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Comment by nwalker85 | Hacker News Reader

This type of attitude is pretty common these days. It's this postmodern view of the world where humanity is somehow separate from nature and must be controlled to protect nature. This is such an arrogant attitude. Sure, you may be right, that having a child has a high carbon footprint, but your decision to not have children doesn't improve anything. Not being actively bad isn't the same as being good.

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What's your point? That we should collectively bury our heads in the sand and keep living the two-kids-and-a-minivan suburb life right up until the end?

That's quite the extrapolation from what I actually said. My point is that the choice to not have children is not the same as actively helping. Not making things worse is not "good". And demonizing all of humanity as though we are somehow a virus to be eliminated is arrogant. We can be mindful of our impact on the environment without assuming that we're a problem.

> Not making things worse is not "good".

If you have Choice A which actively makes things worse and Choice B which doesn't make things worse then Choice A is the "good" choice as it is the one that causes the least harm. Driving a 50cc scooter instead of a car doesn't actively help carbon emissions, in fact it still puts out carbon, but it any reasonable person would say that switching from a car to a scooter helps the environment. Splitting hairs over whether doing less harm counts as "helping" isn't very productive.

> That we should collectively bury our heads in the sand and keep living the two-kids-and-a-minivan suburb life right up until the end?

Have kids and don't do that. If the "good guys" aren't having kids then we'll be fucked. I assure you the "bad guys" are having loads of kids and they don't care one iota about climate change....

There's a 3rd option not being given attention here: adoption. Why play into the idea that the fate of the future depends on some contest to reproduce more "good guys" than "bad guys"? There's plenty of kids that need families who, otherwise, may become the very "bad guys" you speak of. At the same time, you're not further burdening the world's ecosystem with another human simply because of a selfish desire to have another "you" out there. Sounds like a win-win to me.

The view isn't that humanity is separate from nature. It's being cognizant of humanity's impact on nature. The decision not to have children absolutely does improve the situation. In fact, as far as environmental impact the decision to have children is one of the highest-impact choices a person can make. I suppose if you want to be pedantic it doesn't improve anything but it does drastically reduce the continued harm to the environment.

> It's this postmodern view of the world where humanity is somehow separate from nature and must be controlled to protect nature.

The viewpoint that really puts humanity as separate from nature is the one that assumes that the planet can support an unlimited quantity of humans without obliterating nature in the process. How many people do you think the earth can support? 10 billion? 15 billion? At some point we're going to hit a wall. But, thanks to technology, long before we hit that wall most of the plants and animals we take for granted today will be gone.

If we want to preserve a fraction of the biodiversity we have today, at some point soon the human population of the planet will have to stop growing. People who don't have kids are making the rational, forward-looking choice as far as I'm concerned.

“Nature” as it existed 500M years ago has been obliterated and does not exist today. Same for nature as it existed 100M and 10M years ago. Who’s to say which era’s version of nature is correct and deserves special preservation?

And we can work towards that kind of preservation without demonizing humanity as a whole and not view ourselves as some kind of virus that must be eliminated. That's really my point. And it's a very arrogant view that ironically stems from religion, though no liberal westerner will ever admit to it. The concept of humans being separate from nature goes back to the story of Adam and Eve and is embedded in western thought. It's a good thing to be mindful of the environment, but it's not a good thing to think that all of humanity is evil and needs to be eliminated in order to save the earth.

> The viewpoint that really puts humanity as separate from nature is the one that assumes that the planet can support an unlimited quantity of humans without obliterating nature in the process...

The true but unpleasant situation is that, on average, people on HN should be having more kids while those in developing countries should have fewer.

You not having a kid is very unlikely to be a net positive for humanity if you live in a developed country with a large, stable income.

> The true but unpleasant situation is that, on average, people on HN should be having more kids while those in developing countries should have fewer.

Exactly backwards if you look at the resource consumption and carbon footprint per capita in SF vs. that in developing countries[1]. iPhones and Ubers and Bird scooters are expensive. Not just in monetary terms but in terms of generating tons of carbon emissions during production, operation, and disposal/recycling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Well, by your logic, killing all the people in the most overpopulated areas would be a great thing to do. That and/or sterilize them all.

/sarcasm

> People who don't have kids are making the rational, forward-looking choice as far as I'm concerned.

People who don't have kids because they are worried about climate change are doing a big disservice because they are ensuring that all the folks who don't give a rusty rats ass about climate change eventually outnumber them.

Ideology and science are not like the ability to run fast. They don't require biological heritage to propagate. If I spent the money I would spend educating my kids on funding education in the developing world it would probably result in far more net increase in awareness of climate change.

Developing world's impact on climate change on per capita basis is tens and hundreds times smaller than America's. It's not them you need to educate.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. Carrying capacity is a thing, and it applies both at the petri dish level and at the biome/global level.

> Not being actively bad isn't the same as being good.

True, but doesn't being good involve not being actively bad?

No. You don't get points for being not-bad. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

So it's OK to be bad as long as you are also being good? Seems like the two would cancel each other out, at best.

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