The royal baby proves our extinction is imminent.

by Pseud O'Nym

Like me, did you spot the bitter irony of yesterday’s announcement of a royal birth coming on the same day as a report by the United Nations, which reported that the population of the world had doubled since 1970? And will reach 11 billion by 2050?

Like me, did you see this is a yet another sign that not only does the planet need humanity’s extinction, but that we are quite literally sowing the seeds of our own demise?

The single most effective action a human can take to reduce their individual carbon footprint – and if enough humans do it, it will have an immediate and lasting impact – isn’t by adopting a vegan diet, isn’t by cutting down on air travel or by switching to an electric car. Whilst those things are good in and of themselves, and might make one feel good talking about the sacrifices one’s made at a dinner party, that’s all it will do. Humans simply to have to stop having children.

As soon as one becomes a parent, whatever fine, reasoned and logical environmental principles one had, become abandoned in the pursuit of buying things for the child. It’s an inescapable fact. Children want, and parents want an easy life. The daughter of my house-mates is immeasurably adorable, but rather than looking at it on an individual basis, but as a whole, there is no denying the fact that far from being the future, they are in fact the cause of quite possibly there not being one. From time immemorial, people may have had children in part because they believed their children’s lives would be better than their own. How then, can one trust the judgment of someone who looks of the state of the world today and thinks ‘Yeah, I’ll bring a child into that!’.

Which is why the absence of any critical analysis of the royal birth is problematic. When they were engaged, it was widely suggested by assorted flunkeys and lickspittles that Meghan Markle would be a champion, using her new status to highlight issues. What she would champion and what those issues were, we were left to imagine. Had she said, when the world’s media was hanging on her every word, “We’ve decided not to have children, for the simple reason that the worlds population continues to outpace our ability to sustain it. Humanity faces many threats, all of them of our own making, and the future looks increasingly uncertain. I hope that our decision not to have children will empower others to make the same choice.”

But no. Their desire to procreate is symptomatic of a collective blinkeredness, a refusal to grasp the sheer magnitude of the problem.

If as a species we can identify the threats to our survival, can have broad consensus on what needs to be done to mitigate those threats, but don’t do them, we don’t deserve to survive.

 

To me, it’s that simple.