To breed or not to breed

Attenborough is probably right about population growth. But, as so often, we'll deal with it later
Zoe Williams, The Guardian 15 Apr 09;

David Attenborough has assumed his position as a patron of the Optimum Population Trust with some strict remarks about population growth. "There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes only a mere 56 years ago," he said. "It is frightening. We can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production."

Like so many areas of green debate, this is an interesting question whose terms and parameters depend on the context in which it is discussed. In a conversation about the environment, it is taken as a self-evident truth that population has to slow.

James Lovelock has been saying it for years. Jonathon Porritt made a brilliant case for family planning as a key weapon against global warming earlier this year, and the main dissenters were people who accused him of being a communist.

And yet, all debate about population policy outside an environmental context centres on very traditional concerns about what happens when the birthrate is low: dependency ratios scupper the welfare system; pensions have crises; longevity can't be paid for. When the UN publishes on the subject, it is with a worried eye on Italy and Japan, with their very low population growth and looming welfare disasters. When the EU published projections for 2050, in September last year, it was predicting rather sunnily that the UK would be in a good position thanks to its high immigration. This breezy notion brooked no caveat that the climate might have changed greatly by 2050, and we will possibly not be offering even the lukewarm welcome to migrants in the UK that we do today.

The government hasn't so far revised its most recent statement, in July 2006, when Tony Blair told a Commons liaison committee that the government had no policy on population. This isn't to say thinktanks aren't working on it - but again, priorities are traditional: how do we keep up replacement levels of fertility? It is never asked, at a policy level, how we should keep population down.

So the mainstream - thoughtful people, researchers, philosophers, academics, not just politicians - seems to be holding two warring views at once. In a conversation or policy document about long-term welfare and immigration, we absolutely have to breed more; in a conversation about climate change and diminishing resources, we absolutely have to stop breeding.

We sustain these points of view with a plucky, Orphan Annie, totally strange reliance on the wisdom of the future: right now, we can continue to worry about breeding in the traditional way. And at some unspecified time in the future, priorities will change in a clear, pressing, yet manageable fashion. And that generation will have time to reverse the juggernaut that is population growth and send it off in the "right direction".

The upshot of this cognitive dissonance is that we can all understand the issues at stake perfectly well - none of it is terrifically complicated - but we cannot apply them on a personal level. To think pragmatically about any of this would mean we'd have to desist from fannying about and decide between Stop and Go.

The smart money, along with Attenborough, is almost certainly on Stop. Stop the population growth, and worry about the welfare crisis like we worry about every other financial crisis, ie when it's too late to do anything about it. But, like a lovely new lawn, it's a long-way from growing in, this green orthodoxy. At the moment, when people claim to be limiting their families to two for environmental reasons, I just think: "Yeah, you and me both, chum. Environmental reasons like: 'I only have two hands. And I want to watch telly.'"