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National NewsConservative News
Environmentalists Put Planet Ahead of Family
Posted on: December 10, 2007
Ten years ago, in an effort to save the planet, Toni Vernelli aborted her baby. Vernelli, a British woman who works for an environmental charity, believed bringing another child into the world would harm the planet; at age 27, she made sure she would never become pregnant again by undergoing a sterilization procedure.
According to Vernelli, “Having children is selfish. It’s about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.” She believes the world is overpopulated and that every person born is an attack on the planet because they will use more food, water, land, fossil fuel and trees as well as produce more garbage, pollution, and especially, greenhouse gases which she has been led to believe cause global warming.
Vernelli is not alone in her belief. Other women, caught up in environmental extremism, are making the same decision not to bear children. While it may seem that these women are part of a small group of extremists, their perceptions are driven by scientific studies that view children only in terms of their impact on the planet.
A paper published in May 2007 by the Optimum Population Trust claims that if a couple who was planning to have three children, only had two, they would cut their “… carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.”
Optimum Population Trust co-chairman John Guillebaud said, “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off the lights.” Guillebaud, an emeritus professor of family planning at University College of London added, “The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”
Professor Guillebaud thinks when couples start planning a family they should first consider the environmental consequences, especially couples who live in wealthy, developed nations because in wealthier nations “… children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions.”
In other words, they will grow up to build houses, buy cars, perhaps even SUVs, travel on jets and produce lots of garbage. Obviously, children in developed nations have a larger carbon footprint than children who grow up in a thatch hut with no electricity, no running water and no SUV. Apparently, Toni Vernelli was way ahead of Prof. Guillebaud.
For the environmentally-unenlightened families who have already married and birthed blights on the planet, there is more research to consider. A study by two researchers at Michigan State University now reports that divorce is bad for the environment.
At first glance, one might assume this study upholds the traditional family, but it is far from that. Co-authors Jianguo Liu, the director of the MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and Eunice Yu, spent five years examining data from 12 countries and found that married couples or those who live together use resources more efficiently than households who have split up. According to several published reports, Liu and Yu estimate that couples who divorced in 2005 used between 42 and 61 percent more resources per person than when they lived together. They spend an estimated 46 percent more on electricity and 56 percent more on water. In addition, driving children to and from split households uses more energy and increases greenhouse emissions.
According to their study, which was published on December 3rd in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the MSU researchers estimate that if the couples who divorced in 2005 had kept their marriages together, they would have saved more than 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water.
The researchers are careful to point out that people who are miserable in their marriages should not be forced to stay married; they just need to find someone else to marry or live with, in order to minimize the harm to the planet.
Frankly, from an economic perspective, divorce is extremely costly. And I have no doubt it does increase the amount of natural resources that are consumed, all of which have some effect on the environment. But what about the effect of divorce on the stability of society, the personal costs in terms of health and well-being of the individuals involved and the impact on children?
Sadly, for many environmentalists, children only enter their equation as part of the problem. While the vast majority of environmentalists are not as extreme as Toni Vernelli, many radical environmentalists do view children, especially children born in America and Europe, as a threat to the planet.
The inconvenient truth about the radical, environmentalist, anti-child, anti-economic growth agenda is that it is really an assault against traditional family and free-market values that are foundations of Western civilization. Consequently, as more and more people and their governments fall under the influence of environmentalism, what we may be witnessing is not the death of our planet, but the death of cultures that protect and cherish strong families and embrace economic growth.
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