Ann Shibler
JBS
Wednesday September 19, 2007
Piqued by Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a morbid book speculating on Earth's return to its pre-inhabited primeval state if humans left the planet, comes Slate's Daniel Engber's call for reducing the population by 5 billion people over the next century.
Yes, you read that right: 5,000,000,000.
The movement is labeled population-based environmentalism. Admittedly the environmentalists know that switching to wind and solar power won't make a dent in one's carbon footprint. So these anti-life planet-savers have theoretically equated the size of families/population with global-warming which they attribute to CO2 emissions, and they intend to do something about it.
Steve Schneider, editor of Climatic Change and himself a climate alarmist, Brian C. O’Neill of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, and Lee Wexler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis initially calculated the negative value of a newborn child in a published report from November 2000. Yes, negative value.
Environmentally, the "externalities" which they define as "costs or benefits associated with the birth of a child that fall on society but are not considered in the parents' fertility decisions," amount to about $28,200 negative value per child in developed countries. So, they want parents to decide on their own, or with negative monetary incentives imposed by government, to have fewer children. They advocate a type of social planning that calls for imposing taxes on live births and forcing parents to bear the full brunt of educating those children in punishment for having given them life — negative monetary incentives in action.
Engber also cites a frighteningly selfish movement called "The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement," dedicated to "phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed." Their motto is "May we live well and die out." (Note how they don't volunteer themselves first, but just prevent others from entering the world.)
In practicing a sort of ungodly nature worship, these anti-life greenies have placed the health of the biosphere above the dignity and fundamental rights of human beings. They use phrases such as "voluntary familial extinction" and "baby emissions" when speaking of the most cherished gift God bestows upon us, our children. They reject the commandment and blessing of God to "increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air and all living creatures that move upon the earth."
We have seen how, progressively, babies are murdered, and created in labs and Petri dishes for medical purposes with impunity, so at our peril we would ignore this incredibly unthinkable notion. Unless restraints on government are kept in place, then what is already conceived (no pun intended) ideologically may soon be a regulated reality if that power is emancipated.
