Religions impede a real environmental solution
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- Published on Wednesday, 09 December 2009 00:26
- Written by John Draper
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The Climate change conference in Copenhagen will ignore the only real way to save the world from environmental disaster - and the reason will be the refusal of religious leaders to tackle population growth. Not everyone accepts that there is climate change caused by the activity of man but everyone is rightly concerned about environmental issues such as pollution, depletion of resources, species going extinct, damaged oceans, insufficient fresh water and loss of natural forests.
The source of all the problems is that there are simply too many people in the world. People use resources, create waste, create pollution (and CO2) and squeeze out other residents on this planet. If nothing is done, the world's population will increase to 9 billion in 2050 from the current 6.5 billion.
But if the world implemented the Chinese policy of 1 child per female, then the population would drop to about 5.5 billion by 2050.
So why are we not doing this? The main reason is that many people would feel that one of their freedoms (or rights) was removed - but all laws are removing a freedom e.g. removing a freedom to steal, kill etc so people need to be educated that having too many children is wrong and verging on evil - it's just that the negative impact will take many years to be felt. There is already a feeling that "consuming" is somehow wrong so we are progressing positively. In addition, corporations all have a mantra that they must expand to be considered successful and limiting population will make that difficult so they will resist.
But the biggest reason why people resist limiting families is because their religious leaders tell them they must not and that effective birth control is immoral. Many western parents ignore that directive and have relatively small families but underdeveloped countries and strongly Catholic countries like many in South America are still increasing and multiplying.
You only have to look at the overwhelming size of the numbers of people in India, Pakistan and Indonesia to see that they are doing nothing to limit population growth. It's not unique to particular religions - it's more of a cultural thing that's encouraged by religious teaching.
But China's one-child policy is working and should be applied to other countries. Instead at the Copenhagen Climate conference, the talk will be about underdeveloped countries getting subsidies from western countries to cope and no-one will mention limiting population growth.
And as Diane Francis said in a recent post: "For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pasture land into desert as is now the case or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs."