Hypocrisy

According to Stephen Ross of The Harvest Fields, 6,924,246,831 people are currently on our planet. How Ross can determine 831 as opposed to 827 is beyond me, but I’m comfortable with an estimate of about 7 billion. Ross also reports that about four people are born every second and about two people die every second. Thus we are adding 172,800 additional people each day. But this is not really news. Many people know this. Many intelligent people write about population and sustainable growth. If you want to read interesting articles about this, I like Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity: 
A framework for estimating population sizes and lifestyles 
that could be sustained without undermining future generations by Gretchen C. Daily and Paul R. Ehrlich. Also if you are interested, check out this fascinating article by Jared Diamond called The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race. Diamond argues that when we transitioned from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, we unknowingly created all the problems we currently have.

I want to start with the given that we will, if we continue our trend, reach a point in which the planet, as we now know it, will be unable to support the population. Now some people will argue that this saturation point will never actually come because we will continue to create new technologies that allow for unlimited expansion. To argue that something is not a problem because we will invent a solution

when the issue reaches critical levels seems irresponsible at best. This seems to be our thinking as far as fossil fuels go. We will burn oil to ease our lives until there is no more oil to burn, then we will figure something out. Hey, I’ll be honest, this is mostly my mindset. We tend to deal with problems when we have to, proactive isn’t really something we seem to be very good at. We like maxims like “Live for the moment,” “Go for it,” “You might die tomorrow so live today,” etc. 

So we celebrate birth and mourn death. Biologists argue we are programmed to do this in fact. No one I know is angry when a loved one or friend has a child. In fact, my sect tends to celebrate, and why shouldn’t we? Children are the future. They make us closer to biological success stories. They bring us immeasurable rewards. And of course we are crushed by death. We feel loss and sadness. I don’t know anyone who condemns birth and celebrates death for population control reasons. In fact, this seems absurd, but doesn’t it also seem to be what is required in order to control population growth. So here’s that contradiction I find within my worldview. Do I fight for regulations that aim to control population growth, or do I fight for individual choice in reproduction? Do I support medical interventions to extend life, or do I argue that by extending life we are adding to unsustainable population growth? Of course this produces another contradiction: If any restriction or policy is developed, who gets to develop it? Each of us would probably rather sit in the driver seat and point to that group over there as the people who need to be controlled, than to have that group over there tell us whether we can reproduce or extend our lives. So here’s why I’m a hypocrite: I want a sustainable population, but I don’t want anyone to tell me what I have to do to achieve it.