Among the many things we get from England, cautionary examples may be their most useful export:
COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.
Of course he has. What’s the line from Scrooge - better they should die, and decrease the surplus population? I’m surprised that’s not an applause line these days. If Scrooge had forbid Crachet from putting on more coal because it would contribute to global warming, he’d be the hero, and Crachet would have got the three spirits.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.
It hasn’t taken long, but it’s taken hold: children, to some, are not bundles of joys, but bundles of sticks whose inevitable combustion harms the planet. It doesn’t matter whether reducing the population might deprive the world of another Mozart or a scientist who can cure cancer; the latter would just mean people living longer and going more harm, and it’s an act of pure cultural arrogance and classism to suggest we need another Mozart anyway. (Plus, non-political culture we cannot afford in these desperate times. It’s not that it makes people think the wrong things; it just takes up time that could be spent thinking about the right things.)
“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table.”
I think there might be other ghosts jostling to be heard. Smaller ones.
The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland - an area the size of Trafalgar Square.
I have to admit my ignorance here; I don’t know if the old-growth oak is super-extra concentrated potential carbon. Seems likely, since old-growth means the trees would be bigger - but the choice of examples also suggests that something venerable is be destroyed, wantonly, for the sake of something as commonplace as a baby.
There are 51.7 million acres in Great Britain, incidentally.
“Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: ‘You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial,” he said.
It is heartening to think that encouraging the government to tell parents to abort #3 for the sake the environment is still too controversial.
Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.
You thought I was exaggerating by saying that curing disease only prolongs the problem, eh? I’d like to know which diseases he prefers to underfund so the state can shower the land with more condoms. I can’t imagine price is what keeps people from using a French letter, after all. It’s the lack of education, perhaps where does this go? Or the fact that scientists have not yet invented spring-loaded knickers that shoot out condoms the moment you tug on the elastic.
He said: “We still have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe and we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth, often among women who are not convinced they want to become mothers.”
So the role of the state should be to convince ambivalent mothers to abort, then. Possibly by showing them cartoons of polar bears marooned on ice floes and letting them draw the obvious conclusion. But why are two kids okay? Perhaps because the fellow speaking has two of his own, and couldn’t bear to think of choosing which one he’d have culled for Gaia’s sake. Well, I say the limit should be one, and that this fellow is to be roundly pilloried for the metaphorical Forest of Trafalgar Square his excess kin will immolate. He might argue that two are necessary to keep the population going and the economy intact, but of course population and the economy are the twin engines of our destruction, and people seem mulishly unwilling to part with either. If you’re really concerned - if you are a good person - then your heart cannot help but sink when you hear the phrase “There’ll always be an England.” That’s the problem.
Not to say there won’t always be an England - the physical place, which no doubt is called something else by native fauna in a language made of barks and spoor-scattering - will always be there, if we act now. There’s only one kind of sea-level rise that’s acceptable, and that’s because everyone jumped en masse into the water to drown themselves.
Imagine an England where the Hundred Acre Wood is unspoiled by Christopher Robin!
Then burns down entirely one day because there’s no one around to put out the fire.
People do come in handy now and then. It’s good to have spares.
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