Fact: Falling fertility rates and eventual population decline will have the most beneficial long-run impact on the climate and other ecological crises. And yet influential media like the New York Times, and politicians pushed by businesses that rely on unsustainable growth, continue to urge women to have more kids. That is what even progressive Joe Biden is trying to do with his Ivanka Trump-inspired increased child tax credits.
For demographers and other population experts population decline is the expected and desired outcome of decades of family planning interventions meant to end and reverse unsustainable population growth. Why the media alarmism then?
Between the time those interventions were begun and today, neoliberalism and unsustainable growth-based economics that externalizes costs – like the climate crisis and birth inequity, has become the zeitgeist. The Times itself wrote about the same. But fanciful ideologies aside, growth remains unsustainable. The more interesting question is how the arc of population growth became so high to initiate the climate crisis, and who among those who have benefitted from that mistake will pay to compensate the future generations who certainly will be harmed – through no fault of their own.
Justice begins with an ecosocial #FairStart in life.