Everyone says that raising kids means you can’t avoid polluting and depleting. That’s colonialism.
I’ve already written how polluting and depleting appropriate other people’s lives, liberty, and property without their consent. Societies used to take other society’s land—also known as colonialism—by invading or settling. Nowadays they avoid the risk of violence by addicting people. The opium wars were fought over incapacitating a population with opium. Now we do it with cell phones and hydroelectric dams.
A new way of appropriating others’ land is by sticking them with our poisonous waste, especially plastic. We can see piles of it from space and if we look at the details, we’ll see that the shareholders profiting from it are people like you and me. We drink Coke, they live in our plastic waste.
Raising kids, pollution, and depletion
Everyone says that raising kids means you can’t avoid polluting and depleting. Well, then, parents are colonialists who destroy others’ lives, liberty, and property. So you say it’s not your fault. You didn’t create the medical system, educational system, and so on. Then you’re saying what Thomas Jefferson did about owning slaves, only he said it more eloquently.
He didn’t choose to be born into a slave culture. He couldn’t change it all himself.
Do you think he should have freed his slaves anyway? I hope you say yes. It doesn’t matter how hard it would have been for him. The slaves’ freedom mattered more. If he should have freed his slaves, shouldn’t you stop polluting and depleting? As we know, our polluting and depleting today causes orders of magnitude more suffering and premature death than US slavery did.
So you say, “But there’s nothing I can do.” Look, some of us have to have kids to maintain humanity. Unlike polluters and depleters, I value human life, liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy, which they pay lip service to while undermining them. I work toward them.
What are you doing to change the system while raising your kids, then? Not what lip service are you paying but what are you doing? If you’re just blaming others and complaining, you’re an insouciant colonialist, leeching off others, hurting them, probably claiming you’re helping them.
I value human life so I want people to have kids, unlike polluters and depleters, who actively hurt kids. Don’t accept that you have to pollute and deplete. Don’t contribute to other kids premature deaths by funding their being made refugees, or child laborers, child slaves, or children who breathe or ingest poisons you funded reaching their lungs and stomachs.
You do not have to pollute or deplete to raise kids, or at least can 1) reduce your impact well over 90 percent and 2) you can change the system so future parents don’t have to pollute or deplete at all. Stop making excuses or don’t choose to have kids if you’re that irresponsible.
If you don’t know how to change the system, read my book Sustainability Simplified, which will tell you what, how, and so on.
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