1) they are the sole reason why this planet is currently experiencing climate meltdown. Quite simply there are far too many of us to be sustainable. More on that below.
2) more children means higher taxes (including the community charge) to pay for all the services they will use.
3) everyone will have to wait (even) longer to get treated on the NHS. Especially as children get priority.
4) travel and entertainment will continue to get more expensive, to pay for the concessions given to children.
5) equality for women will never be achieved, not whilst they are seen primarily as bearers of children.
6) women who choose to have a child, and it is their choice, face a significantly higher risk of developing health problems (both physical and mental), some of which can be permanent or fatal. As well as placing an extra burden on the already overstretched NHS.
7) parents (the child-burdened) suffer far more stress and financial problems than those who chose to remain child-free.
8) each new child will become responsible for yet more torture, death and the extinction of thousands of other species.
9) each new child will mean more houses, more roads and more physical infrastructures, at the cost of the countryside. At this rate there will be soon be none left.
In conclusion. We are currently being bombarded by politicians, by so-called experts and by the media on how best to solve the problems our rapid growth has caused. A multitude of confusing arguments and counter-arguments. Yet most people, deep down, know we have taken the wrong path.
The term sustainable is being used a lot as a solution. But how many people actually know what this really means?
The true definition, as opposed to those being used to sell products or policies, is this:
the maximum number a species can reach before its impact starts to have a detrimental effect on other species.
For us, that number is about one million (worldwide).
Which for most of our existence on this planet we have managed to stay below. It was only when we stopped being nomadic, which was relatively recent, and began living in permanent settlements instead, that we started to grow and then exceed that. Putting pressure on the surrounding ecology so we had to travel further and further to find what we needed.
That rise in numbers was still very slow. It wasn’t until the UK became the industrial workshop of the world that our use of the planet’s natural resources started to speed up exponentially.
To give you some idea how quickly things got out of control, let’s take a look back over the last three hundred years, starting with 1725. A time when the only way to travel was by walking, riding a horse or by boat. The population of the UK then had grown to 7 million.
By 1825, the way were living had changed radically. The rich forcing everyone to leave their rural lives and move to their newly created factory cities. In just 100 years our population grew to 20 million.
In 1925, electricity, cars and air travel had arrived and the number rose to 38 million.
Today, and remember this is in the UK alone – a small island compared to the rest of the world – that number has now increased to 69 million and still growing. Twenty times as many people living here than just 300 years ago.
Add in the rest of the world, and is it any wonder the majority of all the other species have already gone, along with their habitats.
Is it surprising that with each new person born there will be even less food, even less water and even less of all the other essential resources to go round.
NOT HAVING CHILDREN is a no-brainer. We either carry on as we are, believing all will be fine. Or stop behaving selfishly and each do something that will change the world so there is a future to look forward to.
A more detailed version of this blog is available by clicking the link:
Other sites worth looking at are:
https://www.stophavingkids.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@StopHavingKids
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How to live off-grid 
Its a hoax that there are too many people in this world and another hoax is clinate change whahahaha wake up!!!
Fijne dag! 🥰
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I admire your confidence, no doubt you live in a city and have a good income. Try living in the countryside and on no income and I think you’ll become aware very quickly how much we’ve already destroyed on this planet. Better still, visit SHETLAND, where there has been so much industrialisation in the last five years it is hardly recognisable.
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Populations worldwide and certainly in the west are below sustainability rates so they are at least decreasing. Maybe a 1 child limit would be a reasonable way forward. I agree that overpopulation is the root cause of our woes. But obviously reproduction is necessary so being reasonable about limiting it gradually is going to at least be believable. As it reads to me, you’re advocating no-one breeds at all for what , ten years , twenty years? And who is going to pay your pension in that gap.There are other issues . Of course children will be a cost to a society , in more ways than the NHS. what is bad about that?Anyway Best wishesAndrew Sent from AOL on Android
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Hi Andrew, thanks for the comment.
Sadly there isn’t anywhere in the world that has a sustainable population, not one person who can really claim to be sustainable, because it’s all a matter of numbers. There are too many of us. One million truly is the maximum. And thinking two people having just one child means halving the future population is flawed too. There is no future, only the here and now, so having just one child means adding one more living person to the planet now. We really so have have to reduce our numbers to be truly sustainable, it is the only answer.
The problem is we have been bred to be gullible. But that could work in reverse. If the media stopped glamourising family as the dream, then people wouldn’t be so obsessed about wanting to have children. But then that is never going to happen, they make too much money out of them.
As for pensions, we pay for our own, throughout our working lives, in taxes. And why do people think they pensions are so important? In the very near future they will no longer exist, so we have to be prepared to adapt. It’s already happened to the WASPI generation, also to the 3 million British citizens who chose to live abroad while we were in the EU. Who since 2020 have had their pensions frozen. They have had to find other ways to support themselves in order to survive,.
I think the reason why people don’t want to hear this message, is all down to selfishness, and believing THEY wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us. Well THEY don’t care, and most of the other species have already discovered what our selfishness means, torture, death and extinction.
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I do see the logic of your arguments on the one hand, but on the other they are totally illogical.
Apart from the fact that not having children deprives you of the pleasure of Grandchildren and believe me they are one of life’s greatest blessings, there are other considerations. Most obviously, If everyone stops having children, in a very short space of time the human species will disappear. Now, I for one don’t think that’s such a bad thing, but most probably wouldn’t agree. Secondly, As everyone gets older and there are no young people coming along to take over, who runs the infrastructure? Where are the Care workers or Doctors ? Who grows the food and makes the clothes? Who works in the sewage plants or supplies the water? Who buries the bodies or repairs things when they break? Or in your vision does everyone live off grid and become totally self sufficient? If so, Isn’t that unrealistic. I ask because at 77, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to manage now. I used to have an allotment for instance, but having had one knee replacement and needing another, I’ve had to give it up. I’m fortunate, my husband can turn his hand to most things, so he will replace a broken roof tile or fence panel, unblock drains etc. He’s younger than I but if he did die first I couldn’t do the things he does. So now I would pay someone. But if there wasn’t one or two generations after me, who would I employ?
I totally agree that things need to change. Our ‘disposable, throwaway society’ whilst flagrantly bleeding the planet dry of resources for one. The vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, for another. But I can’t see your Utopia ever being a reality. Fewer children maybe, but none…
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Thanks Ruth for taking the time to respond, it means a lot to me and makes the effort of writing worthwhile to know people read it.
What hit home the most about what you said was it was all the arguments are people-centred, about humanity. Nobody mentions all the other species. The ones we’ve been genetically manipulating, enslaving, torturing and now making extinct, ever since our religious leaders told us that’s fine, we are the Chosen Ones. I have always been aware of this and consequently don’t eat meat, fish or dairy products. But that’s not enough, everything we spend money on kills other species somewhere.
Not surprising really when our warped sense of morality teaches us it is okay for others to suffer, because they don’t feel or think. Rubbish, we are well down on that scale, compared to other species.
When I lived in Spain I was shown a vast area, the size of a large town, that had emptied of people and then dug out by a company owned by the British Royal Family, you may know it, RIO TINTO ZINC. They destroyed not only whole communities, but polluted the area so badly virtually no-one can safely live there now and very little grows. NASA use it for training on their Mars missions. That started over a 100 years ago. Today there are many more in the area, even bigger and far more toxic. Just so rich person somewhere can make a lot of money and we can buy the latest mobile phones. I despair.
It is high time we started to appreciate that it is the other species that allow us to exist, the ones that give us air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, warmth and shelter. Because without them there won’t be any infrastructure to worry about. If this sounds like scaremongering, think back to when you were a child, all the countryside you used to visit and enjoy. Go and see it today. Very little will still exist, it’s all been turned into speculative housing estates, holiday villages, motorways, wind farms, factories, shopping centres……. Places where Nature doesn’t thrive. We have to stop this, being selfish, before there is nothing left. Put all life first, not just our own.
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Thanks!
I made some comments about the “Anthropocene Epoch” and extinction rates orders of magnitude higher than those associated with previous epochs, but they did’nt get through. The disappearance of African fauna is imminent with the continent’s burgeoning population and climate changes.
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