Blessing or a burden: population, reproduction and the demographic imagination

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48723

I recently visited Sturbridge village, a 1830s living history museum that we stop at frequently when we go to visit my family. We happened upon a village worker hatcheting up kindling, and my 7 year old started chatting with him, and asked if he could take a turn. Unfortunately, he was told, the answer was no - there were legal risks if he hurt himself. We assured the gentleman we understood, but noted that my son (with very close supervision) is permitted to cut up kindling at home. The man we spoke to acknowledged that that was one way they were unable to be really authentic - in 1830 if your son, by eight couldn’t keep the woodbox full, or your daughter make a meal from scratch over an open fire, this would be a scandal in the neighborhood. But because of liability issues, and the way we raise children now, this isn’t possible to show. I observed that in Nigeria, I’d read that the average child begins to contribute more to the household than she eats by the age of 6. I wondered at what age most American children contribute more to the households they live in than they consume? For many blue collar households, I’d imagine it is 16-18. For the most affluent families, who subsidize graduate education, it might well be nearly 30 - or later.

This got me thinking about the larger question of how we view each child that comes into the world. I have been troubled for a long time about the ways in which we commodify children in our society - everything from the sense that parents have a “right” to a perfect, healthy child made in their image to the judgements we place on people who cannot keep pace with our increasingly expensive account of what minimum items a parent “must” give their child.

The question that arises for me is how far this worldview can take us, in what I think are inevitable and necessary discussions (and policies) that will come out of it. No matter what your view about population issues, the combination of fossil fuel depletion and climate change mean it is very likely that we will struggle even more deeply than we do with questions of equity, and simply to feed the world. In _A Nation of Farmers_ Aaron and I came to the conclusion that the question of whether we could materially feed 9 billion people in the coming decades could be answered with a very qualified yes. Even with dramatically fewer fossil fuels invested in the system, small scale agriculture can probably meet the needs of the world population to its expected peak around 2050, and for at least some time after that. The wild card on this subject is climate change - unchecked, climate change will rapidly and deeply undermine our ability to feed world populations. We are definitely going to be discussing population at a national and world level sooner or later, and I care very much about how that discussion goes, and what world we get from it. I’m not at all convinced, however, that we can have a productive discussion until we reconsider the terms that underlie it.