SAVING THE WORLD ONE (LESS) CHILD AT A TIME
It gets cold in Wellington in June. Not put- on- every-piece- of-clothing-you-own cold, but the kind that makes you want to burrow under the duvet and set the alarm for October. Especially when you’re standing outside the Beehive for eight hours a day, 100 days straight, in howling southerlies, with the rain snatching at your face and the feeling in your fingers and toes ebbing away.
That’s how Ollie Langridge chose to spend last winter, on the broad grassy strip outside New Zealand’s Parliament buildings, holding a placard that read “For Our Children, Declare Climate Change Emergency Now”.
The 55-year-old’s call for action wasn’t heeded, but his reward included flatearthers and climate-change deniers screaming obscenities and spitting in his face. Others pointed out the irony of Langridge protesting about a climate crisis when he has five children. “Don’t you know more people equals more emissions?” someone asked on social media. “He and his multiple children are the cause of climate change,” hissed one of my friends, while Newshub’s Ryan Bridge called him a hypocrite.
A bit of Googling will take you to the world population counter: watch it tick over and you’ll see how quickly the human race is growing. Currently, we’re at 7.7 billion, but with births outstripping deaths, we’re adding at least 200,000 humans a day – that’s a net growth of 73 million people a year. The UN estimates there will be at least another 2.1 billion of us by 2050. By the end of the century, we’re likely to hit 11 billion.
With more people comes the need for more houses, cars and infrastructure, more consumption and waste, more mouths to be fed using more water and energy in more food production, more fossil fuels burned and carbon dioxide-absorbing trees cleared, sending more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Hello, enormous carbon footprint.
As American writer Lionel Shriver put it: “The biggest driver of climate change and every other global headache you care to name – species extinction, deforestation, desertification, ocean acidification, pollution, fresh water scarcity, oceanic plastic, soil erosion, ‘irregular’ migration – is people. Too many of them and born too fast.”
Sir David Attenborough, a man who knows his way around climate change, wasn’t quite so blunt but his message was the same: “All of our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”
In his office
