Pronatalists like the Collinses, interviewed for your article (America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’, 25 May), emphasise their authority on the “data”, but their cherrypicked results neglect to look at the full picture that humanity’s outsized impact is degrading the natural resources upon which we all depend.
The Global Footprint Network says we are in ecological overshoot, with humanity using the resources of 1.7 Earths. The UN has made clear that our unsustainable demand for resources is driving the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and increasing levels of pollution and waste. And despite the rhetoric of Silicon Valley, technology is not our saviour; it is found to mitigate global extraction by only 5%.
It’s time pronatalists recognised that nothing in nature exists independently. The impacts of climate change are already endangering millions of lives, yet they ignore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s data citing population growth and per capita consumption as the biggest drivers of emissions. The environmental crises cannot be ignored when their effects shape our world; instead we must act now to rein in our resource demand to solve these interconnected crises.
Madeleine Hewitt
Population Matters
• Libertarians and pronatalists like Elon Musk and the Collinses conflate the established link between innovation driving a rising standard of living and population growth. They argue that more people (conveniently, the children of other rich white pronatalists) are required to maintain the pace of innovation, or we enter a death spiral of declining population and productivity. But this argument is thrice flawed.
First, many of the problems we need to solve are perversely the result of the growing population itself – we waste precious innovation cycles addressing pollution, hunger and water shortages that only arise due to population pressure. When we include the negative externalities of population growth on the demand for innovation, a stable equilibrium is possible. More importantly, there are billions of innovative people mired in poverty – unleash their potential first, instead of seeking more people like “ourselves” to carry the burden. And then there is artificial intelligence, still far from truly self-aware but more than capable of enhancing human creativity. Processors, not people, will amplify our ability to innovate. And global standards of living will rise in concert.
Greg Blonder
Visiting researcher, Boston University
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