earth

In a 2012 speech to the Protectors of Public Lands, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson argued bigger wasn’t necessarily better when it came to Australia’s population:

“[Population] growth is behind the world’s most intractable problems — global warming, hunger and poverty, species extinctions, food, water and energy shortages, even war, waste and terrorism.

“Every country has a role to play in tackling this problem. Every country should be moving to stabilise its population and get its house in order.”

He went on to call for a reduction in overseas migrant numbers; as Crikey reported last week, Australia would be well on its way to meeting or even exceeding carbon targets if it had a net migration rate of zero. But climate change is a global problem, not an Australian one. If Australia met its carbon targets but other countries did not, the earth would still warm. And the economic consequences of severely cutting migration could be devastating.

But there is another way for eco-minded Australians to stop using up the world’s resources: have fewer children.

A 2009 research paper by Oregon State University — Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals — found limiting reproduction was the single most important thing individuals could do to reduce their carbon footprint. OSU statistic professor Paul Murtaugh, one of the report’s authors, said:

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime. Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”

How much impact would having fewer (or no) children have? For each child born in the United States, the report’s authors concluded:

” … the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives — things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.”

The study concluded that in 2009, an American child would add 9441 metric tons of CO2 to a parent’s carbon legacy, which would increase the parent’s direct lifetime emissions by about 570%. And if that child had children, the indirect increase in carbon emissions would be exponential. The average annual per capita carbon emissions in Australia is 1.08 times higher than that in the United States, so the impact of each Australian baby born is even more damaging to the environment.

“… the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children”

Dr Jonathan Sobels, an adjunct research fellow the University of South Australia who co-authored a 2010 study commissioned by the Immigration Department on the impact of of different levels of net overseas migration on Australia’s physical, natural and built environments, says a declining birth rate would also reduce Australia’s carbon emissions and relieve pressure on infrastructure.

“It’d have the same effect whether we’re talking migrant or natural increase; it’s the same number of people, and it’s the number of people that makes the difference in terms of environmental impact,” he told Crikey.

Electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith, who has written a book on the dangers of a spiralling population, told Crikey Australian families must be “sensible” about the number of children they have as the world is rapidly running out of resources. “At the moment we’re artificially inflating the birth rate in order to sustain our economic growth,” he said. “It’s a finite world, and you can’t have perpetual growth in a finite world.”

Smith says the population has to decrease worldwide in order to live sustainably. “You have to live in harmony with nature. At the present time we use 1.5 times the world’s resources every year — you don’t have to be very bright to know that’s not sustainable,” he said.

An increasing number of sustainability minded people are taking the message to heart, deciding the best thing they can do for the planet is to not have any children. Of the self-described GINKS (green intentions, no kids), perhaps the most well-known is Lisa Hymas, senior editor at US online environmental publication Grist. In a 2010 article entitled “The GINK Manifesto: Say it loud — I’m childfree and I’m proud“, she outlined her green reasons for remaining child-free:

“For an average person like me — someone who doesn’t have the ability of an Al Gore to reach millions, or of a Nancy Pelosi to advance (if not actually enact) landmark environmental legislation, or of a Van Jones to inspire (and piss off) whole new audiences — the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children.”

And Hymas is far from the only one. Author Laura S. Scott spoke with numerous child-free couples for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice and said in a 2010 article  environmental concerns were a major factor for many:

“I interviewed people who felt very strongly that if they were going to be responsible global citizens, they needed not to have children. I talked to a couple in Canada and [the woman] said to me, ‘As much as I love the potentiality of a newborn, I don’t think the planet needs another garbage-producing human’.”