Hasta la vista, babies.

David Engber, frequent contributer to Slate magazine (a subsidiary of The Washington Post) and the man behind the brilliant "Crying, While Eating" website, recently wrote a piece for Slate about global warming. While normally this would be very much non-news, seeing as global warming is the controversy du-jour, Engber tackled the issue from a different side - in his piece, he posits that if Americans really wanted to help the environment, families would voluntarily restrict themselves to having only one child.


It is a radical idea to be certain, but by doing so, the Earth's population would diminish greatly. In fact, Engber states that if such an idea were acted out by all persons on Earth, the population would decline by 5 billion people within the next century and would thereby help to ensure the habitability of the Earth for those persons remaining.
Going with current growth rates, the U.N. projects that the global population will actually increase by over 2 billion in the next 40 years, putting us at over 9 billion people by the year 2050.

Looking around, our current cultural obsession with being "green" is at such a level that there might actually be people out there who would consider limiting their family size in order to reduce their environmental impact. As Engber says, if you want to reduce your impact, "cutting back on kids is the best choice you can possibly make."


Obviously, Engber's article caused some controversy of it's own, with many weighing in on the Slate discussion boards. Slate actually facilitated a sort of "chat" between Engber and the many opinionated citizens who wanted to have their questions answered by the author of the piece.

After reading both the article and the ensuing discussion, I can see that Engber was merely trying to make people think with his article, and so I can understand how it must have been somewhat difficult for him to write a piece such as this, especially as a father.


Read Daniel Engber's article "Global Swarming - Is It Time For Americans To Start Cutting Our Baby Emissions?"

Read the real-time discussion between Engber and his critics.