Introducing the concept of Demographic justice

| May 24, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Author(s): Esther Phillips

People and organisations talking about Human population dynamics have found that a lot of people in particular on the left of the spectrum refuse to talk about this subject, however much they love to talk social justice. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that letting each and everyone have as many children as they fancy is anything but fair or just. I quote Project Drawdown: “People’s choices about how many children to have should be theirs and theirs alone”.  As if we could all leave for Mars once Earth is destroyed or even share Elon Musk’s fantasy of living in a tin can in space… Project Drawdown and UN you need to go back to the drawing board on this topic, please. Most intellectuals seem to believe that there is such a thing as society but then when it comes to reproduction they are turning into neo-liberals – having children is a free for all where all of a sudden there is no such thing left as society. Yet, society generally expects us to repress murderous urges so why not reproductive ones?

Anyone who wishes to feel morally or intellectually superior talks about climate justice without for most having a true understanding what this means or at least not being prepared, or indeed capable of walking the talk.  Climate justice does not mean we get poor people out of poverty but that we all live in poverty. At nearly 8 billion people, should we wish to live as IF we only had one planet and by miracle share things equally we would all have an allocation of about 2.5 tons of carbon emissions per annum which means we would all live like the average person in Chad or Yemen! All the technology we need to come down to this level hasn’t been invented yet and quite possibly never will be. I would love to work out the resources used up by some well-known campaigners who talk social justice but refute population as a subject. I once calculate my own carbon footprint, and it was 1.5 planets despite considerable efforts on my part. Were I given credits for not having children it would be fairly light indeed. Obviously adding another 80 million poor children to this mess every year just means that this allocation is going down for each person.

Not many are prepared to talk about overpopulation yet no-one talks about the gross injustice that happened because we left it up to people to choose how many children they have.  The most reasonable, intelligent, far sighted ones had few (that is anything between 0 and 2) and now very often choose to have none whilst some families go on to have over 20 in countries where contraception is available. On the other side you have women who might have wanted children going on birth strike because they can see the state of the biosphere, the damage we are causing and the terrible future we face, together with the brightest, kindest young men also deciding not to have any. What was fair in any of that?

If the concept of Demographic Justice was introduced alongside climate justice that that might get all those who like to imagine better worlds interested in the subject of demography and maybe we would revise the idea that it is people’s choice how many children to have as theirs and theirs alone. It would also give bio-diversity a chance to recover and help us addressing the changing climate in the process, as living soils, forests and oceans were the stabilisers of this Earth ship.

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