Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
It isn’t a problem. There are already too many people on the Earth.
There are enough resources, they’re just not distributed correctly.
And they never will be, which is why there is too many people.
Nonsense. Sure, we are getting what we need out of the planet, but we are destroying it in the process. Modern agriculture absolutely cannot continue producing what it is now indefinitely. Fertilizer alone is massive issue, never mind the destruction of old growth forest for farmland, or the contributions to climate change.
Nonsense.
Close to one third of total agricultural production is wasted yearly, with almost half of that never even leaving the fields.
Fertilizers are another scarecrow but there is a never ending source of nitrogen and phosphor right at hand going to waste in many countries with no second thought: waste water treatment muds.
And there are more fields laying fallow today than there were 50 years ago in many countries.
More forest is cut down to be replaced by palm tree for oil than for conventional agriculture and the clearing for cattle is just bad manegement of lands.
Reducing our agricultural output by 1/3 wouldn’t come close to making it sustainable, though it would certainly be an improvement. Fertilizer costs have been a big problem worldwide, so if using waste products were practical we would be doing it already. Shifting weather patterns from climate change are why a lot of those fields are fallow, and that’s only going to get worse.
Countries that use less than average resources are working far harder to use more resources than rich countries are working to use less, and I don’t see a plan to make that change. As individual choices go, no choice a person can make will reduce their impact more than having one less child than they otherwise would. We just don’t need 10 billion people on this planet.
Adoption of new alternatives is not easy nor fast.
Try and give a call to your local waste water treatment plant and ask for a tour. Tell them you want to understand better what they are doing and how, what destination they give to muds, etc. You’ll be surprised to know most countries sent those nutrient rich by-products to landfills for decades and only very recently the muds started to be valued.
And are you sure about that? Because I’d quicker point to population exodus from rural to city areas.
The discussion about cutting back on agricultural production is just starting. Too much goes to waste, when too many go without. The point is that by reducing production, resource management will be a forced point of action. Debateable but it is as valid as any other idea.
But like it or not, the human population will peak and stabilize at the 10 billion and we can sustain ourselves without burning the house down.
Name one society that has ever managed significant decreases in production of anything to help the environment. We’ve found ways to lower the impact of increasing production, and we’ve even found ways to reduce the impact of current production. I can’t think of a single instance of a society broadly adopting a reduction of goods and services for the environment.
The fact is that, while there are many improvements to be made, every one of those improvements would work better with a lower population. There are also no realistic projections of humanity reaching a reasonable level of long term sustainability. We also have a long history of badly failing to reach projected sustainability targets. Ignoring a multiplicative factor that impacts sustainability in every area is just foolish.
Yeah, we are projected to peak around 10b. 9b would be better though, or even 9.9b. 1b would have been fantastic, though probably still too high. But what happens when you get all the lifestyle and efficiency increases you dream of? How do you know that population trends won’t shift? It doesn’t take much. Just a +/-0.2 difference in children per family can have a profound impact in one direction or the other. You are gambling everything on an assumption that trends won’t change. Trends always change.
It never existed because it was never a problem.
And the problem here is not to reduce for the sake of environment but for the sake of not wasting resources for production: energy, water, machinery, etc. Things that cost money that can not be recouped. Environmental impact is a very welcome off shoot.
There are at least three possible scenarios to counter your position:
nothing changes and current trend of population shrinking maintains
everything gets better, standards of life improve and number of offspring decreases for increase of parental investment per child
everything gets worse and either we kill ourselves or the planet does
Numbers, statistics, projections, whatever argument we put on the table, boiled down, comes to these.
You are both oversimplifying the reality and overcomplicating it at the same time. There are thousands of different aspects to sustainability, including many that we simply haven’t identified yet. Modern farming methods that provide us such great yields are simultaneously robbing us of important nutrients that aren’t being replenished in the soil. This has a knock on effect to meat and dairy as well. We are running out of fresh water for farming, residential, and industrial use. Forever chemicals are building up in the oceans, aquafers, soil, and air. Oceans and rivers are running out of fish. Noise pollution, light pollution, heat pollution, and just ordinary misplaced trash don’t seem likely to abate any time soon. Good luck getting cooperation on any of these issues, when we can’t even get people to wear masks in the middle of a plague.
Every one of these aspects of sustainability will relate differently to your scenarios. In the end, we are left with the simple truth that every effort to address every one of these issues will be aided by a reduced population. Either reduced from where it is today, or reduced from whatever future predictions you want to work from. (I’ve been ignoring the fact that humanity has generally been pretty shit about accurately predicting the future, because those predictions are entirely irrelevant to my point).
I’m not talking about culling the population, ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization, etc. People should be absolutely free to make their own family planning choices. But there are lots of ways to promote having fewer children without being coercive. Child free lifestyles should be more respected. Birth control should be more widely available. People should be more aware of the fragility of this planet, and the impact we have on it. Having one less kid than one would otherwise have is always going to blow away the impact of whatever other things we do to promote sustainability.
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