Anti-Birth

Over the years with virtually constant exposure to the media and its various offshoots, I get a pretty clear picture of what solutions people tend to support in terms of saving our planet/economy/selves. There are some things we talk about, and some things we shout about.

And then there are the things we totally ignore.

Like how overpopulation may not be such a great thing. The 'over' part gives us an idea that society as a whole sees it as wrong, but the solutions we come up with are generally in terms of dealing with the constant growth of a population rather than actively exploring how we may get by without the 'necessity' of growth.

The best way to go about it is to think of humans in terms of resources, which isn't that hard to imagine considering just about every corporation has a whole department dedicated to Human Resources and even outside of a corporate environment we talk about Social Capital.

Now consider how we regard resources, say something wonderful, like pizza. I love pizza and would happily consider it an asset, and consume it right away for all its yummy yummy kilo-joules. Two pizzas? sure, I'll keep one in my fridge. A hundred? Well they can't fit in my fridge, but I can use them to feed other hungry people. Ten thousand? seriously? I can't give away that much pizza without it getting stale or growing a small rat kingdom. There's a certain point at which having too much of one resource means that that resource automatically becomes waste.

Dealing with waste is taught to us by a very catchy trinity of ideas:

To Reduce the amount of resources being produced but not used. Seriously stop making so many pizzas.

To Reuse resources that may still be able to serve their intended function. Cold pizza is still awesome.

To Recycle whatever is left over and give it a new function. Because moldy pizza is bad people food but great plant food.

So if humans are resources, why can't we openly speak about the fact that Too Many Humans = Waste? And that that's a really really bad thing that should maybe be avoided as much as possible? And that making more humans when there are already humans going to waste isn't really all that much different from throwing away a car with a scratched bumper, except that poor people can do it too?

REDUCE is the part that concerns me the most, because in terms of human beings it doesn't seem to be a consideration at all. That we have charities and refugee shelters and even prisons suggests we understand Reuse and Recycling, and while we could learn to do it more effectively humanity as an organism doesn't give up on the things that it creates 100% of time. But without Reducing, we're just creating the kind of system that strains the amount of Reuse and Recycling we can apply. Predicted to a point where population growth results in more waste than assets, it pretty much guarantees that poverty is something we'll all have to go through before getting allocated the resources we'll need to become functional citizens.

So:

Don't Make Kids.

I'm not saying don't 'have' kids. I'm just saying that the kids you have should be from a foster home, or recently released from prison, or that homeless guy.

And that's how you end human tragedy.

Post Script:

To be clear, this is something very different:

*Although prion disease is totally over-exaggerated and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with cannibalism so long as it's consensual.

REDUCING doesn't have to mean deliberately killing people who are already alive, or forcibly sterilizing large swathes of the population. Nor does it mean believing problems are being solved and getting a warm fuzzy feeling when you hear about rampant disease, war, and genocide. Burning garbage isn't really a solution, as it just transfers the medium of pollutants from the solid to the atmospheric. Murder & force are cognitive pollutants that reduce our ability to co-operate and function by way of individual liberty.

This doesn't mean you have an obligation to help someone who, without your intervention, would die.
It does mean you have an obligation to help someone who, thanks to your intervention, will die.

I'm a proponent of ending disease and savagery, even if the result is the total number of humans on Earth increasing. I guess you could say the difference between burning waste and Re-ing it is in keeping the format of the problem and solving it via that format, rather than transferring a problem to a new format which regardless needs to be solved. The problem is, humans typically burn. It'll solve the overpopulation problem, but cut into our effectiveness when it comes to the co-operative human blockchain.

So the first image is the world I'd like for us. The second is just jokes.