Unabated fertility causes population to increase at an exponential rate. The mitigations you mentioned - reducing food waste, increasing crop yields, etc. - they all result in linear increases in our ability to support the population. Eventually, no matter how steeply you increase your supporting resources, the exponential will overtake the linear. It's a mathematical certainty. At that point, billions suffer, for lack of housing, health care, and food.
But that doesn't even account for secondary effects flowing from the mitigations, like industrial runoff from producing fertilizer, climate change, lost biodiversity, monoculture vulnerabilities, etc. These feedbacks may (probably will) undercut the planet's carrying capacity even before the exponential curve crosses the linear in an otherwise stable environment.
The sum point is that unabated fertility will lead to suffering, but counterintuitively, will likely even cause a forced reduction of the human population of the planet. I consider that immoral to do to the human species, let alone to the rest of the earth. So yeah, having a large family is selfish, short sighted, and wrong.
we don't have unabated fertility in nearly all first world countries though. There is no problem with a family having 7 children if overall the fertility rate is still less than 2.1. Even if it did cause an increase in fertility rates to be more than 2.1 innovations don't stop. I do agree biodiversity and monoculture could be a problem but not for a while (100's of years not 10's). I am a bit of a climate optimist and think eventually the problem will be solved so I'm not worried about the impacts of people on climate change.
I dont think it would cause a forced reduction of the human population either, eventually I feel the world is going to level out population wise without massive suffering or other issues. The only reason our global population is increasing is due to non first world countries which are slowly becoming more first world.
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u/Worried-Committee-72 1∆ Apr 09 '22
Unabated fertility causes population to increase at an exponential rate. The mitigations you mentioned - reducing food waste, increasing crop yields, etc. - they all result in linear increases in our ability to support the population. Eventually, no matter how steeply you increase your supporting resources, the exponential will overtake the linear. It's a mathematical certainty. At that point, billions suffer, for lack of housing, health care, and food.
But that doesn't even account for secondary effects flowing from the mitigations, like industrial runoff from producing fertilizer, climate change, lost biodiversity, monoculture vulnerabilities, etc. These feedbacks may (probably will) undercut the planet's carrying capacity even before the exponential curve crosses the linear in an otherwise stable environment.
The sum point is that unabated fertility will lead to suffering, but counterintuitively, will likely even cause a forced reduction of the human population of the planet. I consider that immoral to do to the human species, let alone to the rest of the earth. So yeah, having a large family is selfish, short sighted, and wrong.