More Thoughts About Population

I used to think I shouldn't have kids because there were already too many people in the world. Every time I was stuck in traffic, had to ride home in rush-hour on the subway, or got jostled in crowds at the mall, I thought of that. The world is already full. More people just add to the crush and the burden on the environment, and mean that resources must be spread even more thinly.

Today I realized my feeling is shifting to a more subtle one, that I shouldn't have kids because the world they'll grow up in is in such terrible shape. I want to give them a childhood of woods and open spaces like the one I had, and opportunities to choose the lives they want. But the environmental problems I've been studying for years are getting worse, not better, and starting to hook together. Global warming is related to deforestation is related to soil erosion is related to industrial agriculture is related to antibiotic resistance and invasive species and urban sprawl and loss of predators and pollution, and all of these things are building to a crisis that's going to change the very face of our planet. My life has been shaped by knowledge of the coming crisis, not the necessity of coping with it. I don't want my children saddled with the misery of the coming environmental and social collapse. Not to sound all doomsday-y, it's not like the world is going to fall apart in a single day like in The Day After Tomorrow. It will just be a series of crises, like Katrina, that happen more and more frequently and tax our ability to respond to them until it is clear there is no such thing as normal any more, and the idea of a childhood like mine sounds like a fairytale from a hundred years ago.