OK, so we've filled the Earth with our young. What now? When somethings full, whats the point in overfilling it? It will just spill, and when we talk human lives, spilling blood is the only recourse, be it from famine, war, pestilence or disease.

The Left has a point. Pointing out they are irrational hippies and dredlocked imbeciles from time to time doesn't invalidate their point and give you free reign to do a very Right wing thing: act with a conscience scubbed clear of any conception of the moral or logical ramifications of what you are doing. God may have said be fruitful, but he didn't foresee 6 billion people starving to death.

The Bible is a moral and spiritual tract, not an agricultural thesis on balancing inputs and yield or population. Simplistic moral arguments don't invalidate real-world problems, much as the Author would like to believe.

I came here to read the submission above and all the comments. What happened to the comments that were here previously. Are you offering a forum here or a restricted pulpit?

how odd all of this. When I was a child in the 70s they were saying we were headed to a new ice age. Move forward to the late 90s and now we are heading to a heating age. What gives? What gives is that no one really knows and these people do have an agenda and like questioning the holocaust, if you do not conform to the wisdom of Al Gore one is a pariah. Anytime the government starts looking at something and preaching something I suspect that the motivation is money. Even though this article mentions faith etc. I think it really just comes down to money. Everything else in this country from the drug war to the war on terror, is really just about, you guessed it, money.

As I see it, "Be fruitful and multiply" was more a blessing than a commandment. But if you insist on seeing it as a commandment, I guess that's okay too. At least you can take comfort in the observation that for once people obeyed - at that time there were only a few million people scattered around on the planet, and now there are over 6 billion, that number having doubled in my lifetime.

As for the population explosion, yes that is getting to be a problem in many places - it is one of the causes of global warming, world hunger, the stretching thin of water, land and natural resources, and traffic and living congestion - not the only cause, by any means, of any of these problems, but a salient one in each case. Just for the record, though, my noticing that doesn't mean I don't like kids or anything. I just think we should think about these things, thoughtful consideration being more productive than name-calling.

The solution is historically observable; in places where the general population is relatively well-off, birth rates tend to decline - so maybe the solution is to help raise the standard of living in poor and over-congested parts of the world. Foreign aid and good old capitalist investing can go hand in hand in fixing the problem. Or you can sit around calling people names hysterical leftist eco-freaks - it's up to you to decide which approach will do the most good in the world.

CUCKOO, CUCKOO, CUCKOO, CUCKOO, CUCKOO!

How easily people demonize the other side. Color and creed completely aside, give a people some other people to point a finger at and they'll do so with vigor. Usually citing the exact same offenses as those pointing fingers back at them.

I will here state the problem as I see it, and then I will go into detail. In the past 200 years, we have indeed filled the planet - we have multiplied our population to several hundred times the number of human beings the Earth has ever been asked to support before. We have discovered, utilized, and nearly depleted the oil fields that took several million years to lay down - sunlight captured in the plants of ancient jungles by photosynthesis, decomposed into what we call fossil fuels.

I am an environmentalist, a scientist, and firmly affixed to the left wing. I am a daughter and someday, I will be a mother. I can assure you that I DO NOT see my children as the doom of the planet. I see my future children as gifts, opportunities, little windows into a better future. I feel it is my duty to leave the world a better place for those children, and to empower them to do the same for theirs, and so on. To ensure the happiness and survival of our progeny is the driving force behind most, if not all, of the environmental movement. However, that does not stop me from seeing the ugly truth that we are swiftly approaching critical mass. The ecological balance of the planet is no longer healthy. Our species has grown fat and happy on the luxuries of that long-buried sunlight energy. Our innovation in putting these substances we call oil and coal to work has brought us some marvelous achievements, and we could be applauded for our adaptive ingenuity. But in our fervor for growth and the noble quest to rid ourselves of toil and hardship, we neglected to take into account the long-term effects of the resources we were utilizing. Who would have thought at the turn of the 20th century that burning coal and oil would thicken the heat-trapping blanket in our atmosphere? The science of the time was woefully ill-equipped to handle such hypotheses.

Let me remind you that for 99.99% of the history of the human race, we have not lived in this sterile, sedentary Western ideal that the widespread use of fossil fuels has allowed us. When we did not have cars or planes to zip us from place to place, we had horses, or our own two feet. And what fueled those? Food. The food that we could grow, from plants, or animals fed on plants, in any given year - current sunlight that had only recently been converted to energy by photosynthesis. And that, for most of human history, limited our population growth to something that was sustainable within the ecological balance of the Earth. It was when we started using ancient sunshine long since buried that we started tipping the scales in our favor.

The Earth is a closed system. It has a finite amount of resources that cycle endlessly, powered by the energy from the sun. A finite amount of resources will not support more than its fair share of growth by simple laws of mathematics. It took us 10 thousand years - since the dawn of agriculture - to amass our first 1 billion humans. Only another century and we doubled that to 2 billion. In the century after that, with the increasing assistance of oil - as fuel, energy, in fertilizers and pesticides, and especially, as plastics - we have tripled ourselves to 6 billion human beings. This is truly unprecedented population growth. The Earth, and all its resources and cycles, however, have not shifted to accommodate us.

Environmentalists *have* stated numbers as to what size a population of humans the Earth can realistically support - I've heard everything from a mere 2 billion up to 12 billion. No, scientists do not always agree on exact figures - they have too much fun arguing over them - but I defy thee to find me a credible scientist in the field who denies the evidence that human-made climate change is severely problematic to human way of life, and who would not cite overpopulation as a part of the problem. I would listen eagerly to this person's evidence to the contrary.

We do not want to invade or destroy, least of all the family institution. What we want is to ensure that the children of the human race still have a home in a few hundred years. This is a new problem, relative to the whole of history, unique to post-industrial society. But it is not new on a political timescale. Since the 1960s people have been reporting the evidence of the wrongs we are doing to the planet, (see: The Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, published Houghton Mifflin 1962, on the dangers of DDT pesticide, a book widely credited with starting the steady growth of the environmental movement.) and for going on 50 years it has been reduced to the back row of political pandering. Environmental and ecological problems are made up of aggregate small pieces, and as such it has managed to sneak up behind those who weren't watching carefully. But people have been looking at it, watching it happen, for decades, making small and large victories (like the banning of widespread use of DDT, and of CFCs which thin the ozone layer) that have slowed or reversed certain problems while leaving others (indiscriminate growth of the fossil fuel industry) relatively unchecked.

This is not a new problem in our perception. It's just one that has been delegated to the next man's term for far too long. Now it is delegated to the next generation - my generation.

The balancing act that we are now given to perform is one of balancing the ecological and environmental health of our planet with the quality of life and the technological achievement that we have seen in the past century. We should not and could not go back to pre-industrial society now that we have advanced. We can only go forward from here. It will take all of our ingenuity and adaptivity to unite the two, but those are the very qualities that set homo sapiens apart. It is my sincerest hope that we will spend the next several decades growing wiser as a race, more responsible, more aware. Is that too much to ask?

Umm. . .when have any scientists given a schedule of global climate change? Some have offered estimates, but these are presented as what they are, and are subject to invigorating debate within the scientific community. Population growth is a serious problem, and you are absoloutly correct that totalitarian societies have been the worst offenders in the area of population containment. You, however, have not addressed the other ways in which people can be persuaded that the evoloutionary drive to breed may be mitigated.
Why does the Catholic Church not allow contraception? Why do so many religious people not admit that humans have sex, and without proper precaution sex may lead to more humans?

I'm a US guy, so I may be off, but I assume that you live in an area with a population density far below the norm. How many people so you think should live in your area?
Would you be opposed to your area being a jumble of strip malls and gaudy apartment buildings?
I live in what was once a relatively small city in north Florida, USA.
In only the past ten years the population has more than doubled.
I appreciate the wild parts of my state and country, but they are running out.
How many people is too many? Do you really think that there will be a sudden revelation causing people everywhere to realize that they are too crowded? Or do you prefer the Malthusian scenario?

I've heard that 100 million is about the right number,but I don't know the evidence behind that.

I think we can all agree that 6 billion is too much for our current technological level.

Do you honestly believe that the planet can hold up unrestricted population growth without ecological disaster? China cannot afford to dismiss the one child policy; Westerners only see one side of the story.

Due to those tree-humping lefties, my steak was too rare last night, and I was forced to cook it 'til done. inexcusable! Oh how they'll rue the day...

I can see how it would be difficult for you to give up parts of the ancient shepherd religion you have adopted as your own. Even scary. You might have to restrict yourself to two children, and drive a different car. You even believe that we think the world will be destroyed.


How about considering others, and the future of humanity? Unless you are a rapture christian, maybe you would want to save millions from death by starvation as the global climate changes. Maybe you'd like to help others out. Do something voluntary now to avoid mandatory down the road.

But probably not.

Thank you for this breath of fresh air! It is so nice to read such a well researched, unbiased opinion piece. It is so rare these days to read a well informed article that does not descend into name calling and general vilification. The references to the "Left" as freaks and cultists was especially delicious, I shall try my utmost to use these in polite conversation as soon as I can.

My thanks again,
Ben.

Most people advocating environmentalist policies don't argue for any restrictions on havingchildren at all.

People in severe poverty in countries with no public pensions system and a high infant mortality rate tend to have more children both because many of them will not survive to adulthood (due to e.g disease caused by lack of clean water) and because grown up children will be their only form of support in their old age.

Its for those reasons that the countries with the highest birth rates are not the biggest polluters - because they are too poor to use more than a fraction of the energy per person of much wealthier countries with smaller populations. Its also why birth rates fall as populations become better off.

The solutions to environmental pollution put forward by most people are energy efficiency (home insulation, more efficient car engines, public transport, less waste etc) and less polluting means of producing energy (e.g solar, wind, wave power and research into others)

Where Stanley Reitsma gets the idea that most environmentalists say people should have less children i don't know.

And the dinosaur fossils were put there by Satan to perpetrate the myth of evolution! And of course, everyone knows the Earth is flat!

.....if you really, really, REALLY want to.

It would be hard to find a case which could expose more ignorance than the writer of this article has shown - anyone who would choose the information provided by a two-thousand year old poorly edited text over current science is obviously delusional.

One point - why look at China? He should read his 'holy book' and notice the god-sponsored infanticide.

Wake up!

You've connected your "scary hidden agenda" to communist oppression, some 200 years of leftist implied "immenent doom", global warming, destroying christianity, family, freedom, some kind of leftist bedroom intrusion, and "Green Terrorism" without a shred of backing evidence. None of these things exist. You're just making stuff up as you go along. Neat!

I also love how you've taken a predicted scenario (although, not a specific one from a real person), the "doomsday scenario", and tell us it a real threat because it hasn't happened yet. WTF???!?? Nice logic. Next time somebody finds a rapist outside their window, no need to call the cops. If it was a real threat, that person would already have been raped. Neat!

I have never, not once in my 40 years of existence on this planet, seen a single liberal advocate that "the state" bar families from conceiving children. I haven't seen conservatives do this either. Of course, I live in North America, and can't suggest such arguments aren't being made in other countries - most of whom have no "liberal" movement that we would recognize as such.

The only hysteria I'm perceiving right now appears in the form of Mr Reitsma's schizophrenic letter to the editor. How he manages lumping together political ideology, religion, paranoia, the environment and birth control into a single subject is beyond me. It's creative at the least - sadly ignorant at best.

I find it amazing that the Left always cites Pierre Trudeau’s famous quote of the state having no business in the bedrooms of the nation, yet it is the Left who wants the state to bar families from conceiving children in that same bedroom under the guise of saving the planet.

Yep. You read that right. Better keep your Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanie strapped on tight, or the Evil Black Helicopter Pirates Of The Great Left-Wing Conspiracy will prevent you from conceiving children in your bedroom.