Not having children to save the planet is tragic
It won't be climate change that could end our civilisation, but demographic decline.
It will soon be 20 years since I started dedicating my working life to environmentalism. In a way, I have always approached environmentalism from a conservative perspective. I want to preserve as much as possible of what I love and appreciate about our European culture(s). For all its faults, I like the Western civilisation in which we live (even if much of it is in decline for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment). That is why I have never been particularly fond of proposals to change everything to tackle climate change, as Naomi Klein suggested years ago.
The Earth's systems are complex systems that we will never fully understand. That is the nature of complex systems. Change always has unintended consequences, something that progressives don't sufficiently understand. The faster we change our natural environment and our social structures, and the more we move into uncharted territory with these changes, the more trade-offs we can expect. It is very difficult to know whether the net effects of our policies will ultimately be positive, especially when we are making many changes to our system at the same time. Trying to rationally design and construct a utopian society has historically often led to dystopia, whereas, as the economist Thomas Sowell argues, throughout human history people have learned to do the right thing without understanding why it was the right thing to do, and they are still better served by habit than by understanding.
I believe – and I haven't changed my mind about this in the last 20 years – that the globalised economic machine we have created is damaging the ecological foundations on which life on earth depends on many different fronts, and that the more we do this, the more we are endangering our own future existence as humans on planet earth.
I still believe that it is a good thing to use the earth's resources more wisely, to use energy more efficiently and to develop technologies that help us live in harmony with nature, and at the same time I still believe that there is no technical fix to saving the environment. Hyperconsumerism is not compatible with sustainability. The aim should be to stop wasting food and clothes (fast fashion), give up our addiction to mass tourism and reduce our dependence on electronic gadgets and digital screens, etc.
But I'm not a climate catastrophist. I see the risk that a warming planet poses to our civilisation, but I do not believe that climate science makes precise and irrefutable predictions, nor do I know how likely it is that, say, more than 2 degrees of global warming will lead to civilisational collapse, or, as some environmentalists - including Jem Bendell - argue, that societal collapse due to climate change is already happening.
However, the obsession with (and narrow focus on) climate change and the hysteria surrounding it can have many unintended consequences. Ultimately, it's not just about climate change, it's about the health of entire ecosystems and human flourishing as part of the equation.
If we don't find a way to deal with our environmental challenges that has human flourishing at its core, then I think we're missing the point.
Which brings me to what I think is the darkest and most absurd way of dealing with our environmental challenges: the idea that the best way to deal with climate change is not to have children. In 2021, in a global survey of 10,000 young people, 39 per cent of respondents were reluctant to have children because of climate change. Apparently some young women are even deciding to sterilise themselves out of fear of climate change.
The idea that overpopulation on our planet is a key driver of climate change and a problem that needs to be tackled is still an undisputed fact in the environmentalist circles that I was part of for many years. And, of course, the world's population has grown rapidly in recent decades and continues to do so. So those who believe that overpopulation needs to be tackled have had all the signals they need to confirm their dogma.
This is despite the fact that the signals pointing in the opposite direction, namely towards a global population collapse, began many years ago and have recently become impossible to ignore. In many countries, fertility rates have been below replacement levels for many years. In Europe and North America, the average woman now has 1.5 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. In Spain the fertility rate is 1.19, in South Korea 0.72. The trend is downwards, even in countries such as Sweden (1.50) and France (1.68), which have always been considered exemplary child-friendly due to their generous welfare state.
While in Europe most countries still have a stable or even growing population due to high levels of immigration, China already lost around 2 million of its population in 2023 due to its low fertility rate and could shrink by 109 million by 2050 according to UN projections. The only continent that is expected to grow demographically over the next few decades without the need for immigration is Africa.
Although life expectancy continues to rise, the world's population is now expected to peak around 2080, much earlier than previously thought. However, even these projections may have to be revised downwards if current trends in fertility rates in developed countries continue.
This may seem like good news to many environmentalists. They may even argue that their efforts to reduce the world's population may eventually pay off. In fact, a deeply anti-humanist strain of environmentalism wouldn't mind if humans became extinct altogether.
But what's the point of caring for the environment if you don't want to preserve it for generations to come? Those who would rather see the human race extinct obviously don't care about such considerations. But while this is the extreme end of anti-humanist environmentalism, it has influenced the way many in the green movement think and the vision they promote. These people are not motivated by their love of humanity, and even less by their love of our culture.
A closer look at these developments suggests that there is little to cheer for those of us who are motivated by humanism and those of us who care that our culture does not die out.
Mass immigration: a quick fix with huge unintended consequences
To begin with, our political leaders are not yet prepared to sell us the idea of managing demographic decline. Instead, they are selling us the idea that we should become more open and diverse societies, and that our own lack of children can be compensated for by a large influx of immigrants. This has been the consensus across the political spectrum in the West for many years. On the right, the argument was that immigrants were needed to keep the growth economy afloat and to pay for the pensions of an ageing society; on the left, immigration was welcome to promote the idea of an open, diverse and tolerant society. Those who expressed concerns were, and still are, often branded as right-wing extremists and excluded from polite discourse.
In particular, over the past 30 years, migration from Latin America, Asia and Africa to North America and Western Europe has accelerated to unprecedented levels. Some 29 per cent of the German population are now immigrants or second-generation immigrants, a figure that has roughly doubled since 1990. In Spain, the number of first and second generation immigrants has risen from around 1.5 million to 9.5 million in the last 28 years, and now accounts for around 20 per cent of the Spanish population. Most Western countries have experienced similar waves of mass immigration over the last 30 years, a large share of it from non-European ethnic as well as muslim religious backgrounds.
It is precisely because Western birth rates are very low that immigration is changing our societies very rapidly. Most people are not hostile to immigrants, or even to lower levels of immigration, but many ordinary people perceive current levels of unregulated mass immigration as a threat to their collective identity and culture. As the political scientist Matt Goodwin has consistently argued, widespread dissatisfaction with current levels of unregulated immigration is the main reason for the continuing rise of right-wing populism across the West.
I am not against immigration or immigrants, nor am I an ethno-nationalist or anything like that. I am an immigrant myself (to Spain) and have lived my life in between different cultures and have enjoyed it.
But regardless of one's background and personal preferences, anyone with a critical mind and an honest assessment of what has happened to European cities in recent years should realise that rapid mass immigration has too many downsides to be a solution to our demographic problems. In fact, it has already led to a huge breakdown of social trust in Western societies, an increase in crime and a deterioration of the public sphere.
The idea, promoted by multicultural ideology, that enforcing the law would be enough to hold our societies together has proved fatally wrong. Even relatively low levels of immigration always carry the risk of ghettoisation and lack of social integration, but current levels of mass immigration have become unmanageable even for rich countries like Germany or Sweden. Without cultural assimilation, without shared norms and values, these societies cannot function properly and will eventually fall apart.
If current levels of immigration continue in the coming years in Western European countries, it is fairly safe to predict that in 20 or 30 years' time these societies will not look very much like they did in, say, 1990. Of course, societies always change, but this likely change under what might be called a business as usual scenario is completely unprecedented. Western culture, based on a Christian heritage, will find it difficult to maintain its influence if the proportion of the population that does not assimilate - as is the case with a large proportion of Arab/Muslim immigrants in countries such as Germany, the UK and Sweden - continues to grow.
Without going into the many consequences this could have and the many potentially serious and violent conflicts it is likely to entail, it is enough to focus on the breakdown of social trust that is already taking place. Social trust is one of the most precious features of Western culture. Our entire political and economic system is based on the fact that our cultural evolution has given us high levels of trust between strangers. The West cannot survive without trust.
With all its many drawbacks and potentially fatal consequences for Western culture, mass immigration can only be a short-term fix. After all, fertility rates are falling around the world, and as the share of the world's working-age population that is skilled shrinks, so too will the ability of Western countries to continue importing workers to compensate for their declining populations.
Consider what a fertility rate of 1.19, as is currently the case in Spain, actually means. It means that in one generation's lifetime the Spanish population (without migration) would be almost halved from around 47 million today to around 26 million.
The case for having more babies
I have no children myself. So who am I to argue that we should have more children? I'm happy to accept the criticism that I'm speaking from the ivory tower without doing the hard work of raising children. But then the ivory tower sometimes makes useful contributions to the discourse, as I hope is the case here.
In any case, I am not, as I now believe, an example to follow. I am a child of our modern Western culture, which has thrown away tradition and put individualism and freedom before commitment and parenthood.
The writer and feminist Louise Perry puts it succinctly: “At the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernisation, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernisation and so have even fewer.“
The irony of this story is that the Western culture that has given us so many of the good things that we value and don't want to give up, including equality before the law, due process, protection of personal liberties, legal equality of the sexes, gay and lesbian rights and religious pluralism, also contains within it the mechanism for its own extinction.
Louise Perry continues: “I may have my reservations about progressivism as a quasi-religion, but that does not mean that I welcome the prospect of sliding back towards the poverty, parochialism and authoritarianism that characterised most of our species’ history — which is exactly what will happen, if we cannot find some way of marrying modernity with a culture that promotes and supports parenthood.”
It is often argued that digitalisation, automation and artificial intelligence will lead to huge productivity gains in our economies, which will pay for the pensions of an ageing population. However, despite ongoing digitalisation, productivity growth in OECD countries has fallen sharply in recent decades. If the past is any guide, the demographic collapse is more likely to lead to high inflation, labour shortages and dramatically falling living standards.
Population collapse is like a time bomb going off in front of our eyes, and we're not even discussing it in our public discourse. It is a threat to our civilisation, and as societies we should be putting our energies into finding ways to reverse the trend.
I don’t think, however, that for ordinary people the threat of economic decline will be an effective motivator for having more children.
Perhaps we, as ordinary people, need to start telling ourselves a different story about what it takes to live a good life. It must include the advice that we should stop putting individual freedom above all other values. Of course, having children dramatically reduces individual freedom over a number of years, especially for young mothers. But that's not to say that having children has no benefits. Children bring a great deal of personal fulfilment and joy, meaning and purpose to life, as well as emotional support and companionship in later life.
But human beings are not just selfish creatures, we are also capable of doing things for the common good. The philosopher Edmund Burke famously said that "society is a partnership not only between the living, but between the living, the dead and those yet to be born".
In the words of Mary Harrington, “we’re only here because our ancestors had kids and passed on both their genetic and cultural legacy. Those shared aspects of our culture and everyday life will only continue to exist, if we do the same. To the extent that a community views itself as a community - a people, if you like - and values that web of connection both in the present and across time, they will feel a common obligation to ensure its continuity. That means having children.”
As Mary also points out, the more we lose our sense of cultural community, the less we will feel a sense of duty or obligation towards it. My hope, however, is that even if Mary is right that "citizenship is now treated more like a gym membership: you show up, you pay your taxes, and you're in", we can still identify with a cultural community to which we feel a shared obligation to ensure its continuity.
This brings me back to the question of caring for the environment. Having children in the sense of Burke's societal partnership can unleash our motivation to make sacrifices because we feel that we owe something to the generations that come after us and want to pass on a beautiful and healthy environment to them.
Fertility rates are dropping. We have microplastics in every newborn's umbilical cord. Are you sure this is not nature taking it's course?
I personally look forward to a depopulation bomb. Finally the shift of power from employer to employee will change. Nothing has sucked more than coming behind the boomers. They ruined work for everyone. They were the only ones to have decent wages with decent hours. It's been downhill from there. Yet my own idiot father thinks everyone should all be working harder than him for less. What a brainwashed fool.
Nature is very good at recovering from humans once they are gone. Nature explodes when humans leave. The wolves of Chernobyl are now cancer resistant. Nature is not stupid, we are. We don't know when to quit and be happy with enough. We always have to take too much.
I do not under estimate the level of violence. I know way touch about violence. You are the one who does not. Babies will not help it. Babies make women more vulnerable and prone to violence. You don't actually have children so how would you ever know.