Ok, so I’m not talking about strapping little rucksacks on their backs stuffed full of C4 and pushing them out onto Oxford Street in their strollers, or even attaching them to nuclear bombs in their liddle romper suits like the cowboy out of Dr Strangelove. No, I’m just talking about not having any. Well, not me exactly, but my kids definitely shouldn’t have any kids.

My proposition is conceptually simple in that it breaks the paradigm that the world’s human population should continue to grow, on the grounds that this is no longer ecologically or morally sustainable.  Instead, it proposes that the human population of earth be radically and rapidly reduced to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth.

“Impossible!”, you cry.

“Bollocks” I retort!

Whilst this might seem dismissive, I choose my word carefully. I don’t say that this endeavour comes without its own unique set of challenges, but many a challenging enterprise has been undertaken with far worse odds of success than this one. I give you Neil Armstrong walking on the moon for example. Most of the technology necessary to pull off that “Giant leap for mankind” didn’t even exist when the project began, yet in 10 short years, there he was hopping down the ladder and uttering his immortal words.

We can make amazing things happen. All I’m suggesting, is that our kids choose to stop having babies. Not because we try and force them too (‘cos we know how that will go), but because they decide that having babies is immoral and toxic. Oh, and we have to let old and sick people die when they are supposed to. Did I mention that? I meant to mention that.

And I might have been exaggerating. We can’t stop having babies altogether because we’d all die out and there would be no more humans………

We just have to have far fewer children than the current global fertility rate of 2.5 kids per female, and very arguably far fewer than the current global replacement rate of 2.1 children per female.

At the Replacement Rate, population stabilises, wherever it happens to be, after a couple of generations. If we want to make it fall, we have to have fewer than 2.1 kids per female. Look what happens opposite when you reduce it from 2.1 to just 1.6 kids per female (bottom blue dashed line). But that only gets us back to where we are now by 2100, and look at how well that’s going.

The drop needs to be extreme both in terms of numbers and timeframes. I’m going to run 0.5 kids per female up the flagpole and see who salutes it. At this level, the population should drop like a stone and pretty quick.  Hell, the population would get so low it would be hard for a chap to find a dame to go a courtin’ with.

 “WHY WOULD YOU WANT SUCH A THING? MY LITTLE JOHNNY’S NOT GOING TO ‘AVE NO BRUVVERS OR SISTERS”, you ask.

Really good question everyone. I was hoping you’d ask. Firstly Little Johnny is going to have to learn to sit quietly in the corner and play with his imaginary friend, and secondly, in the immortal words of Agent Smith…

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague…..”

Epic quote from “The Matrix”

Ok, Steady on Smith old boy. No need to get carried away. Can’t just go on and on about how humans are all just a bunch of plagues and bandying the “C” word about, you’ll hurt someone’s feelings!

Still, you really don’t need to be a rocket scientist, or Agent Smith, to work out that something whacky and unwelcome and uncomfortable is happening with us. You know that feeling you get every time you hear what the population is, and you just tuck it away because nothing can be done about it, it just is?

Quite early in my life I observed something. When something went wrong, more often than not, I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. I had an inkling. Sometimes way before the thing went wrong. The thing went wrong not because I didn’t know, but because I did, and didn’t do anything to stop it. I warranty each of you have experienced this in your lives. It’s called intuition. It’s not necessarily borne out of facts or knowledge. A confluence of events, rumours, insights, experience and intellect add up to a “feeling in my water” that something’s not quite right. I decided, after a number of these inklings turned out to be correct, that I would consciously act on all future inklings to confirm or invalidate the thing I thought might go wrong before it went wrong. As a result, I became A MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!!

Now is the time for everyone to listen to that little voice at the back of our mind. Face into the discomfort of its message. Not wait for the proof, but act because in acting, nothing gets worse and things can only get better. There is no downside to acting now.

There are a few obstacles though. Like the fact that we don’t really recognise that there is a burning raft. The various religious doctrines that bang on about going forth and procreating and that terminations and birth control are a sin. The government incentives which encourage our youth to have kids because we need more rats to run around on industrial wheels to keep stoking up our economies.

We should not underestimate the sheer number of untrusting stakeholders we would need to convince either (our kids). 26% of the worlds population is below the age of 15. Roughly half of these kids are female. Soooo, 26% of 7.7Bn divided by 2 multiplied by the square of the hipppopotomoose plus 3 minus 10 and you get about 1bn girls. Of these we have to convince 1 in every 2 girls not to have a baby. So that would be x over y times by E=MC2 divided by 52….ch-ching =500m girls in our target population.

Our biggest challenge though, is our unwillingness to let go of this way of life. That scrabble for “success” whatever that means. We’ve constructed a society where all the needles need to be pointing up or somebody is getting shit-canned. Revenues, profits, quality of life, life expectancy, mo’ money, mo’ cars, mo’ cribs, mo’ likes, mo’ social standing, Global macroeconomic indicators, and on and on and on.  But we’ve got to keep feeding that machine or it all stops and its food is us. Reducing the population by the amount I am suggesting, means we have to let it all go. Let it all stop. And as my old gran would say, that’ll scare the b’jaysus out of us.

But do we really have such a big problem that we need such a drastic solution? Well let’s take a look and see.

I think Smith’s analysis is very pertinent to this discourse. And accurate. Earth is in fact a host. A living breathing organism which just like us, is populated by many other organisms. It can also catch a cold just like us. About 200,000 years ago, the Earth caught such a cold when one species emerged that turned out to be really good at solving problems (that’s us). Especially problems related to its own survival.

So, let’s assume for the moment that Agent Smith has nailed it and we can be likened to a virus or a plague on the Earth. There are only two ways to stop a virus from spreading before it kills its host. You can kill it, or you can suppress it. Honestly, I’m open to either solution, but I’ve been told “You can’t just go about eradicating humanity”, so let’s stick a pin in that for a mo’ and take a look at suppression.

Remember HIV and how scary that was? If you got it, you were a goner, and not in a nice way, because it couldn’t be suppressed. Today millions of people who are HIV+ will live out full and active lives until they are grey and old. They can do this because we made two things happen. The invention of highly accurate, very fast, point-of-care screening technology, and the development of highly effective antiretroviral therapy.

We can now detect the virus much faster (from ~3 weeks down to minutes). In fact the test results are delivered while the patient is waiting. If positive, antiretroviral drugs are issued on the spot before the host goes back into the community. The patient, knowing that they are HIV+, alters his/her behaviours and so becomes a natural brake on the spread of the infection to others.  

The antiretroviral therapy controls the viral load in the patient. It’s still there, but the therapy prevents the virus from reproducing, and the amount of virus in the blood reduces to undetectable levels in the host. At this point it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, to transmit to others, and poses little or no threat to the host. The host has a normal life with a normal life expectancy.

If we carry this analogy on, there are two ways to suppress human population. Voluntarily or involuntarily. The voluntary way is the rapid and radical reduction of the human population, by girls and women of child bearing age choosing to reduce the birth rate to 0.5 kids per female. One baby for every two females on the planet until we reach our target population of say 500m to 1bn people and then to never exceed the replacement rate.

The involuntary way is not what you might be thinking. I’m not talking about making human laws to limit the number of children born. That didn’t work out so well in China. And in any case making laws is a voluntary act of the virus.

When we discuss our relationship with the Earth these days, we tend to talk about it in terms of humans “destroying the planet”. This is a function of our innate and ever-present sense of self-importance. All things being equal, and subject to the arrival of some cataclysmic event, Earth and life on Earth isn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of billion years when the great march of entropy, towards which everything in the universe tends, catches up, as our star begins its death rattle.

Today, we are making a big fuss about CO2 levels hitting 410 parts per million (ppm) because it is double the pre-industrial average. Few would argue that human activity isn’t responsible, at least in significant part, for that increase. In the distant past however, we had much more CO2 in the atmosphere and had an abundance of diverse life on the planet. When the dinosaurs were stomping around 65-250 million years ago, it was about 2000 ppm. Go back 500-600 million years and it was more like 5000 ppm. Life on earth began 3.5bn years ago!  Planet warming hasn’t killed off all life forms in the past and there is no reason to assume that at the sorts of levels we are talking about (1-2 degrees C), it will in the future. We can thank Darwin and his Origin of the Species for that. Life will adapt, but some won’t, and those organisms that don’t will become extinct. This is the involuntary option.

So, the answer to the question “Is there really a problem?” is yes. But it’s not that we are destroying the Earth; the Earth is destroying us.

Best case, human generated greenhouse gases (including from the animals we eat), cause the Earth to warm and act as an antiretroviral on humankind, eradicating most, but leaving a few alive, at levels which no longer pose a threat to the ecosystem. Worst case, Earth is getting a high fever. It’s acting like any other infected organism and protecting itself from us. Bad news? We are nowhere near as lethal as HIV once was. We are a common cold, not even a bad bout of the flu. The worst thing about us is our presence and the scars we leave on the landscape. The climate gets warmer and wetter globally, the wind will blow, and the seas will heave, and the Earth, no matter how hardy we think we are, will blow out our candle with the same ease as my daughter on her 4^th birthday. The Earth, over time, will feel better. Will be a better place. Its wounds will heal. New forests will grow. The Coral will return. New, better adapted, species will emerge and all signs that we were once here will be covered over.  And we won’t be here to see any of it because smart as we are, we were not smart enough to survive.

What’s the worst part about this dystopian future for you? For me, it’s that we won’t be here to see the rebirth of Earth’s natural beauty. What it will look like without the scar of humanity on its face. Seeing a world unbound by cities and strip malls and roads and factories and fences. A virgin Earth. An Earth without our ugliness. I’d like to see that. I’m saddened by the fact that I won’t. I’d like someone to see it though. Just a few. Just enough that the world doesn’t know they are there. Hidden away. Quiet. Returned to the village. A whisper of humanity. A different humanity. That best part of humanity that is able to find wonder in a single drop of rain and in the same breath look up at the stars and imagine what is there. Eight billion people can never be in “equilibrium” or harmony with the Earth, but maybe just a few can?

And if not?

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy Batty – Blade Runner