Population does not become a reason to not have children. It becomes a reason to seek more efficient means of providing for ourselves, and it has been a force practiced throughout history.
Couples use NFP when they feel they do not have the resources to support a child, how is it different to use NFP when you feel there are not enough resources in the world to support additional people?
And it doesn’t have to be an either or situation. We should seek more efficient means of providing for ourselves, but at some point we will run into a limit (and perhaps have already reached this limit). There are only so many resources on the planet, even with perfect efficiency there is a limit to how many living things can be supported.
It is not that people have “right” to a “disproportionate share of the planet.” It is how the ecosystem, including humans, has worked out. Just as an alpha wolf or bull elephant, expansive fungus or high trophic-level animal takes up/consumes/has a larger ecological “footprint” and great consumption of resources than other organisms, even other organisms of the same species, so too do some humans, due to competition and productivity, have access to a greater amount of resources.
Too often it has “worked out” this way through military force, and the current distribution of wealth in the world has a lot to do with the actions of the colonizing European powers.
We can talk about the ways that this world order is maintained today to the advantage of Westerners, but this is not what it’s about.
The point is that some things, like water, like land, like natural resources are simply “there” on the planet. And if you believe God gave us this planet with these resources, do you think God made for some of us to have the great majority while others nearly nothing? Or do you think God meant for us to share them in a reasonably equal amount?
I mean, do you think it’s fair for Western nations to buy food grown in Ethiopia (in order for Ethiopia to be able to pay back its loan to the IMF) while its people don’t have enough to eat?
- Food becomes scarce, production increases. Ultimately, scarce food can drive hydroponic production, which could produce more than 10 times the food than fertile farmland with far less waste and water. We could probably cultivate less than 10% the land area we do now in the world and feed 100 times more people if it were all hydroponics. Hydroponics can also efficiently produce biodiesel from algae.
- Wealth increases dramatically due to agricultural production. Energy becomes scarce, price goes up, driving switch entirely to solar and nuclear or fusion.
- Transportation is accomplished primarily through electricity from the above clean energy sources.
- Construction: already in the U.S., 90% of steel is recycled, lumber can be recycled, and we have more forest area today than we did when America was first settled. Even if renewable sources of wood were stressed, minerals can be continually re-used and more efficiently recovered, and there is a virtually inexhaustible supply of stone for buildings.
- Water demand goes down with more efficient agricultural use and plumbing. If scarcity increases sufficiently, wastewater reuse expands and, along with desalination, produces an endless supply of water.
- Residential footprints continue to diminish with creation of environmental corridors and vertical expansion.
- Recycling becomes more economically feasible and dominant (already, my wife and I produce only 1 10gal bag of trash per week with the rest being recycled, and if we composted, we’d probably only have about a 1gal bag of trash). Landfills become deeper and more efficient (1cubic km of earth excavated could hold the trash of the US for many, many years, and contains enough minerals, if perfectly extracted, to supply the world’s mineral needs for many years–this from a 2002 Environmental Geology class, exact stats in my notes)
- Increased wealth permits more expensive, cleaner industry as well as expensive environmental remediation and restoration.
- Nanotechnology permits vastly more efficient extraction and utilization of resources.
- Space elevators relieve shipping burdens and permit escape into space, with space mining of resources, jettisoning of waste, and colonization.
Those last two in particular (and fusion earlier, though a power plant is currently being built) may sound like science fiction, but the technology has been in the works for years now. What allows us to achieve this near-miraculous state of sustainable, efficient use of resources at vast levels of material wealth and luxury?
The price mechanism of economics. Which is really just a measure of human ingenuity driven by scarcity of resources.
These things you listed, particularly new inventions and improvements in technology will certainly allow us to provide for more people, but still not an infinite amount of people. At some point, overpopulation will have to be confronted. And as it stands, we do not have space elevators, colonization, or widespread nanotechnology. Those are all very hopeful things, but we don’t have them now.
Talking about what might-be is pointless. It might be that tomorrow we’ll have a nuclear war or an epidemic that will wipe most of us out. We should talk about what is, what we have now, and work with it.
As it stands, it is more likely that food will become less available. There is more demand for fossil fuels, and many say peak oil is here. Fossil fuels are key in modern farming techniques. Modern farming techniques also turn land into deserts.
You say hydroponics is more efficient, but I bet it is also more expensive or else it would be more widely used. You still need energy to operate the facilities. Where does that come from?
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Even when you look at things optimistically, unless we will be able to indefinitely colonize new planets (a really far-fetched idea, considering the distances between stars) we will have to say at some point that it is not only moral to limit family size, but immoral not to.
It was the talk about conservatives and Marxists that had me confused. So my real comment - why in the world is a call to social action identified with communism? No one would identify a call to action on abortion as a call to communism.