WANT TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT? HAVE A BABY!
IN PRAISE OF HUMAN INGENUITY By Anne Morse
- Breakpoint WordView, September 2005. © 2005 Prison Fellowship

It was the thirty-fifth annual Earth Day last spring, and environmental activists were out in full force, telling anyone who would listen how badly babies are fouling the planet.

On the website of the National Wildlife Federation, next to a photo of a half-dozen adorable infants, reporter Don Hinrichsen referred to babies as diaper-clad "consumption machines," and announced that too many babies are "taking a heavy toll on our planet's life support systems."

The Sierra Club cut newborns a little slack: It merely held them responsible for species extinction, deforestation, climate change, and "the destruction of natural ecosystems." For its part, the Audubon Society blamed babies for exacerbating "many environmental problems, including air and water pollution, loss of birds, other wildlife and their habitat, fisheries depletion, and climate change."

BLAME THE BABIES?

This blame-the-babies syndrome is, of course, nothing new. A few years ago Big Green came up with a publicity stunt that involved picking out a newborn, labeling him "Baby Six Billion," and groaning about how much he was going to mess things up.

"Six billion and counting, as a baby boy born in Sarajevo symbolizes a major milestone in the global population," trumpeted CNN & Company host Donna Kelley on October 12, 1999. "Welcome to a world some warn is busting at the seams, from jammed morning commutes to smoggy cities and shortages of food and water. What do we say as the population passes six billion?"

What we say, if we're environmental Chicken Littles, is that something has to be done about all those (mostly dark-skinned) people who insist on having children despite the best advice of their (mostly white-skinned) betters in Hollywood, at think tanks, on college campuses, and at the United Nations.

Big Green's solution to all this indiscriminate breeding? Birth control. (This is the Left's solution to every world problem. Given their way, they'd stretch giant condoms over Africa and Asia. Forget about terrorist strongholds; it's those dangerous babies we have to go after!)

Most radical environmentalists will admit to favoring only voluntary birth control measures, sterilization and abortion being particular favorites. As Audubon's website puts it, we must continue "helping families" stop breeding environmental destruction by funding international population control groups. The fact that many of these groups have a grim record of coercion sustainable goes unmentioned.

Other environmentalists are more candid about their anti-natal agendas. In For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy towards Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, environmental guru Herman Daly lists the catastrophes that too many babies are causing - deforestation, global arming, and the supposed ozone "hole" to name a few. The problems are now so critical we can no longer rely on couples to make sensible decisions about childbearing, he writes; couples shouldn't be allowed to reproduce unless they first acquire a special childbearing license from the government. Those who give birth to unlicensed babies should be punished as an example to other would be fertility scofflaws.

To people like Daly, writes population expert Steven Mosher in his forthcoming book, The War on People, "The world is not a horn of plenty, but an overcrowded human ark, foundering in a polluted sea of its own wastes-and it is past time to begin throwing people overboard to lighten the ship." Mosher warns, Reducing the number of people does not solve environmental problems, but the attempt to do so invariably leads to such atrocities as the sterilization of large numbers of women, which are visited upon the poor [and] the marginalized - those least able to defend themselves - with especial viciousness."

Mosher is right, as millions of Chinese women will affirm - women who were forced to have abortions, to be sterilized, or both.

What most environmentalists seem not to understand is that there is no correlation - none - between population density and environmental degradation. A country may have a large population and enjoy a pretty good environmental record (think Japan) or poor record (think China). A country with a small population (Sweden) might have a great record, while other small countries (Haiti) have awful records.

TOMORROW'S PROBLEM SOLVER

So why do environmental groups insist on blaming babies for most of the world's ills? The answer is that radical environmentalists view babies in a shortsighted and deeply inhumane fashion. To them, human infants are parasitic drains on the Mother Ship's limited resources. What they don't seem to grasp is that infants represent tremendous intellectual capital.

Human ingenuity has led to enormous strides in tidying up the planet, as the Pacific Research Institute's Steven Hayward has thoroughly documented. When babies stop drooling and start thinking, they grow up to invent things like hybrid cars and more efficient ways to clean air and water. As philosopher Michael Novak notes, one hundred years ago, environmentalists worried about the health hazards posed by the horse manure dropped by the stinking ton-load on urban streets. They needn't have worried: A former baby named Henry, born during the Civil War, was about to solve that problem with the invention of the first mass-produced, affordable automobile - which, as Novak writes, "removed the excrement of 3.4 million horses from urban streets."

Today's bellowing baby is tomorrow's environmental problem solver.

So what's really behind most of the planet's muck? Unbridled pollution is tightly bound up, not with babies, but with poverty. As Mosher notes, "It is poverty that leads a destitute people to cut down all the trees for fuel. It is poverty that makes it difficult for them to dispose of their waste, often polluting the only source of drinking water. It is poverty, not people, that degrades the environment. . . Wealth is the solution to our problem."

Hayward agrees, noting, in National Review Online, that technological progress (along with America's growing economy) "is what drives environmental improvement, and as the rest of the world grows richer in the 21st century . . . the world's environmental problems will begin to improve rapidly." We are fixing environmental problems caused, not only by humans, but also by
animals and acts of God.

Ironically, aggressive population control programs may actually exacerbate pollution. As Stephen Mosher notes, the population in many developing countries is projected to decline in the next few years. "We now know that many developing nations will become old before they become rich, if they ever become rich at all, thanks in part to the family planners at the United Nations Population Fund," Mosher writes. And with neither youthful human capital nor wealth, these countries are doomed to permanent squalor.

HERE'S TO LIFE

So go ahead: Have your own little "consumption machine"- or two, or three, or six. Children are an heritage from the Lord, as the Psalmist reminds us, and blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them (Psalm 127). Moreover, as economist Jennifer Roback Morse notes, big families were the original recyclers: They bought a crib, high chair, stroller, and Jonny jump-up for the first baby - and then recycled them through the next five kids.

When Earth Day rolls around next year, and environmental groups once again accuse babies of
destroying the planet with their little dimpled hands, set your neighbors straight. Help them understand why babies are not parasites, but cute little packages of potential. Better still, start your own Earth Day tradition: Have a baby-and save the planet.

Anne Morse, senior writer for BreakPoint, recently cowrote the How Now Shall We Live? Devotional with Chuck Colson. She frequently writes for National Review Online, Touchstone, Crisis, and other journals. Her review of Christina Hoff Sommers's book, The War Against Boys, won a first-place Evangelical Press Association award in 2000.