Don’t believe alarmists saying human population has grown too large, they’ve been wrong for 50 years.
How about the reverse “Handmaid’s Tale”?
This is a fascinating read. Thanks to Chelsea Follett.
This week, viewers will get another chance to submerge themselves in the dystopian future created by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the novel about the government forcing women to bear children to counter a declining population, resonated with audiences across the world.
However, the reverse Handmaid’s Tale — the idea of coercing people to have fewer children — ought to generate just as much outrage. Particularly when that coercion is justified by baseless fears.
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich plays on those fears. His apocalyptic warnings, which started almost 50 years ago, persist despite decades of evidence proving them wrong. Just recently, Ehrlich said the collapse of civilization is a “near certainty” within decades.
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he warned in 1969.
Then he said, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
Unfortunately, many people still believe him.
His 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb incited global panic with claims that out-of-control population growth would deplete resources, bringing about widespread starvation. Ehrlich’s jeremiad led to human rights abuses around the world, including millions of forced sterilizations in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India — as well as China’s draconian “one child” policy. In 1975, officials sterilized 8 million men and women in India alone. The sheer scale of this authoritarian nightmare is difficult to imagine.
To put that in perspective, Hitler’s Germany forcibly sterilized 300,000 to 400,000 people. In other words, Ehrlich’s unfounded fears have motivated far more forced sterilizations than even the Nazi ideology did.
Such abuses aren’t confined to past decades: In 2012, India’s Supreme Court found that “unrealistic targets have been set for sterilization procedures with the result that non-consensual and forced sterilizations are taking place.” And even today, China limits couples to having no more than two children.
Back at home, many prominent American environmentalists — from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to entertainer Bill Nye “The Science Guy” — support tax penalties or other state-imposed punishments for having “too many” children.
Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book in 2016 through the Oxford University Press advocating a “one-child” policy, claiming it is “morally permissible” for the government to limit family sizes through force.
Their views are chilling.