And Nietzsche is Still Dead

Like the “Roe Effect”, it’s a sentiment that could only last one generation:

"Having children is selfish," the now-35-year-old says.

A vegetarian by age 15, Vernelli met her husband at an animal rights demo; on the morning of her sterilization, he gave her a "Congratulations" card.

Each new child, she says, "uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

What a depressing take on the value of human life. But it was echoed by another eco-crazed couple profiled by the Mail.

Sarah Irving, a 31-year-old green magazine editor, and Mark Hudson, a 37-year-old health care worker, reminisced about how, "after a year of dating, we started talking about sterilization."

Suspicions of laziness and attention-getting behavior aside, this notion isn’t just impossible to have an aspirationally-minded Indian or Chinese citizen to invalidate with the loving acceptance of making a new life, it’s anti-human. It’s a perverse termination of a tangible and real life for an inanimate other form of life. The thought itself is the abstraction that places a thinking being with those of plants that doesn’t. Like animals, they are driven alone by their genes to reproduce and consume. Only humans can act with will, and decide when it’s time to reproduce
just enough to match their resources.

Animals, on the other hand, will eat and breed until their surroundings can no longer provide them with enough nourishment and shelter, and then test their own extinction. It’s something they’ve been doing long before the Prius, the bicycle, or the human found a use for the opposed thumb.

Who, in the end, is it better for the earth’s surface to have as a dominant environmental actor?

But beyond the comical absurdity of frequent-flying foes of fossil fuels is a vastly more important point: Man is more than a consumer of food and a producer of waste.

The late economist Julian Simon, that prophetic debunker of Malthusian overpopulation theory, proved that people are no drain on our precious planet's natural resources. Rather, they are the solution to scarcities, thanks to the increasing ingenuity of successive generations.

Not so in the view of the essencial environmentalist. To them consumers of food and a producers of waste really IS all we are. It really undermines any warm platitude they might spit out about “worrying about the next generation”.
Maybe we should thank her.