The title is yet another lyric cribbed from the artists who gave the site its name, and I think it’s an apt description for a discussion on overpopulation, and the taboo of voluntarily sterilization. Ever since Thomas Malthus began predicting doom and gloom for human society in the early 1900s, the idea that humans are overrunning the Earth’s natural carrying capacity has remained one of those uncomfortable subjects that most everyone acknowledges, but almost no one is willing to make a personal commitment towards. (There are critics who dismiss Malthusian limits out of hand, but they don’t seem to realize that the huge improvements in agricultural efficiency we’ve made are only the result of an exponentially greater reliance on dwindling fossil fuels). We’re generally content to say that overpopulation is bad, but that it’s the fault of those dirty Africans, Indians, and Chinese - they’re the one’s having all the children, after all. We may be the ones using all the resources, but that’s not the point.

Interestingly, though, the idea of voluntarily sterilization still crops up from time to time in the media. Back in the hippie hey-days of ‘65, TIME even wrote an article about it (apparently 100,000 Americans were sterilized annually). More recently, I read an amusingly incredulous article about it in the Daily Mail (a right-wing British tabloid) with a few anecdotes about women who sterilized themselves because of the environmental impact of children. On the far fringes, there’s always the Voluntarily Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), continuing to do their fine work. And of course we have China, though their one-child policy is hardly voluntary - another one of those instances where admitting that the actions of totalitarian governments can have positive impacts is awfully prickly.

All of this raises an interesting issue, though - it seems that having an environmental conscious remains something of a Western, bourgeois ideal, especially with regards to something as dramatic as voluntary sterilization. It’s an ideal that may ultimately be irrelevant, anyway, as birth rates naturally dwindle off with education and affluence. In most Western countries the birth rate is well below the level of replacement, with the difference being more than offset by immigration. Population growth (and commensurate consumption) the world over thus shows little real sign of abating, despite the extreme actions of a few people. As an analogy, we’re obviously much better off having 100 carnivores eat one less meat meal a week than have 1 person become completely vegetarian. Childbirth is much more of an all-or-nothing deal, which makes convincing people to avoid it that much more difficult.

The other irony is, of course, that most of the people who are willing to go ahead with something like voluntary sterilization are more highly educated and environmentally conscious in the first place, and would (I would argue) be more likely to pass on these virtues to their children. There are undoubtedly people who, through their actions, can produce a net negative in carbon emissions throughout their lives. I suppose adoption might be the ideal way to foster those values, while reducing the environmental impact of overpopulation.

In the longview, though, I wonder what the population will look like five generations from now, as intellectuals and altruists breed less and less, and the uneducated and uncaring pick up the slack. Alternatively, we’re left with the moral repugnance that eugenics entails. Neither option looks especially promising. I think I’ll read up a little bit more on VHEMT’s literature…