LONDON, January 12, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A leading promoter of depopulation is telling Britons they cannot only preserve biodiversity by having fewer children but they can avert traffic jams.
Chris Packham, a host of TV nature programming and a patron of Population Matters, the country’s leading promoter of zero population, found the London Times eager to publish his op-ed piece, evocatively titled “Population growth is stifling our green and pleasant land.”
Packham cites Population Matters research showing, he claims, that humans are destroying the environment, so there needs to be fewer of them. First, he argues pounds and pence: “In 2013, the National Ecosystems Assessment placed the worth of insects pollinating our crops at £430m per year.” These insects are being deprived of habitat by human expansion.
Packham then appeals to his readers’ higher natures. Human fertility must be throttled and unborn babies terminated because “we are intrinsically connected with the natural world, woven into its fabric and complexity and as one very small part of it – entirely dependent on it. We must readjust our thinking to know this, because if we don’t we are doomed – pure and simple.”
But Packham and Population Matters don’t ignore lower natures. If population growth isn’t controlled, traffic will get worse, they argue. “We know that every car, every truck and every railway carriage adds to the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. … More congestion also means more pollution – combustion engines are getting cleaner but when we put more of them on the road, we are chasing our tails.”
Population Matters projects the UK’s population to grow by 10 million by 2025 and cost the country $23 billion for roads, trains, cars, etc.
The solution abroad is to empower women politically, and with power they will practice family planning and reduce their output of children, Packham promised. In Britain, he then acknowledged, this hasn’t actually worked, because people keep having children.
“We have to recognize that the more of them we have, the more difficult it will be for them to [enjoy nature],” he said. “We all need breathing room: animals, plants, human beings. We shouldn’t have to compete for it, and we don’t have to.”
But Dr. Anthony McCarthy of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children commented to LifeSiteNews that “evidence-free predictions of population controllers come back again and again despite their consistent failure to relate to reality.”
In the 18th century, British economist Thomas Malthus wanted his countrymen to let Indians, who were beset by famine, to starve rather than overburden the British Empire. In the 20th century, American insect expert Paul Ehrlich was so horrified with conditions in India that he called for similar tough mindedness in The Population Bomb, predicting virtually every natural resource would be exhausted by 1990.
Such warnings, McCarthy said, have “been used to coerce people throughout history, which is unsurprising given that such fears emanate from a devaluing of the human person and pessimism about the value of human lives.”
But more fact-based economists have “for a long time realized that economies can be damaged by population decline and have been proved right on this.”
McCarthy added, “It is curious that Population Matters, in praising ‘Nature’ and her fruitfulness, seems to despise the fertility of men and women whose existence is a great blessing for the human family at one with nature.”
Previous advocacy for population control has found ready opposition in Britain. In October 2014, Russell McCarthy of Spiked noted in an article titled “We Need More, Not Fewer, People” that the news media like to illustrate overpopulation stories with “pictures of people clinging to clapped-out, overcrowded trains.”
“When a Malthus-minded individual,” he continued, “looks at such an image they [sic] see too many people, not too few trains.” What is really a problem of economic and agricultural development, said McCarthy, Malthusians see as one of “one of too many mouths to feed.”
Two months later, London Telegraph columnist Charles Moore likened Britain’s shortage of young workers to the UK described in the P.D. James novel-turned-film The Children of Men. In this mis-utopia, a disease has rendered every woman infertile, immigrants do all the work but are deported at age 60, and the elderly “are herded onto boats readily singing ‘Abide with me,’ and pushed out to sea” to die.
Switching from fiction to fact, Moore writes, “In the world in 1980 there were 10.2 old people for every 100 working ones. Today, there are 12.1. In 2050, the UN projects, there will be 24.7. … In Britain … the old are living longer – a good thing in itself but also, in a society with fewer workers, a problem.”
Moore then explains the wrong-headed thinking behind overpopulation concerns. “Because we tend to think of wealth as a static lump, we assume that people will get poorer if there are more of them to share it. The truth is almost the opposite: wealth is the product of activity and exchange. More people working, more activity, more wealth: fewer people working, less activity; eventually, more poverty.
“The economic and moral message to our supposedly Christian society at this season of the birth of Jesus,” Moore concludes, “is make more babies.”
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