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One Child: Do We Have a Right to More?

The scientific literature, as summarized in such massive efforts as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 and the twice-a-decade reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, states unequivocally that the world’s environmental problems – including climate disruption, ocean acidification, and mass species extinctions – are driven primarily by human economic and demographic growth. More people consuming more goods and services per capita generate more pollution. We use more land, more water and other resources, leaving less suitable habitat and fewer resources for other species. Ever increasing demands tend to degrade the key ecosystem services that human and natural communities need to flourish. Given current consumption levels and the ongoing attempt to increase them as fast as possible (through increased economic growth, the chief goal of most national governments) a strong case can be made that Earth is already overpopulated. It almost certainly cannot support the current human population of seven and a half billion people for the long term, much less the higher populations projected for later in the century. Shrinking the global population is likely a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition for creating ecologically sustainable societies. At a minimum, substantial continued population growth appears incompatible with creating such societies. Despite this, most environmentalists and policymakers ignore population matters, ostrichlike, and hope for the best. Regarding the failure to deal with population issues at the Copenhagen meetings in 2009, the U.N.’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, remarked: ‘A lot of people say population pressure is a major driving force behind the increase in emissions, and that’s absolutely true; but to then say “OK, that means that we need to have a population policy that reduces emissions,” takes you onto shaky ground morally.’ Sarah Conly’s new book argues, contrarily, that given their importance, ignoring population matters represents the real shaky moral ground. Clearly written and carefully thought through, One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? represents a rare attempt to explore population ethics and population policy in a philosophically rigorous and ecologically informed manner. It merits the attention of environmental ethicists and environmental policy analysts, particularly those working on global environmental issues. Chapter 1, ‘The Problem,’ discusses the severity of global environmental problems and the connection between these problems and overpopulation. It explores why population matters have proven so difficult for environmentalists to discuss in recent decades. It argues against the kind of ‘lazy thinking’ that resolves that ‘if Malthus was wrong in his particular prediction about population size, population size can never be a problem’ (11). In response to the oftrepeated refrain that it is consumption, not population size, that is driving environmental harms, Conly responds, reasonably, that it is both: the growing per capita consumption of ever more capitas quickly ratchets up our environmental troubles. ‘Even if it is consumption and population in combination that pose our present danger,’ she writes, ‘that doesn’t mean we’re justified in having more children than the system can bear. Contributing to either part of the destructive combination is wrong, even if they’re only harmful together’ (18). This chapter also states Conly’s central conclusion forthrightly: under current circumstances, people do not have a right to have more than one biological child. In what follows, her argument hinges on the claim that the potential harms of environmental degradation are significant enough to justify limiting the human freedom to procreate. Not that Conly denies such freedom. People have a right to procreate, she believes. Chapter 2, ‘The Right to a Family,’ argues for such a right based on basic human interests 106 BOOK REVIEWS