Chris Packham is expressing concern today about the way we are now paying attention to the current ‘big thing’, coronavirus, and may be neglecting the previous ‘big thing’, global warming.
However, there is more than just a subtle connection between the two.
The world’s concerns about global warming have centred around just how much each country, and therefore each of us, is contributing to this ‘damage’ by the way we use natural resources and also by the use of modern technology in improving our lives and comforts.
What doesn’t seem to be getting the attention is that if each of us is contributing then there would be less damage if there were fewer of us in the world. In other words, the forever increasing global population over the last two centuries or so is probably as much to do with global warming as is the way we live.
Nature likes to keep things in balance and if we accept that idea then it does not take too much thought to realise that if we are upsetting the balance of nature by there being so many of us then ‘nature’ might decide to do more quickly what we are trying to do by reducing CO2 (etc.).
Perhaps for a start we should consider persuading people to reduce the size of families by only paying child allowances (and associated benefits) for a maximum of two living children.
I fully realise that there is far more over-population in parts of the world where that sort of disincentive wouldn’t work. It is difficult to try and find other ways.
This is not a joke—but many years ago there was a move to get males in a certain part of the world to have a vasectomy and the persuasion offered was a free transistor radio.
Even in USA, in 2013, a lawyer from Ohio suggested that the US government should offer $1,500 to every 18-year-old male in exchange for them getting a vasectomy provided at no charge.