…from the personal to the philosophical, but preciously little by way of the practical, except insofar as the process of creating and sharing such disquisitions is itself a form of palliative medication in the face of inevitable and irreversible ecological deterioration.
…in which topics covered include the following: population ethics at CEHV; the most compelling case for human population reduction is ecocentric or biocentric; neglected anthropocentric reasons for human population reduction; the author as a child-free role model?; is ‘the right to procreate’ philosophically interesting?; conservation needs a stronger moral basis than ‘future (human) generations’ rhetoric.
The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it.
– J.S. Mill, “Of the Stationary State” (1848)
Population Ethics at CEHV
I am fortunate that the Ohio State Center for Ethics and Human Values – that’s my employing unit – is not a participant in the politically correct trend of population denial syndrome.
Notably, our former postdoctoral scholar, Trevor Hedberg, spent the part of his postdoc finalising and publishing his book The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation. During his time with the Center, Trevor also spoke at an author-meets-critics webinar, which you can watch on YouTube. (I admit that I’ve not read Trevor’s book yet myself, and I know about his views mainly from said webinar and his article for The Ecological Citizen, everyone’s favourite ecocentric peer-reviewed journal, “The Moral Imperative to Reduce Global Population”.)
Our Director, Piers Turner, also recognizes human overpopulation as a problem, although he is sometimes much more hedged than I would be, as in this brief interview with the university’s Sustainability Institute (“The 4 Ws and H of Sustainability Ethics”): “It is sometimes said that the ‘Population Bomb’ theory of the ’60s was hyperbolic and wrong. But put into a sustainable development context, where we commit to providing a decent standard of living to 10 or 12 billion people in the future, there’s a version of the theory that may have been right after all.” Granted, in this day and age, I suppose it is bold to bring up overpopulation in such a forum even in a hedged manner.
It’s nice to work in an institutional setting where there’s no pressure to deny that human overpopulation is an ecological catastrophe. But, with that out of the way, let me say that I don’t fully agree with either Hedberg’s or Turner’s approaches to the topic, which are resourcist (i.e. viewing Nature as valuable mainly as a source of resources of practical/survival value) and primarily anthropocentric, even if they each have non-anthropocentric forays.
As usual, I approach matters from the standpoint of a solitary mystic enchanted by Nature. I cannot speak about overpopulation without saying a word on behalf of introverts. First and most importantly, though, I must say a few words on behalf of Nature herself.
Human Overpopulation is Already a Crisis Beyond Measure
It is flatly FALSE that the overpopulation crisis about which Paul Ehrlich and others warned in the 1960s did not come to pass. It has. Human population has exploded, and as a consequence the more-than-human world has suffered beyond measure.
Well, although the full implications are beyond measure, I will still cite a few statistics:
1. Since the “population bomb” explosion that allegedly wasn’t so grim, wildlife populations have been plummeting catastrophically.
In its 2020 Living Planet Report, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that, globally, population sizes of wild vertebrates decreased by 68 percent since 1970.
As an avian empath, I would be remiss not also to point out two groundbreaking bird-specific studies. In “Decline of the North American avifauna” (Science, 2019), Rosenberg et al report that the continent has lost 29 percent of its breeding birds since 1970. Two years later, Burns et al published findings that revealed a decline of about 17 to 19 percent in Europe’s breeding bird abundance since only 1980 (“Abundance decline in the avifauna of the European Union reveals cross-continental similarities in biodiversity change,” Ecology and Evolution, 2021).
And these declines are only expected to worsen. Another study published in 2020 found that 85 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species suffer from intense human pressure in at least half of their range (O’Bryan et al, “Intense human pressure is widespread across terrestrial vertebrate ranges,” Global Ecology and Conservation). Estimates suggest that up to one million species are threatened with extinction, primarily as a result of exploitation of land for agriculture and direct exploitation of organisms (see the IPBES 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and [offensive term omitted]).
2. Humans and domesticated animals constitute a grossly outsized proportion of total vertebrate biomass.
Today, humans account for about 36 percent of total mammalian biomass. Livestock accounts for about 60 percent (which, of course, exist only to satisfy the desires of the bloated human population; more on my views about livestock in a future post). Meanwhile, wild mammals make up scarcely more than 4 percent of all mammalian biomass. Even in text, that bears repeating: wild mammals make up scarcely more than 4 percent of all mammalian biomass. The same report points out that, indeed, humans and livestock together outweigh all other vertebrates combined, excluding fish (Bar-On et al, “The biomass distribution on Earth,” PNAS, 2018).
While we’re at it, let’s remember those imperilled wild bird populations (I wouldn’t let you forget); Bar-On et al also reveal that the biomass of domestic poultry now exceeds their biomass almost threefold.
I can’t resist citing one more statistic in our discussion of biomass: around the notorious year 2020, human-made mass (e.g. buildings, infrastructure, machines) exceeded the total of all living biomass for the first time in history (Elhacham et al, “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass,” Nature, 2020). To repeat: the products of human manufacturing now outweigh all the living biomass on Earth. Now that’s some heavy stuff. (Seriously, though, it’s horrifying.)
3. A grossly disproportionate amount of Earth’s surface has already been usurped to feed all these people.
Overall, agriculture consumes almost half of the Earth’s habitable land, and is it listed as a threat for over 85 percent of the species on the IUCN’s Red List (see, e.g., “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” in Our World in Data). According to a 2021 report by the Ramsar Convention (“Global Wetland Outlook”), 35 percent of wetlands have been lost since 1970, primarily due to conversion to agriculture. Agricultural expansion also remains the main driver of deforestation, as UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization states, with 420 million hectares of forest destroyed since 1990.
To be sure, 77 percent of agricultural land is used for either livestock grazing or the growing of crops for livestock feed (see, again, “Half of the world’s habitable land…”), and there is no reason that the vast majority of people couldn’t adopt a predominantly plant-based diet (I do and it’s yummy). But plant agriculture itself needs to be de-intensified and conducted in a non-ecocidal manner, stripped of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Aside from this, conversion to plant-based diets risks being just another means of feeding the human population more efficiently, and without an antecedent commitment to create and retain space for Nature, those efficiency gains could result in more human overpopulation rather than more wild creatures and wild land.
There is no need for further justification as to why humanity’s outsized presence on the surface of the Earth is morally reprehensible. It is patently unfair to the millions of other species who have every much claim to their space on this planet as we – or a greater claim, if anything, considering that they were here first. Did we not all learn in kindergarten that it is proper to share?
A Better Anthropocentric Argument against Human Population Growth
If I were to mount an anthropocentric defence of overpopulation-as-a-problem, I wouldn’t go first to resource depletion. I would begin with the more obvious: human overpopulation is arguably the leading cause of the inability to get the eff away from other people. …or, as J.S. Mill rather more delicately stated, “It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal.”
In the webinar linked above, Trevor Hedberg states that population growth is not bad in itself. Here I must disagree. After a point, population growth is bad in itself, precisely because by definition it entails an increase in the number of people. Even if such a population were able to continue to meet its material needs and not inflict incurable damage upon the biosphere, too many people in too small a space deprives the individual of sufficient opportunity for quietude and aloneness. As Mill presciently noted, “A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment.”
Some might find it callous and out-of-touch that I focus on spiritual benefits of solitude at a time when 690 million people globally are malnourished and overpopulation-driven resource depletion threatens to worsen human suffering. But true to my philosophical tendencies, I happily entertain counterfactual scenarios as useful to ascertain the most basic reasons for a thing. In this case, we can ask, counterfactually, “Could population growth be problematic even if resource depletion were no issue?” And my answer, following Mill, is a resounding yes. This is a point too often missed in discussion of whether it’s possible to feed to the world or to fit everyone inside of the state of Texas.
Furthermore, although Nature is first and foremost intrinsically valuable, I am also a staunch believer that it should be a basic human right to be able to experience Nature as she exists independently from crowds, infrastructure, agriculture, noise pollution, light pollution, and other anthropogenic intrusions. Such a rich and deep relationship with our Mother Earth ought to be our birthright.
Again, Mill was prophetic: “… Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.”
I haven’t anything to add to something so perfectly stated, and so relevant after a century and three-quarters.
An Interlude: Changing the Topic
We mustn’t conflate the following two questions: (1) Is overpopulation bad? (2) Is it wrong to pressure people not to reproduce? We will now move from the planetary level to the individual level, from discussion of (1) to discussion in the vicinity of (2).
Whether one starts from the standpoint of ecocentrism, biocentrism, or anthropocentrism, it should be easy to see that there are too many people on Earth. The tricky part is not naming the problem but offering a solution, because all potential solutions raise moral concerns of their own. Telling people to drop dead is out of the question. But, to many people, it is also morally objectionable to tell people that they shouldn’t have children.
At its heart, overpopulation is an obvious problem with an obvious – and easy – solution: y’all just stop having kids. But few people want to say “y’all just stop having kids.” Heck, I might be one of these spineless individuals, considering that I instead choose to write it on an obscure webpage with no specific audience.
Most people want to avoid mandatory population controls. Let’s accept this premise, since I don’t have anything specific I want to say about coercion at the moment. So, then, how do we get people to choose voluntarily to stop reproducing? Is it enough to showcase the benefits of a childfree life? Answering this question seems to require some sympathetic understanding of why some people want children in the first place, which I lack (“The Author as Role Model?”). Is there a moral argument that can be used to dissuade would-be parents? On the surface, there seems to be, given our shared responsibility to alleviate the pressures of an overcrowded and excessively human-dominated world. But even here, ostensible tensions arise: we speak of respect for Nature, yet the biosphere as we know it is shaped but nothing if not creatures acting on their naturally-given drive to reproduce (“Population Ethics Should Be Philosophically Interesting, Right?”).
An underlying assumption of both the preferential and moral approaches, as so far described, is the focus on the wants of the would-be parent. But an alternative moral perspective puts the focus on what would be inflicted upon the would-be child. Indeed, especially given today’s planetary crises, I believe that a strong case can be made in favour of antinatalism.
The Author as Role Model?
I have written much more about material simplicity, downshifting, and car-free living than overpopulation. This is not because I believe that such individual lifestyle choices are more important; on the contrary, I acknowledge that the former will do utterly zilch to “save the planet” in the absence of a significant downsizing of the human population. The bias in my own writing is simply due to the fact that I feel like I actually have something to say about topics like material simplicity, downshifting, and car-free living – specifically, I can attest to the fact that they are liberating – whereas I never really know what to say or do about overpopulation.
On the surface, it might seem that there’s at least one obvious way in which I could positively contribute: I could speak more about my personal life as a happily childfree individual, just as I speak openly about my decisions to downshift and abandon automobile use. In Hedberg’s author-meets-critic session, both Hedberg and commentator Ramona Ilea (Pacific University Oregon) floated the idea of individual contributions to portraying childfree living as a socially acceptable and personally rewarding choice. Ilea asks, “Should everyone try to advertise the advantages of having smaller families?” and “Those of us that are childfree and happy, should we advertise the advantages of having extra time, extra money…?”
Well, it’s true that I’ve voluntarily chosen a childfree life and am exceedingly happy about this. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine life any other way. But there’s the rub: I can’t imagine life any other way. I can’t imagine desiring to have children. I can’t imagine feeling pressure to have children. I can’t so much as imagine entertaining the question of whether to have children. It has never even been a consideration.
Here is a disanalogy. For the past several years, I have had no interest in ever owning or even renting another personal automobile. However, I have owned cars in the past, and I know what it’s like to be enculturated into a society in which the motorist lifestyle is simply taken for granted. When I realised that I don’t actually need a car, it was revelatory and liberatory. In contrast, childlessness has always felt like not only an option but indeed the default option. I didn’t have to experience any revelatory breakthrough to realise that I don’t have to start a family. There was a time when I assumed that having a car was “just something everybody does,” but there was never a time when I assumed that having a child was just something everybody does.
To be sure, I can still vouch for numerous personal and practical benefits of childlessness. Here are some examples:
- It saves A LOT of money, making it easier to downshift, take mini-retirements, and otherwise devote less time to paid work and more time to passion work (or leisure, doing nothing, etc.).
- It provides A LOT more flexibility in both the structuring (or lack thereof) of everyday life and one’s overall life course. It even enables decisions like giving up stable housing and moving around from country to country on tourist visas (not that I am currently doing that or anything). Being childfree makes it generally easier to live without a schedule, plan, or long-term goals.
- It makes it A LOT easier to avoid interaction with, or the presence of, children in daily life.
The difficulty for me is that I am psychologically unable to simulate the mindset of wanting to raise a child. Many children are astonishingly noisy, especially considering their small size, and it is invariably awkward to be caught in conversation with a child, even in comparison to being caught in conversation with, say, an engineer or mathematician. I don’t even perceive human babies as especially cute, certainly not in comparison to baby plovers or the little 50mL bottles of scotch or even kittens and puppies. I venerate the process of evolution by natural selection – I think that respect for evolutionary processes needs to lie at the heart of an environmental ethic – and from this perspective I do understand the advantage of an animal’s possessing a drive to reproduce. But I myself am an evolutionary anomaly.
If I have seldom remarked upon the fact that I don’t have children, that’s because from my point of view it’s just a taken-for-granted background condition, like the fact that I’m not incarcerated or not comatose. My “decision” not to have children was no decision at all; it was merely an action (or an inaction) that flowed automatically from living in accordance with my own nature. When I’m reminded of it, I am happy to speak frankly about the material benefits of childless-ness. However, I can’t speak to how these benefits weigh against whatever it is that people seek when they form a desire to procreate or raise a child.
Population Ethics Should Be Philosophically Interesting, Right?
As someone trained as an analytic philosopher, I get excited about internal tensions and inconsistencies between positions that I find pretheoretically appealing, such as tensions between putative “natural rights” of humans (i.e. rights that humans might be said to enjoy merely in virtue of being Earthlings) and the rights of Nature herself. Usually when I say this, I have in mind something like the (prima facie) right to roam. But we can also think of the “right to procreate” in this context.
Humans, like all living organisms, have a prima facie right to reproduce. Indeed, on the surface, there’s little that could appear more like an evolution-given “right” than the right to procreate. After all, that’s kinda been the main driver of the evolution and diversification of life since the age of the last eukaryotic common ancestor.
Respecting the Process of Evolution?
In fact, there’s an even deeper layer here. Philosophically, I find myself compelled by the conjecture that what must ultimately ground an ecocentric ethic is respect for evolutionary processes (I won’t attempt to defend this conjecture here, but it is something that I intend to explore in future posts). But, of course, evolutionary processes have their basis in the drive to reproduce. Take away the desire to mate and produce offspring, and the evolution of life on Earth comes to nothing.
But what would it really mean to respect evolutionary processes? Intuitively, of course, my mind goes to the preservation of large and connected areas of unmanaged land and water, large and genetically diverse populations of wild fauna and flora, and other building blocks of evolution as it unfolds outside of us (see also the Foreman quote in the next section). But this is to ignore the fact that Homo sapiens is itself both a product of and participant in the process of evolution by natural selection. One might thereby argue that, in fact, a genuine respect for evolutionary processes would entail that Homo sapiens ought to wantonly and recklessly reproduce until we hit carrying capacity, since that’s what any species would naturally do, and that’s what drives evolution. On this view, human overpopulation might be considered a natural disturbance that will ultimately create room for novel evolutionary experiments after we crash and burn, according to Nature’s laws.
True to my nature as more-philosopher-than-activist, I actually find the latter to be a very intriguing position – viscerally appalling, sure, but intellectually intriguing. It would be an interesting exercise to attempt to defend the view and see exactly where it breaks down – if, in fact, it does. I certainly loathe the idea of living on a planet filled to the brim with individuals so heartless and disenchanted that they could accept such an ethical position (it sounds almost as bad as living on Earth in the here and now), but my personal loathing doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not the conclusion that should follow from my own premises.
Towards Antinatalism
If there’s one thing that does make the putative “right to procreate” philosophically uninteresting, it’s this: even the staunchest ecocentrist won’t deny that we do have moral obligations to individual human beings. Human procreation invariably entails the creation of a human, a moral subject. It is wrong, presumably, to intentionally bring human life in existence when one knows that one is unable adequately to provide for that human’s needs. And it is not hard to argue that, given the level of ecological degradation in today’s world, it is beyond the ability of any would-be parent to meet the needs of any would-be child. For one, the human needs of which J.S. Mill so presciently wrote – the potential for “solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur” and so forth – simply cannot be guaranteed in a world already so degraded and more and more pressed to satisfy even the basic subsistence needs of an outsized human population.
Some people might not mind living in a crowded “planet of the humans,” devoid of any vestiges of self-willed Nature, and devoid of any animals except ourselves, domesticated species, and perhaps a few enduring friends like cockroaches and bedbugs. But some people would find it fate worse than death. Or worse, say, than extinction. Or worse than never being born. The problem is that we can’t interview would-be children prior to their birth to determine their own preferences. The non-existent cannot give their informed consent to being brought into being, and what right have would-be parents to assume it?
So, then, it would seem that the philosophically boring conclusion is just plain ol’ antinatalism, reviving the classic philosophical work of David Benatar with an injection of ecological reality. According to Benatar, non-existence entails neither pleasure nor pain (duh), and so it’s not bad at all. In contrast, hell, hell is for children, and you know that their little lives can become such a mess… Oh, wait, that’s the wrong Benatar. But the Cape Town philosopher also points out that only existent children (and adults) can suffer pain. (David) Benatar argues, roughly, that because the presence of pain is always bad, but the mere absence of pleasure is not bad in itself (e.g. if someone doesn’t exist to feel it), then on balance it’s always better not to have been born. … or better not to cause someone to come into being.
To add poignancy to Benatar’s abstruse philosophising, I offer this remark from a four-year-old child: “Mom, I don’t want to be alive anymore. … The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when everything’s dead” (cited in Mary DeMocker, “So Your Kids Are Stressed Out About the Climate Crisis,” which is not an argument for antinatalism, even though that would be a more obvious conclusion and IMHO a more compassionate one).
Everyone accepts that our individual freedoms can be curtailed when they infringe on the rights of other humans, and procreation by definition brings another person into existence – into a world of suffering, degradation, overcrowding, and extinction – and moreover it always does so without that person’s consent. So, philosophically speaking, I think that there’s ultimately a clear, straightforward, uncomplicated conclusion: it’s wrong to procreate. (Easily said, easily done. IMHO. Mileage may vary in real-world conditions.)
Rights of Future Generations? Or Rights to Future Speciation?
Whelp, it should come as no surprise that I have no interest in moral positions based on some notion about what is owed to future human generations.
Concern for the welfare of future human generations might be good salesmanship to those who’ve already made the decision to reproduce. However, it is simply not adequate as a moral basis for the duty to protect the integrity and autonomy of wild nature.
The Last Man, Revisited
The above point is nothing new. Richard Sylvan made the same point in his well-known Last Man on Earth thought experiment: intuitively, a person is not morally entitled to recklessly destroy plants, animals, and the rest of nature even if that person is the last person on Earth; ergo, our morality must rest on something more than obligations to future humans. Obligations to other humans are insufficient to ground an environmental ethic.
Voluntary childlessness doesn’t add anything new philosophically. It simply transfigures Sylvan’s thought experiment into a form that is not only some philosopher’s thought experiment but eminently relatable. It is not a necessary fact about the world that there will be future human generations. Future generations don’t merely spring into existence. Babies don’t spontaneously manifest out of thin air. The existence of future generations is a choice. It is voluntary. A human body will never produce offspring unless action is taken to enable it.
To be sure, society can do much more to guarantee that reproduction is a choice. We must oppose the egregious recent decision of the US Supreme Court to deprive women of their right to an abortion. We need better sex ed and access to contraception. We need to combat rape. We need to destigmatize childlessness. In order to take action against them, we need to admit the inadequacies of present societies in permitting reproductive choice – but acknowledging this contingent (and, I hope, changeable) reality doesn’t alter the fact that the existence of future human generations is not a nomological necessity. It is fully consistent with the laws of nature that humans could just stop breeding en masse, rendering it nonsensical to speak of what we owe to our children and grandchildren.
Voluntary childlessness also highlights another glaring inadequacy with “future generations” rhetoric, and that is to reiterate the antinatalist position of the last section: if you are worried about the welfare of future humans, then don’t bring them into existence. If the welfare of future generations is the matter of concern, there is an option that’s easier and guaranteed more effective than any proposed conservation measure or techno-fix: don’t cause those future humans to come into being.
Rights of Future Speciation?
So, then, what should be our goal as conservationists if not the survival and well-being of future human generations? Well, this is a question that I’m sure to explore again and again. But here is an appealing first-pass.
I recently relistened to the Rewilding Earth Podcast Episode 1 with Dave Foreman, and (unsurprisingly) Foreman offered a perspective on this question with which I wholeheartedly agree: “I don’t know if Homo sapiens is going to exist in a hundred years the way we’re doing. But what my goal really is, is to have all the building blocks of evolution — which are native species, natural processes, large chunks of land and oceans and lakes and rivers that are off limits to industrial civilization — for whatever comes next, and that’s the greatest legacy we can leave.”
To which I reply, as the kids might say on their social medias, “This.”
These days, it seems, I only find conservation, restoration, or rewilding inspiring from exactly this mindset: we should strive to do as much as we can – however little that might be – to leave the Earth best poised for her productive and creative processes to continue without us, whatever new species may come.
Any voluntary reduction in population and/or consumption will leave more space to make space for the rest of the species with whom we share this planet. At the end of the day, however, I firmly believe that the only rational and informed option is to relinquish hope that human societies will constrict themselves enough to persist in equilibrium with a flourishing and ever-evolving wild world. The only truly optimistic approach, in my view, is to trust that human extinction eventually will occur – after all, nothing could be more contrary to Nature than for one species to persist forever – and that once finally relieved of this pressure, wild Nature will eventually recover, even if it takes tens of millions of years.
Non-philosophical types will have already immediately dismissed antinatalism and all other moral arguments for extreme population reduction as “unrealistic.” I do not disagree with the charge of unrealism. My disagreement with these folks hinges over whether it is a worthwhile use of time to engage intellectually with unrealistic ideals. I think that it is. It is fun. It is, perhaps, an addiction. I believe that, in a way, it is also a means of coping. In my opinion, it’s insistence on always being practical and down-to-earth that’s a damn boring waste of a life. But I nonetheless do believe that beneath all philosophical flights of fancy, it’s important to retain a sense of what is and is not “realistic.” And what’s realistic is, indeed, that already egregious human overpopulation will continue and worsen.
False hope is not optimism. Optimism is coming to terms with the likely course of reality and yet still looking for a silver lining, viz., in this case, the renewed evolution of life post-humanity.
There are still many lingering philosophical – and scientific – questions and concerns with Foreman’s appealing construction of our moral duty to rewild Earth. They fascinate me. For now, however, I’ll just mention what is perhaps the largest overarching worry: is there anything that we few ecocentrically-minded humans can actually contribute to leave the Earth in a better position for recovery after the demise of our species?
Ex hypothesi, none of these contributions will do enough to ward off a large sweeping global extinction event. Why expect, then, that they will do enough to accomplish anything that won’t be a wash in the fullness of geological time? Nature will recover as she will, slowly, on her own terms and in her own time. Dams will collapse on their own. Roads and buildings will crumble to dust. New life will evolve to fill niches left unoccupied by extinction. Perhaps new life will even evolve to metabolise plastic litter and forever chemicals. Could it be anthropocentric arrogance in disguise to suppose that we can bequeath to Nature, in our dying moments, anything that can help the future course of evolution? However we purport to “save the building blocks of evolution,” are we really doing any more than self-care in the face of overwhelming feelings of inefficacy and ecological grief? I would like to think so, and I will continue to explore this alluring moral basis for conservation, but these are concerns that mustn’t be ignored.
…but, that said, there is also nothing wrong with self-care in the face of overwhelming feelings of inefficacy and ecological grief.
Palliative Care
That brings me to one final thought (for now): there is more than one way not to be a complete and utter misanthrope. In the eyes of most people, people who need people, it is inherently misanthropic even to suggest that humans are bound for extinction and that there’s a silver lining in this fact (despite the fact that the very use of phrase ‘silver lining’ ought to make plain that people like myself don’t wish for imminent human extinction but instead consider it generally bad).
IMHO there are other ways to manifest love and care for other humans than to hold out on a false hope that the species will limit its overshoot and live in harmony with the rest of Earth, and there are certainly better ways than to wish upon humanity that fate worse than extinction, that fate of which Mill warned in 1848: a world “from which solitude is extirpated,” a world “with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature.”
In my view, things have already gone far enough down the commode that it’s not unreasonable to change our mindset from life-extension to palliative care: once we admit that things are going to hell and getting worse, what can we do to help others who are coming to terms with this same predicament? What can we do to help others who must endure the destruction of the wild places and wild creatures that they love, powerless to stop the losses? What can we do to help others who find themselves stranded and lost in a world too crowded, too loud, too fast, too mechanised, too sterile, too tame? (Incidentally, here is a moral quandary I sometimes feel when attempting to inspire others to love Nature: it is, in fact, morally wrong to inspire a person to love Nature, knowing that this love is highly likely to lead to a type of grief that this person would otherwise avoid?)
I raise these questions not to answer them – not here, not now – but to suggest another take on the question of “What should we do about overpopulation?” Overpopulation is here, and worsening, and extremely tough to watch if you’re a human who loves and cares for the more-than-human world. Whatever else we may do to alleviate the strain on the more-than-human world, the mental health of environmental advocates may itself be a concern not worth dismissing out of hand.
Kate M., July 2022