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It's a non sequitur designed to degrade the conversation and it implies that having reservations about constant growth within the current paradigm is somehow akin to desiring large scale mass killing?
Bizarre and troubling.
A political movement to “decrease the Earth’s population” is extremely bizarre and troubling, and deserves being called out for what it is.
Humans are not some unique, special animal. We're a very invasive, ecology modifying organism. We already have rules on where humans can and cannot live, where resource extraction can happen and how much. It may be uncomfortable to consider, but yes, we absolutely should manage our own population so we don't fuck up our one, and only, spaceship that's flying through a universe that is very hostile for us.
Metastatic growth is simply unsustainable. Running our civilization like a capitalistic business ignoring externalities and borrowing against the future that needs constant growth to sustain isn't a great idea. That will crash.
So we're going to see peak Earth population, and a start of its decline, in a few decades.
No one is advocating forcing anything on anyone.
Respectfully, I think you are over complicating the situation. People in many parts of the world, simply enjoy sex and having kids. Not due to lack of birth control, simply due to the desire to have children. Its that simple. Its only when you make it to the first world with our stresses and self induced neurosis does the fertility rate fall.
Humans are part of nature and one of our instincts is to reproduce.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
Declining fertility rates is not confined to first world countries.
I write "subculture", because they exist in many different cultures. Perhaps literally everywhere where voluntary low birth rate happens at all. (I don't know of a breeder subculture in Japan, but I'd be surprised if it did not exist. We certainly do have them here in Germany, and they scare the shit out of regular people in the rural regions they colonize, with their "everything Nazi except the Hakenkreuz")
Back to end game: the current set of what people consider human rights ("have children and raise them however you like") seems to make it inevitable that those subcultures thrive until they aren't sub anymore. Participate in the breeding race or you're out. It's almost as if back when they declared human rights they accidentally enshrined the very foundation of Nazi ideology when they tried to keep that from happening ever again.
But then on the other hand, the actual text of the declaration makes very little mention of procreation. All those who cry "but human rights!" whenever the topic comes up seem to base their argument on (or be mislead by, I guess most seem to assume that it's a straight forward article resembling "go forth and multiply", I know I did before looking it up). I'd love to see some discussion of de-sanctifying the presumed right to "sire and ideologize an army" (I wish I was exaggerating..) before things get so ugly that the discussion will include radical swings of the pendulum to the other side. Perhaps a viable diplomatic approach could be more explicit protection for the first two children, and in exchange less article 26.3 beyond that threshold? We certainly should not try to actively solve breeder subcultures, but we should give them less to hide behind.
Hopefully those breeder subcultures will inherit the earth. Hopefully not nazis though. Care to start a non-nazi breeder subculture?
PS: and that's not a coincidence. Any would be breeder subculture that does not sufficiently discourage outside marriage would see too many of its children defecting to the general population. They'd be out-bred by breeder subcultures that do. Seen across a several generations time window, it's a "survival of the close-mindedests" situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
this is one of the fastest growing populations in the US, and they are notoriously pacifistic, to the point of forbidding mustaches because they are associated with the military
> During the French and Indian War, the Hochstetler Massacre occurred: Local tribes attacked the Jacob Hochstetler homestead in the Northkill settlement on September 19, 1757. The sons of the family took their weapons but father Jacob did not allow them to shoot due to the Anabaptist doctrine of nonresistance.[10] Jacob Sr.'s wife, Anna (Lorentz) Hochstetler, a daughter (name unknown) and Jacob Jr. were killed by the Native Americans. Jacob Sr. and sons Joseph and Christian were taken captive. Jacob escaped after about eight months, but the boys were held for several years.[150] When freed, both of these sons joined the church and one of them became a minister
Perhaps the big reason to have fewer humans around is that we inject "chaos" into many of these well understood dynamics, creating instability in them, which does, and will, continue to produce a lot of suffering. Assuming humans (animals) are somehow immune to what the rest of life on this world has to deal with (we can invent our away around these problems) is akin to believing in gods, and perhaps that might not end well.
"akin to believing in gods, and perhaps that might not end well" Mankind has believed in gods since essentially the beginning, hundreds of thousands of years and during that time has risen to become the dominant species on the planet. During this rise, human quality of life, and life expectation have continues to improve reaching its current high point. Anyone telling you different is a victim of political propaganda. There are always hot spots on the earth but overall we are doing great.
Note: There have been a couple of empires that were openly athiestic, the USSR and Communist China. How did that work out for its peoples?
You mean things like earthquake detectors, disease monitoring, our weather services, climate predictions, air-quality testing, lead in your water testing? Then yes.
> has risen to become the dominant species
How do you define "dominant"? Homo sapiens is not not dominant in many ways: 1) in numbers; 2) in evolutionary lifespan (not even remotely closer there); 3) in genetic diversity; 4) our ability to independently produce our own food (photosynthesis, fungal detrivores), 5) lifespan; 6) ability to communicate via chemicals; 7) etc. etc. Perhaps you mean "in our ability to destroy"?
> this rise, human quality of life, and life expectation have continues to improve reaching its current high point
I say this to every single evangelical who comes to my door and says "You have to admit things are getting worse."
Acknowledging that we are better off than ever (I'd literally be dead multiple times over if not for modern science) doesn't have to be logically inconsistent with "we're going to hit a limit with how much better we can be if we don't stop messing up our ecosystems, in fact I suspect that the places that are "the best" have their hands in both pies.
I'm not going to disparage human religion, but when push comes to shove I'm going to look to science, technology and a better understanding of our world as a whole, particular how evolution led to species interacting with one another as the route to maximize our "greatness".
We are on the same page here. I fully believe that no matter what happens we will be able to figure it out. I have essentially zero concern for global warming because of that. We will adapt. I am very optimistic on our future as a species.
We cannot stop fossil fuels currently as the third world has not yet reaped the benefits of cheap fuel that the first world has. We would be asking them to cripple their potential. Technology will eventually make renewables as cheap as coal / oil and then globally we will switch. Just a matter of time.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20231013/Experts-call-for-...
I don't think it's common for child free people to share this belief. I would even hazard a guess that for many this train of thought is more associated with how they feel about pressure from their own parents to fulfil their emotional needs by creating more new people.
That kind of self-interested argument doesn't land very convincingly on people who feel that their future state of being sad and alone or not is their responsibility and nobody else's.
https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/beware-depopulation-bom...
There's no need to posit the only choice involves genocide.