Not having babies won't save the planet

Abstract

Environmental antinatalisms share the idea that bringing people into existence is bad for the planet, and see a need to discontinue human ‘procreation’. They assume that the world needs fewer people (or none), and that there is a self-evident, strong and inevitable correlation between the total number of people in the world and environmentally damaging consumption. Plenty of people of course, by design or by chance, do not have children themselves but could not properly be called antinatalists: they may have freely decided to do other things with their time: ascetics, singletons, couples, humanitarians, and entrepreneurs alike.