Recently, one of my friends gave birth to a healthy baby girl. While I am overjoyed for my friend, the planet-lover in me cringes at the news of every new human birth. I cannot help but think, “why couldn’t they just adopt?”(after all, there are an estimated 30 million orphans in India alone, even though all don’t fall under the legal adoption umbrella); or “why did they not think twice about the planet folding like a flimsy sheet of paper under the exploding human population?”
I wonder if these thoughts ever cross the minds of millions around the world who had and have chosen to get pregnant. I must clarify that I’m not talking about the men and women who do not have access to contraceptives and education, but about those who have the luxury of choice to conceive children or not, as well as access to education and money for contraceptives and family planning.
I have decided never to have a biological child of my own.
Many would say I am crazy to go against my natural urges and even against evolution by choosing to not propagate my genes. My friends look at me incredulously when I voice my decision and are unable to understand my reasoning. More so because I am a young woman, and this idea goes against every cultural, traditional and religious ideal that we have been taught to conform to.
Some even say my decision is unnatural. However, didn’t we homo sapiens cut the symbiotic cord with nature long ago? We left our natural ways behind around the time we decided to farm, renouncing our more natural and sustainable hunter-forager way of life. The next blow came in the form of the Scientific Revolution 8,000 years later, and then the Industrial Revolution. There was no turning back from there.
There are more than seven billion of us here. Overpopulation is easily the single most imminent problem at the root of almost every conceivable challenge we face – be it diseases, pollution, deforestation, food and water security, climate change and mass extinction, and our stressful, overcrowded and strained quality of living. India has already crossed the grizzly 1.2 billion mark and is projected to beat China in the population race by 2022. Quite plausible, considering we have the highest rate of births per minute in the world. Africa is foretold to harbour more than half of global population in little more than three decades. Population will continue to rise exponentially in other parts of the world as well.
The world is crowded. PC: Koushik Das. Source: Unsplash
More than two centuries ago, humans on the planet numbered in mere millions. We reached our first 1 billion mark only in early 19th century. By 2011, we had managed to procreate exponentially, and how! Before the advent of the Agricultural Revolution, the tentative human population on the entire planet was less than 20 million. Today, the 600 sq. km. city of Mumbai holds is home to over 20 million people. As per UNICEF estimates, globally, 4.3 children are born every second. That is, every second, there are at least four new mouths to feed, four new mouths to consume the planet’s resources such as space, water, raw materials and fuel. All of these are quite limited, I assure you. The more the feet, the larger the carbon footprints.
In just the past few decades, wildlife population has decimated rapidly due to our destructive, cruel and unsustainable activities. No wonder, scientists have termed the present time period as the Anthropocene epoch. Human actions are impacting the planet at a scale so large that they have changed the very shape of the planet, geologically and ecologically. They are irreversibly affecting the biosphere in a very short span of time, the way geologic changes did over millions of years.
Thomas Malthus, English scholar and expert on demography states in ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1798), “…[I] say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.”
Nature has always exercised its powers of population control if any species shows signs of exceeding reasonable numbers, and humans are no exception. Natural selection is a merciless taskmaster. Disease, famine, premature deaths and even misery as Malthus puts it have been forms of population checks throughout history. The best known example is the deadly plague, termed as ‘Black Death’, that gripped Europe in the mid-14th century claiming more than 20 million people, wiping out more than one-third of Europe’s entire population. It may sound harsh, but such checks are the norm in nature, necessary for progress and survival of the species.
In our case, unfortunately, preventive checks such as contraceptives and the progressive delay in the age of women conceiving with every generation haven’t really helped. In Thomas Malthus’ opinion and frankly mine too, we humans are not pragmatic enough to exercise moral restraint and undo our destructive ways of living.
Or else, why would we not take this dire crisis more seriously, and address it dedicatedly? Why is it not talked about as much as the more famous and closely related cousin, climate change? Clearly, the two are closely and irrevocably linked. Then is it because it is simply too inconvenient a truth to admit to?
Man-made climate change and overpopulation are directly connected, but the two are never talked about in the same breath, as they should be. Talking about population control is, tragically, still taboo. People, especially those in positions of authority, hesitate to address it for fear of a backlash. Unfortunately, human population control and family planning is not even on the agenda of most conservation organisations across the world even though unsustainable rise in population renders even the best conservation efforts weak.
While human population almost quadrupled between 1900 and 2000, human carbon emissions rose fifteen-fold in the same period. Another study suggests that the impending carbon footprint that one child will eventually leave behind through his entire lifetime is 20 times more than what a person will save by resorting to an eco-friendly lifestyle.
What we have on our hands is a very serious population crisis. On World Population Day 2015, renowned wildlife conservationist and award-winning journalist Prerna Singh Bindra wrote, “it’s widely acknowledged, even if in hushed tones, that not having children may well be the biggest contribution to limit your environmental footprint … I think too, of the world we bring our kids into. We prefer not to face the inconvenient truth, but there is no escaping the fact that resources crucial to our survival are shrinking, getting dirtier. Water wars are already occurring, they will only get more frequent, murkier. Our food is frankly, filth. I do not want my child gasping for air, her lungs function far below capacity, as is the fate of Delhi’s children.”
Amen to that.
I respect a woman’s natural urge and maternal instincts that goad her into wanting to bring her own child into this world. It is beautiful and to go against it, difficult. However, no matter how hard it is, I am never going to add one more person to the billions already here.
This article was first published in The Tilak Chronicle in September 2019. An earlier version was published in Sanctuary Asia.
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About the Author: Purva Variyar is a conservation and science writer at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, India.
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Disclaimer: The author is associated with Wildlife Conservation Trust. The views and opinions expressed in the article are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Wildlife Conservation Trust.
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