brand any effort at population limitation to be "genocide" inflicted on the minority by the majority, both of these positions are untenable, indefensible, and ultimately destructive of the best interests of all humans and the planet upon which we live alike.

Whether assorted clerics and "spokesmen," pundits and politicians, boosters and demagogues like it or not, population limitation is coming. Probably it is coming sooner rather than later.

Limits on our collective growth can and will be enforced in one or more of three ways. Our population can be reduced in the traditional way--The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Or it can be reduced over time by the Chinese Way--governmental fiat and control. Or, finally, we can do it ourselves by acknowledging that our hunter-gatherer predecessors knew a very deep truth.

They knew to their very depths what most of us alive today recognize with the rational part of our brains. All land, every country, every piece of property has a natural carrying capacity which can be stretched only so far by the products of mind and muscle. The limits to the ultimate carrying capacity of land, whether natural as in the availability of resources or quasi-artificially as in the economic value of effort, labor, and invention, are real. They are imposed by the nature of life and the Earth themselves.

Obviously, the Geek greatly prefers the third option. But, one way or another, by act(s) of nature or the decisions of governments, the limits will be imposed. Far better we do it ourselves by individual choice rather than submit to either the iron will of pestilence, famine, and war or the dictates of government.

May we live in interesting times. Like it or not we are.