For long enough have we stayed in the dark dungeons of recycling, green technology, tree plantation, electric cars, and many other such solutions, now is the time for the bright hills of actual solutions to recover the light lost under the darkness of our ignorance.
I don’t think there is a better way to articulate our present dull approach to address the climate problem than this: We are too busy, or I should say, too interested in killing the cockroaches and mosquitoes in the name of cleanliness that the two African-savanna-sized elephants in the room continue to outdo our efforts by a huge margin right under our noses.
If we are actually concerned about our worldly room being constantly made stingy by the dung, we must stop getting too excited when some action against mosquitoes, lizards, or flies is taken, and like a real warrior, get ready for the right and required action, which is confrontation with two elephants simultaneously.
Those two elephants in the room are Pro-consumption and Pro-natalism.
Apart from the scientific mumbo-jumbo, what is the climate change?
Climate change is not when the world runs on the fossil fuels; it’s not when people are not vegan; it’s not when the roads are not filled with e-cars; it’s not when the recyclable stuff is not thrown in the bin labeled as “recyclables”; it’s not when you use hot water to take bath and wash clothes, etc.
At best, they can be called as the drivers of climate change, or you can accuse them of adding fuel to the fire, but they do not belong in the discussions concerned about the fountainhead of fire.
Then what ignited the fire?
The subtle notion that we can consume our way to the happiness we deeply aspire for. If you are a bit honest with yourself, you would know that our idea of happiness is directly related to the standard of living one has, which is directly related to the amount and number of things one consumes. The very word “development” drools infinite consumption from each of its letter.
Not only that it’s a societal standard to blend happiness with consumption and create a flour of success, but it’s also a narrative that almost all of us hold dearly in the deepest valleys of our subconscious mind and narrate our life stories based on that knowledge.
The narrative around us is that we are in a golden age. Yes, we are in a golden age, but we never care to ask that golden age for what and whom. It’s a golden age for endless consumption and Freddy Kreuger. Never throughout the history has the consumption of everything been so easy to much of the human population and never before we stood as close to Freddy Kreuger as we do today.
We are projecting toward the total collapse like a jet while the prevalent solutions are making the world a better place at the speed of horse and buggy. You don’t need to have the brain capacity of the likes of Albert Einstein to know what the end result in this situation would be.
People use the word “overpopulation” to indicate that we are overflowing with humans on this planet, but I do not think that there is a precise number over which you can say that the population growth is responsible for the climate change, because there are numerous studies that can show you that the correct number is 4 billion and there are studies that can show you that even increasing by twelvefold from here won’t be a big issue. (SOURCE)
There is no correct or incorrect number in itself but in relation to the consumption habits of the number of people living on the planet.
As Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York City, said: Knowing "how many people want Jaguars with four wheels and how many want jaguars with four legs" will provide the most accurate representation of the sustainable limit.
As per the current state of human mind, it just wants to consume, consume, and consume. It wants to consume as much as it can and that’s why, as said earlier, our very definitions of “development” and “success” come from how much a person consumes. The “developed” world has a much higher consumption rate per capita than the “developing” world, and how much that “developing” world will consume when it gets “developed”? Obviously, it will consume as much as the today’s “developed” world consumes and under these circumstances, we would need almost 4 Earths to meet our demands, which means the sustainable limit would be around 2 billion, and that too only if we press the brake pedal at our greed once every nation reaches that level of consumption.
Under current scenarios, we should not have been more than 2 billion and even if we magically bring it down to 2 billion, our consumption level should be saturated at what an average middle-class American consumes today, but we are failing spectacularly on both these fronts. We are neither 2 billion nor are we ever going to stop at today’s consumption level as long as the “happiness through consumption” narrative is not slashed into pieces.
Let alone the future scenario where every nation gets so “developed” that it starts consuming like today’s America, even right now, as much of the nations have not yet reached that “auspicious” level of consumption, we are still “borrowing the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present,” as highlighted by Mathis Wackernagel, CEO of Global Footprint Network.
Did you think Ponzi schemes exist in the financial markets only? You are wrong, our way of operating and our sense of happiness is built on as much of a Ponzi notion as that of the Tulip bulbs; sooner or later, things will collapse if the mania continues.
The graphic below paints the picture lucidly:
When it comes to consumption, we consume in three different ways, of which we talked about in an earlier post, and one kind of consumption involves consuming the body of the opposite gender, which leads to filling the Earth with billions of people more than it can sustainably provide living means to.
When we look at the situation like this, it is self-evident that we are overpopulated, not in the traditional sense of the word, but in respect to our present consuming habits. Therefore, the more suitable word is not overpopulation but pro-natalism, which is the notion that everyone must have a child. The entire world culture is such that you are expected to raise more eyebrows by refusing to have a child than by any other thing.
“You must have a child.”
“Why?”
“…….because……everyone else has and……reproduction is necessary for the species survival.”
Instead of accepting that their stained glasses of tradition and culture have distorted their view of reality, the pro-natalists act like they consider the species survival as the utmost valuable thing in their life, when according to the current reality, the worst thing you can do for the species survival is giving birth to one more child.
There is no bigger crime against humanity and the planet in today’s time and age than filling the maternity wards, but instead of treating it as such, we tend to congratulate the moment the “good news” strikes our ear drums.
The propaganda around us is so strong that it makes us buy into the notion that the most creative and colorful part of our life would be when we bring another life into this world, and nobody bothers to mention that bringing life into a world rapidly turning lifeless is as creative and colorful as giving 1kg of sugar to a patient of diabetes on a daily basis.
And I am not making it up. It is self-evident that the birth taking place is the confirmation of more carbon in the atmosphere, more need for the food, more trees going down, more corpses of animals, more waste, and many such things that the liberals, progressives, “climate activists” spend their time protesting against, but one thing they will never talk about or at least agree to is how pro-natalism is the source of that all.
“I am so environmentally conscious that I teach three of my kids to recycle and plant trees” is no different than saying that “I am so health conscious that I wash my hands after smoking a cigarette.”
Nearly half of the pregnancies are unplanned/unintended/unwanted; meaning two people got together when their “Cupid level” was high and after some days came to the realization that their hard work that day will bring them a cute news in a few months’ time. Of those pregnancies, around 40% of the cases end up in a maternity ward.
We fill up with great energy, anger, and attention like a balloon balloons with air when it comes to fighting the outer forces such as the fossil fuel companies, non-vegetarianism, or deforestation, but all of that de-balloons into laziness, flattering, and ignorance when it comes to a fight against our hormones, the bodily tendencies, or the family and societal pressure to produce a child. All of your activism is a scam and nothing else than a phony effort to gain sympathy from the people around you if it’s not concerned about that BIG CIRCLE in the picture shown above.
And both - the pro-consumption narrative and pro-natalism narrative - need to be tackled simultaneously if we are actually as serious about the climate change as we pretend to be. Being a minimalist and saying nothing about 140 million babies taking birth every year helps the climate fight as much as being an anti-natalist and consuming to the eyeballs i.e., zero.
USA's population is only around 320 million, yet they are the second biggest carbon emitter in the world because they consume a lot. On the other hand, China's consumption per capita is very low as compared to that of the US, but still, it’s the biggest carbon emitter because their population exceeds a billion.
We can't pick and choose between less population and less consumption, doing that means we are choosing a horror. Instead of working to bring down our consumption and numbers, we are doing just the opposite. We are increasing the population and every new generation consumes more than the previous one.
For those who say that deciding not to have a baby won’t make any difference, I have some mental exercise: Imagine how many tons of CO2 are we going to prevent from entering the atmosphere if every second family decides to have one less child than expected, ……. and now imagine the difference we can make if every family decides to have one less child….. and don’t stop there….. now imagine the difference we can make if many families start adopting a child rather than giving birth to a new one. Protecting the Earth from the ruthless consumption of billions of people would be better……. no, infinitely much better than what’s being done today in the name of “protecting the planet.”
But we do not want to discuss this, because our entire culture seduces us into bearing a child, it’s often portrayed as some kind of accomplishment. The market forces are poking us from every direction to have a “full nest,” so it’s not easy, but instead of worrying about how difficult it is, we should be focused on how necessary it is. Someone roaming thirsty in a desert is pushed by the necessity of finding water, not stopped by the difficulty of finding water in a desert.
Let not the massiveness of the cultural desert become a hindrance in your way by letting the necessity of the situation push you beyond those hindrances.
As I come to close this article, I am reminded of a couple of lines from Martin Luther King’s letter he wrote in the Birmingham jail:
“Shallow understanding from the people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from the people of ill will.”
“Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
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'The entire world culture is such that you are expected to raise more eyebrows by refusing to have a child than by any other thing.'
I don't think there is an entire world culture. The closest thing we have to a global mono-culture is liberalism, which is anti-natalist because it is a narcissistic worldview. Hence why fertility rates have been in terminal decline across the West for around 60 years. Liberal market forces have destroyed the traditional home, by encouraging selfish consumption and encouraging a social value set of choice above duty. This has gone hand in hand with the destruction of traditional religious beliefs, which urged material moderation and an anti-consumption mindset. That would be where to start, rather than telling people not to have children, when we have a massive problem on the horizon with growing numbers of elderly people and not enough of working age to care/pay taxes to look after said elderly, hence highly pressurised health systems.
We have a duty to be guardians of our environment, but we should not worship it in a crudely religious way to the point where you can't even bring yourself to reproduce because you're unwittingly part of a death cult that completely misdiagnoses the scale and breadth of the problem and the source.