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Campaigners tie baby slings to statues in call for better UK paternity leave
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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There are already way, way too many people on the planet. We shouldn't be forced to support someone else's family.
Your logic is flawed. Even if we reduced births to 10% of current rates. Those children would need more parental support for longer. As that generation would be more dependent on parental and family bonding due to lack of a same aged community to learn and grow with.
We are a species evolved to have very, very dependent young, rather than most other mammals. This presented up with advantages in the predator / prey fight that is evolution. But it also left our young depended on tribal societies to survive.
Parental leave is just the modern capitalistic equivalent of the tribe coming together to raise its young. It is the recent historic lack of it in many societies and post-industrial revolution that is odd. Not the return.
You as a non parent will eventually need these children to learn to manage the society you live in. Just because you choose to be child free yourself. Does not mean you will not depend on them as adults as you age. As you age you will need educated doctors nurses and Bin men to ensure your life is liveable. Those adults are the very children you think are not your responsibility now.
But unless you are a hermit living entirely on the milk of your own land. (if so you are already not funding this).
Then yes, you and all of us are involved in raising the future population.
I get all of that, I also understand that we literally have no choice but to change how we live because it's completely unsustainable.
Ignoring the fact that the Earth is already way over populated isn't helping anything.
We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 10 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.
In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.
Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.
Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.
Yes, I generally agree. I can't help but note that we aren't expected to hit peak population for a long time. There's a good chance we'll both be underground by the time it happens.
Meanwhile, many of the key metrics we use to monitor the environment have already been indicating irreversible damage for decades.